I’ve had a revelation as of recent, as it relates to energy consumption. I believe that part of the reason that people have a tendency to be less energy conscious than they may be otherwise is that we are sometimes insulated from the levels of our consumption. Yes, we get a bill from our utility companies each month, but dollars alone seem to not be enough to help people understand how much energy they’re using.

PGE’s bill tells you how many kilowatts you’ve used, and even provides a graph to see how your use has fluctuated not only from month-to-month, but also year-to-year monthly comparisons. This is valuable, as is the billed dollar amount, but at the end of the day you can’t put a kilowatt into a bucket, bag or Hello Kitty lunch-box.

The same can be said for Northwest Natural Gas. While I don’t use natural gas to heat my home, cook my food or heat my water, I know that NWNG bills based on how many therms you use. But really, what the hell is a therm? Again, show me how to put it into said bucket, bag or Hello Kitty lunch-box.

I believe that the sheer intangibility of household energy has led us to be less critical of our use of said energy. In automobiles we have a nice gauge that outlines the total volume of gasoline/diesel available in the vehicle’s fuel tank. And I think many of us know exactly what a gallon of gas looks like –you know, kind of like a gallon of milk, just far more stinky and far less desirable as part of a latte. Because of this, we’re painfully aware of how much energy we’re using and we can take immediate steps to reduce the amount. I believe we as a society would use less energy if we simply had a better grasp of what this energy looked like!

This year my family is heating our home with two fuel sources: Oregon-grown hardwood and Oregon-sourced/refined B99 bio-diesel (99% from plant sources –primarily from waste vegetable oil). Last year I learned that we could acquire locally made, waste vegetable oil-sourced B99, so we upgraded our heating system by making major modifications to burn said fuel. It burns far cleaner than petroleum and supports our local economy. Unfortunately, it’s expensive and carries slightly lower heat value than its dinosaur-sourced petroleum predecessor. The burn rate is the same (3/4 gallon for every hour that the furnace is firing), but the total heat output is ever-so-slightly less.

Part of the heating system upgrade involved installing a 275-gallon tank in a room in our basement for the sole purpose of storing the B99. Sitting atop this new tank is a small gauge that indicates the level of fuel inside. Having this gauge visible right in our home had a big impact on understanding how much fuel we were using to heat our home. Since the tank was installed last October, we’ve been keenly aware of how much fuel we burn to stay ‘comfortable’.

Armed with a good deal of valuable data on how much real fuel we used to heat our home (in tangible gallons), this year we decided that we needed to reduce our consumption dramatically. We also set out to make our home more comfortable. Subsequently we purchased vintage-reproduction wood storm windows for every window on the ground floor of our home. Mind you, our 1923 bungalow has a lot of glass, and all of it was sitting in the original single-pane windows. As you can imagine, this was not the picture accompanying the wikipedia entry for ‘energy efficient’.

We were certain that we could bring down our overall fuel consumption if we simply held in the heat we generated for a longer period of time. What’s more, we concluded that if we could do a better job of holding in the heat, we’d probably be able to reduce cool spots in rooms, thereby making our home more comfortable.

Insulating walls is a good idea, but the primary loss from walls comes from windows. Subsequently, we ordered 17 custom-fit Martin wood storm sashes from Versatile Sash in Portland and, though arduous to prepare (planing, staining, sealing, cleaning), installed them all before the cold hit. Far less expensive than new windows, the Martin sashes look fantastic as they are vintage reproductions of what would have been on the home originally. Better still they essentially preserve the existing windows while creating what amounts to being a double-pane window. While not as efficient as a new double-pane window, they provide a massive improvement. It’s much quieter in our home and the cool spots have been dramatically reduced. Now on to the next comfort issue: the fireplace.

For those of you who own fireplaces, you know that they provide wonderful ambiance, albeit at the cost of expelling massive amounts of carbon out of the chimney while sucking out all the warm air in a room. We burned many fires in our fireplace last year and it always had the wonderful effect of reducing the temperature in our home. But damn it looked nice!

This summer we decided that we simply couldn’t afford to continue down this path. First, we wanted to continue having fires but didn’t want them to put a big dent in our carbon footprint, or chill our home. After much research we elected to install a cast iron wood stove insert in place of the open fireplace. This would completely reduce the vacuum effect and produce dry, radiant heat that would permeate through the main floor of our home.

Much of the discomfort of Portland winters is the high humidity of the cold air. The water particles in the air more effectively transfer the cold temperature from the air to your body. Cast iron radiant heat dries out the air rapidly, which has the net effect of making you feel less cold, not just because of the air temperature, but also due to the drop in overall humidity.

We selected an American-built wood stove that features a ceramic catalytic convertor. Once the stove gets up to adequate temperature, you can dampen the exhaust and force the emissions to essentially double-burn before they have a chance to enter the chimney. The stove is recognized by the EPA as a clean burning wood stove as the catalytic converter works just as catalytic converters function in automobiles, ensuring that unburned particles have a second opportunity to be more completely burned before they exhaust into the atmosphere.

The stove also features an ultra-efficient, geared reduction blower motor, which has the ability to pump massive amounts of hot air into the room while using a tiny fraction of the electricity demanded by the furnace blower motor. What’s more, we have been able to add a timer on the motor, enabling us to load the stove with a log before we hit the hay, letting it continue to heat our home while we sleep, shutting off at about 2 a.m.  We subsequently set set the furnace to 58 degrees to ensure that if we get a wicked cold spell overnight, we all don’t freeze after the fire dies.

So far, we haven’t encountered too many evenings where the outside temperature has dipped to 40 or below, so our tests have not been conclusive. This being said, by the time we went to bed last evening, the living room (where the stove insert exists) was 75 degrees. When I woke this morning, the living room was 65 degrees, while the outside temperate was 42. The furnace never had to fire. This bodes well for a more comfortable winter and far more energy efficient.

So how about that wood? As outlined above, wood can be burned very cleanly. What’s more, trees spend their lives filtering carbon out of the air, thereby making a clean-burn wood stove a very low-carbon event. This is not the case with a non-renewable fuel like natural gas or oil. Emissions aside, the real benefit to heating with wood is physical.

As with the fuel gauge on the B99 tank, wood is very likely the most tangible physical manifestation of a fuel source –even more so than a tank full of refined vegetable oil. Stacking, chopping and handling the wood makes you keenly aware of the fuel and working to burn it as efficiently as possible just adds to the overall level of energy consciousness. This is something I never anticipated but appreciate a great deal. The combination of B99 and hardwood as our family’s fuel source has led us to a very high degree of energy consciousness. Again, this was not the primary intention of our switch to these fuels, but the benefit has been tremendous –shocking, actually.

I firmly believe that if more of us had a keen understanding of a ‘therm’ of natural gas, or a ‘kilowatt’ of electricity, we’d be more apt to turn the dial down, or perhaps even consider another fuel source. I’ve experienced this firsthand and hope to continue learning more, becoming even less of an impact on this delicate planet.