Green Building

I haven’t said anything about the sustainability of our remodel project. But as an environmental scientist, it’s been on my mind.

The main thing we’re doing is we’re going to install solar panels and batteries and go 100% off-grid. It takes about 50% more panels to go off-grid then grid-tie, because we have to cover our power use during nights and cloudy days. Plus we also have to buy a lot of expensive batteries, which are not needed for grid-tie systems.*

Everyone we’ve mentioned this to thinks we’re stark raving mad to go off-grid and they strongly push us to do grid-tie instead. I’ve gotten outright hostility and have been laughed at, to the point where I’m now not even telling anyone we’re going off-grid. I have no idea why there is such hostility toward going off-grid rather than grid-tie (“they” being every vendor, contractor, and supplier I’ve ever mentioned it to, including solar panel suppliers – you’d think they would be happy to sell us half-again more panels). It’s as if I said something REALLY un-PC. I just don’t get it.

Our house is already 100% electric, so going 100% solar isn’t going to be too difficult. But it means I don’t get to run a gas line from the street for a gas stove. I infinitely prefer cooking on gas, but I’m bought into the idea of 100% renewables, 100% off-grid, so I will deal with cooking on an electric stove (sigh). Out of concern about me giving up my gas stove, John briefly tried to argue that if we installed a small propane tank it would count as off-grid. Hmmm, nope. Just because the delivery method is a truck instead of a pipe, does not mean it’s off-grid. Plus, propane is still a fossil fuel.

We will also need to replace our old, inexpensive and power-hungry electric baseboard heaters with a more efficient electric heat-pump. It also means that we will keep our evaporative cooler rather than upgrade to refrigerated air. Evaporative coolers require far less energy than refrigerated air, because evaporative coolers are just a fan blowing air over water that’s recirculating through a filter. Refrigerated air is generated with a compressor, and compressors use WAY more energy than a simple fan and water pump.

I’ve also looked into using some reclaimed materials. As a rough rule of thumb, almost anything reclaimed is going to have a smaller environmental footprint than things newly manufactured. Unfortunately, I’ve been very time-limited, so I haven’t tried very hard to find reclaimed materials. But reclaimed flooring is something I’ve been looking into.

Initially, I looked into using reclaimed brick for the flooring downstairs. I love the traditional brick floors in this region.

Unfortunately, it turns out that it’s very hard to install brick flooring after the house has already been built. Real brick is thick, and it would have to go on top of our existing cement slab. The height of it would completely mess up our doorways, our cabinet height, etc. Our sliding glass doors would have to be reinstalled, and it just wasn’t worth the expense.

Although at the time that we decided against brick floors, we did not have ANY IDEA of the TILE tribulations we would be encountering, or we might have opted for brick after all. But it’s too late now, because we’ve already installed our accidental new doors, at the wrong height for a thicker floor. So tile it will have to be.

For those of you wondering about my idea of putting wood floors downstairs as well as upstairs (Plu-ee-ee-eees??) – it’s a little more complicated than I realized. Apparently it’s difficult to adhere solid wood floors to concrete slab, and best if you build a subfloor. But with the addition of a subfloor, we’d have the same height issue with the doorways as we would with brick.

However, we are currently looking into using reclaimed wood for the upstairs floors. Reclaimed wood runs a little bit more expensive than your standard new oak floors, but it has great character. And being reclaimed, it means we’re not cutting down new trees for our project.

We are also considering mesquite for the upstairs floors, if we don’t go with reclaimed planks. Mesquite is a bush, rather than a tree, and it’s invasive, and it is sourced fairly locally (Texas and Mexico). So for those reasons, it is a fairly environmentally-friendly choice. It is also more expensive than oak, which may seem surprising for what is basically a local trash-bush, but the reason is, it’s not a common choice for floors. So you don’t benefit from economies of scale.

*Grid-tie is when you buy solar panels but not batteries, and you connect (tie) you system to your local electricity supplier. That way, when it’s cloudy or dark you can draw off the regular grid, and then during sunny days, your system feeds into the grid. This is by far the most common use of solar panels in the US. If you see neighbors with solar panels, you can bet they’re tied to the grid. Usually people size their system so that the amount they generate and the amount they use averages about zero. But with grid-tie it doesn’t really matter how big your system is. You can undersize it and pay a small electric bill, or oversize it and sell small amounts to the electric company. It’s more complicated to go off-grid, because you’re on your own and you really need to have a sense of how much power you’re going to want. In order to be completely off-grid, and not tied to the local utility, you need to install a big enough system for your heaviest use times, and lots of batteries, so you still have power on rainy days and cold dark nights.