As promised, a few details about my home energy journey (so far)!

The new house game plan: electrify, decarbonize, and harden.

How’s it going, you ask?

We’re moving to Ossining NY, the home of two famous figures: Don Draper and the Indian Point nuclear reactor. Energy loomed large for us right out of the gate, as we learned more about the area and heard about the plant closure impact on our taxes...

Temperatures can get down to zero, but not often. That matters because, as I learned, sizing (and incentives!) for heat pumps look at the peak hot and cold similarly to how grid capacity is sized to look at peak.

Incentives only apply if the heat pump is sized “correctly” for the low temp days...

Another interesting twist to the local area (that saved me a @Guay_JG experience!) is that it’s smack in the middle of the Nat Gas moratorium territory. The house didn’t already have gas lines, and now can’t get them even if we wanted to!

The house is carbon intensive A F. Growing up in Virginia, I had *no* frame of reference for the enormous tank of fuel oil outside. Fuel oil emissions are about 40% higher than natural gas. And so expensive! No personal data, but $2-4k per year depending on price and temps.

That giant oil tank feeds into a (very old) hot water boiler that supplies radiators throughout the house. Plus, an indirect water heater (also pretty old). Central air for cooling.

This combo turned out to be a bit of an issue... because what I wanted to do was geothermal. But apparently this kind of a dual setup, and the baseboard radiators, ruled that out.

A few contractor calls in & they all told me heat pumps wouldn’t work. Let me count the ways! The vents are too high, you need supplemental heat, too expensive, I can’t do that kind of install, I won’t do that kind of install, use propane, get another fuel oil boiler...

And, honestly, I don’t know that much about building efficiency- so that’s pretty persuasive! I told them all I’m going no fossil fuels. But now I’m out here googling “how do heat pumps work” and measuring vent distances from the ground and looking at air circulation patterns.

#energytwitter intervened - thanks btw - and I got some better local references for companies. After googling all these heat pumps I was thinking like a $10k project. $5k for the heat pump and then labor should just be a few thousand right? Ha.

Two companies helped out a ton (again, thanks #energytwitter!) but one worked under an energy savings model- and because I don’t have any home usage data that was a blocker. But they were amazing and helped me scope the project just to be nice.

The other, @BlocPower, has been awesome. Basically they do the customer side, connect you to a contractor/s, manage those contractors, sort out design, and then finance it. Yay! Could I do those things? Maybe! Do I want to do those things? No!

The house is ~2500sqft with ~2200 that we’re really trying to make comfy. Built in 1967. It’s a split level ranch, or a “splanch” (apparently...). The estimates came in at 54.7k btus heating load and 45k cold.

So on to the solution.

1) fujistu mini splits, single and multi room. What the heck is a minisplit? It’s one of these little guys! At least intuitively, these always seemed smart to me- each zone has its own unit that you can control.

The idea is to have the upstairs on one zone (my choice), and then the downstairs on a few minisplit units- with those two green rooms served from the ceiling bc it’s the part that splanches with the upstairs

Then the not sexy but very important... 2) insulation!! The better the insulation, the less the heat pump needs to work. This place has such. Bad. Insulation. So we’re gonna make it good. Like a

No supplemental heat (looking at you
@Stphn_Lacey....). Just pump, pump, pump it up.

This project was literally 5x my uninformed guess on cost. More than our down payment or a new car. Worth it. But when @energysmartohio tells you these things are $30-50k... believe him! Financing is obviously a critical solution here, a lot like solar.

Also if you are thinking about your cash flow, remember to plan for higher electricity bills :)

Work starts this week and I’ll share some pictures.

But next up, decarbonize! Let’s get this (outrageously high) load cleaned up! Step one is @arcadia. Then get some usage data via @sense. Then guesstimate the EV. Then get the solar panels up there.

Then storage, which will both help shift around clean generation to cover real time load AND start the process of hardening this house into a more resilient asset. More to come.