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Saving energy with hot water heaters

Ask Mr. Electricity has a concise page that compares installation and operating costs for different types of hot water heaters. It covers gas vs. electric and tank vs. tankless.

Installing timers can save energy in some cases, but not always:

A $40 timer can automatically turn off an electric heater . . . after you go to bed, and on again right before you get up. These don't save as much money as you'd expect, though. That's because a typical electric water heater only runs about three hours a day anyway, and modern energy-efficient water heaters run only 1.3 hours or so. . . . (In fact, if your heater was made after 1998, it's possibly not worth using a timer at all.) . . . A timer for an old (pre-1998) heater will save about 25kWh/mo. for a family of two using 40 gallons a day with the heater off four to six hours a day, but only 14kWh/mo. for a family of four using 80 gallons a day.

There's also a nice tidbit about health considerations when setting the temperature on your heater:

Bacteria fram Legionnaires Disease can grow in water up to 122°F, so many people set their heater tanks to at least 123°F.

"Green Building Impact Report"

This looks interesting. Just came out. It's written by Rob Watson, known as "the father of LEED" and is available online. He also seems to have an Amory Lovins connection.

via Joel Makower

National "River Rally" comes to Baltimore this spring - May 29, 2009

It's a good conference, put on by a national group called River Network.

Past River Rallies have been held in idyllic spots like the Columbia River and the base of Mt. Washington. But the Baltimore edition will be the first held in an urban setting, so I expect it will tread lots of new ground.

Should be interesting.

When: Friday May 29 - Monday June 1
Where: Baltimore Hyatt Regency (which is next to the Inner Harbor in downtown Baltimore)

No more raking leaves

Instead of raking leaves this weekend, we tried mulch-mowing them. To do it, you just run your regular grass-cutting mower over the leaves to chop them up. It works pretty well and saves a lot of time.

The left part of the photo shows untouched leaves and the middle swath shows the results of two passes of "leaf mowing". The mower shown is the CMM1200, a battery-powered electric model from Baltimore-based Black & Decker.

The benefits:

• faster and easier (no raking, no bagging, and no lugging bags to the curb)
  
• cheaper for you (no bags to buy and the cost of electricity to power the mower was less than 3 cents)
  
• cheaper for the county (nothing for trash trucks to pick up & no space taken up in county landfills)
  
• provides nutrients for the lawn

What's not to like?