Heating Your Home With Solar Energy
November 6, 2009 by Go Green Tips · Leave a Comment
It doesn’t matter if you are building your home or remodeling, you can turn it into a solar energy home by making a few simple changes to your plan. If electric and gas become hard to manage you may want to consider heating your home with the sun. Solar energy is the heat that comes from the sun down to the earth. When it reaches the earth it spreads evenly but you may need it to go to a certain area like your home. How do you get that much sunlight to heat a home? It’s easy to do and takes a few extra steps to help get it started.
Building or Remodeling your Home
If you are building your home you have several choices to choose from regarding your heating source. If you choose to heat from the sun you need to build your home facing in the direction that the sun rise’s. This allows your home to get the most sunshine during the hottest part of the day. Buying solar powered glass windows allow the sun to come through and stay in the home without escaping back out. After the sun goes down your home is kept warm by the sunlight that came into the home during the day. You need to keep the door shut in order to keep the heat in and you also need to use insulated curtains on the windows at night so that the heat will not escape at night while you sleep. Make sure you don’t allow too many windows on the side of the house that faces the evening sun as it may cause the home to cool down quickly.
Remodeling your home to use the sun as a natural heating source is fairly easy to do. Although you can’t change the direction that your home is built in to face the morning sun you can still trap the sunlight that shines through and reduce the amount of time that you use another source of heat. You may want to consider building a sun room onto the side that catches the morning sun allowing it to heat up naturally and then install ceiling fans that will circulate the air into the parts of the house. During the day this may provide enough heat to maintain the warmth in your home. When remodeling your home, it will help to install solar power windows that are specially designed to attract the sunlight and allow it to come into the house but not let it escape. This is a natural way to heat your home.
Using sunlight to heat your home is an excellent way to safe money on your heating bill and also to improve the environment. You can install a backup heating source incase the sunlight does not heat your home efficiently during the day because of clouds. Your back up system can be used to assist the solar energy which will also cut down on the use of electric or gas.
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How Much Does A Carbon Offset Cost?
October 14, 2009 by Go Green Tips · Leave a Comment
For self-styled environmentalists and regular folk just looking to do their part, there is often concern over the subject of carbon offsets. The basic lack of knowledge on the part of the American public is, while troubling, not altogether surprising. The information is difficult to find and at times difficult to process.
See more information about carbon offsets.
Your standard environmental poll always asks some version of the following questions: 1) are you concerned about issues of the environment, and 2) if so, does that concern factor into the types of purchases you make or the companies you make them from? The resounding answer to both of these questions is ‘yes’. While over-reporting of environmental concern is to be expected (probably equally as much as over-reporting of voting habits or under-reporting of tax evasion), we can reasonably expect that 60-70% of all Americans at least claim to care about the environment and at least claim that it will affect their choices. So why doesn’t it?
The simple answer is because there’s a prevailing sense that being an environmentalist takes too much work. It’s a non-starter for Average Joe that he needs a degree in environmental science or economics, or, God forbid, environmental economics, just to try to do something to show he cares about the planet.
This is where carbon offsets come into the equation. They’re the perfect intersection point between environmentalism and capitalism. It’s a market-based incentive for companies and farms and renewable energy plants to reduce the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and for people to write a simple check instead of going back to grad school or spending hours of their free time researching the best organic fair-trade hypo-allergenic bamboo bibs for their new child.
The problem is, people don’t know what they are and those that do don’t know how they work. The most important question becomes, for the group in question, how much does it cost? And the answer, of course, is: “well, that all depends.”
Let’s start with the basics. Everything you do adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is bad because it represents part of what causes global warming and most of what frightens Republicans who don’t want to pay for it. Every metric ton of C02 produced has a variable price associated with it. That price, however, is reflected not directly but indirectly: it is priced rather in terms of how much it costs somebody else to capture and mitigate one metric ton of CO2.
So, if you want to reduce your carbon footprint and you don’t know what appliance to buy or just don’t have the time or patience to find out, you need to buy carbon credits, or find someone to take your money and buy them for you. Carbon credits are simple financial instruments that represent metric tons of CO2 reduced by others.
The reason there is no set price for carbon credits in the US is two-fold: 1) there is no regulatory apparatus yet devised by Congress or the White House to set the price, because 2) every industry has different costs. It costs a solar power plant a lot to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere because the technology is fledgling and still not cost effective. That makes their credits expensive. On the contrary, it’s easy and cheap for a farm to trap gas in the soil, so they’re able to price them more cheaply. There is no set price for a carbon credit in the US.
In short, a carbon credit in the US worth one metric ton of CO2 could cost anywhere from 10 cents to $15. Under the European Trading Scheme, a metric ton(ne) has been priced as high as the Euro equivalent of $60.
So how do you buy a credit? Simply put, you can’t do it yourself. You don’t have access to the market. You need to find a company to do it for you. Footprint Zeroed, for instance, is a web-based company with tremendously accurate and thorough calculators that can help you determine what your carbon footprint is and provide you a fair price to offset it based on the cost they incur from the projects they buy credits from.
This is how the market works in a very basic sense. Contact a company like Footprint Zeroed to get the specifics, but take away the following points: it’s easy to do what’s right for the environment, it doesn’t have to take over your day, and there are companies out there who can do it for you.
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