air

One of the great things about sustainable architecture is that great sustainable features can be added easily onto your existing home. One of those that you might not have thought of before, is adding a greenhouse to the south side of your home to grow your own food, and heat your home. Just like solar heating, heat is stored in the greenhouse insulating the home, and allowing heat to enter. Heat moves through the house by convection.

On the outside, you can design it to go with your landscaping, and reap the benefits of having a greenhouse if you don't have the space in your yard, for a detached one. Check out www.aces.edu, where they talk about the benefits of an inside entrance, so you can won't have to walk outside to visit your greenhouse in bad weather. Another option is to have doors that close off the area and keep it as a separate living space. They also report that an attached greenhouse 'may also cost less per square foot to build than a freestanding greenhouse.'

Check out www.greenhousebuyersguide.com for more details on an attached green houses. Although I find the best explanations of how they work, types, advantages, and disadvantages are best explained on educational publications, like, extension.umd.edu. If you want to get right into building and design check out www.builditsolar.com. They have designs best suited to transfer heat to the home, plus ideas for cooling the home with an attached greenhouse as well.

Part 10 of our 15-part Q&A series on all aspects of green building from the publishers of HealthyHouseInstitute.com. Click here for the introductory post and furthur details.

Question: Won’t a good air filter remove all the pollution in my house?

Answer: In most cases, filtration isn’t the single answer, but it can be part of the answer. To have good indoor air quality, you first need to apply the three Healthy-House Design Principles of eliminate, separate, and ventilate. Once that’s been done, the indoor air should be pretty good, and you can use a filter to remove any minor pollutants that are left. A good filter is not a substitute for ventilation because filters can’t remove moisture from the air and they can’t supply oxygen.

If you want to try and use filtration to clean up the air in a problem house, you’ll need a very powerful system that will filter the air several times an hour. This will be expensive, breezy, and noisy, and it won’t be as effective as applying the three healthy-house design principles first.

If you decide to use a filter, there are three ways to do so. First, you can use a portable room-sized filter unit. There are a number of companies that offer these free-standing units.

Portable filters work best in a single room, with the door closed, and the filter left running continuously. Second, for whole-house filtration, you can let the fan on your forced-air furnace or central air conditioner run continuously so its filter will remove pollutants passing through the system. Third, you can use a filter with a general ventilation system to filter the incoming air—air that isn’t always as clean as we’d like it to be. In some cases, it can make sense to combine a forced-air heating/cooling system with a ventilation system. That way, one filter (and one set of ducts) can serve both systems

Question: My furnace already has a filter. Isn’t that good enough?

Fresh flowers, on a weekly basis, can get expensive quickly. With this in mind, when an undesirable smell (after say a trip to the bathroom or burnt soup in the kitchen), the most affordable thing to do is spray a little air freshner. Thanks to a new study from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the "cost" of those few sprays may be much more than we first thought. Spray and solid air freshners were tested, 14 in all, and 12 of them were found to have phthalates in them (even the "all-natural" and "unscented" ones).

Phthalates are known to interfere with hormone and testosterone production. Children and unborn babies are particularly vulnerable to the toxins. The State of California notes that five types of phthalates - including one detected in air fresheners - are "known to cause birth defects or reproductive harm." Still, phthalates are used in many common consumer products -- to soften plastics in children's toys, as sealants and adhesives in nail polish, and as solvents in perfumes and fragrances.

NRDC's testing was limited, but the results do suggest that more comprehensive, in-depth testing of air fresheners is warranted. NRDC and other groups are petitioning the EPA and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to do more comprehensive testing and to take action to protect the public from dangerous chemicals in air fresheners. While consumers should be concerned about the chemicals, NRDC stressed that there is no cause for panic. The chemicals pose their greatest risk over long term repeated exposure.

Of all the widely-available freshner tested, those made under the Walgreens store brand had the highest level of phthalates. In swift response to the study, Walgreens has already agreed to pull said air freshners off their shelves.

From personal experience, I recommend the Mate Mist line; one bottled lasted nearly 6 months in my apartment (and that includes usage by two adult males). How do you keep your home smelling sweet? Candles? Incenses? Sprays?

Remember when you were a kid and nothing could cool you down on a hot summer day like a frozen popsicle? One California company is taking that same concept and applying it to residential and commercial energy systems: ice-based air conditioning.

California/Colorado-based Ice Energy has been developing and marketing this technology since 2003. Most recently, they teamed up with California public ulitity company PG&E as part of their new "Shift & Save" program.

In collaboration with vendor technologies such as Ice Energy's Ice Bear hybrid air conditioning system, the "Shift and Save" program provides incentives that cut air conditioning peak electrical demand on light commercial and institutional buildings.

The ice-based air conditioner uses cheaper nighttime electricity to make ice and then uses that ice for daytime cooling needs. The units cooling looks almost identical to a standard AC unit. The systems lowers peak daytime demand significantly, shifting the energy load up to 95%.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find much information on just how much a system like this costs to install in an average home, but it is a technology very much worth looking into for eco-minded homeowners. 

Do you use any alternative methods to say cool on hot days? Personally, here in San Francisco, I just turn on a few fans and open all the windows, but in many locations, that would not be nearly enough. 

[via ENN]