Sonoma County Water Shortage

Today the newspapers were reporting on the deep drought that Sonoma County is currently suffering. So what are some things you can do to reduce your water consumption if the City/County enforce a 30-50% reduction in end user consumption? The average US household consumes 350 gallons of water per day. Water rationing would require you to cut that by 105-175 gallons per day.
Here is the typical break down of how we use water in our homes:

1. Toilet 26.7%
   
2. Clothes Washing 21.7%
3. Shower 16.8%
4. Faucet 15.7%
5. Leaks 13.7%
6. Everything Else 5.3%
   

I thought I would focus on toilets, because they are one of the single largest users of water in your home. Older toilets used 3-5 gallons of water to flush. There are two ways that I see that you can reduce your toilets consumption; replace it or tweak it.
The tweaking is fairly straight forward, first, make sure it doesn't leak. Your local water agency should be able to provide you with a free leak test to determine if your toilet is leaking. Water leaking from the tank to the bowl will result in a constant drizzle of water down the drain and intermittent refilling of the tank. Since most residential toilets work on the principle of the siphon, you may never see the water going down the sewer line. The leak test will put dye into the tank which if you have a link will result in a change in color for the water in the bowl.
Having fixed any leakage, you can also reduce the amount of water used per flush by placing some ballast in the tank, you can use a soda or water bottle filled with water to displace its equivalent amount of water entering the tank. This will directly reduce the amount of water per flush by the amount of water displaced. However, because your old toilet isn't designed for the reduced amount of water, flush performace will be affected. There is no use reducing the amount of water in a flush by 2 liters only to have to flush twice every time you use the bathroom.
So, maybe you would rather buy a new toilet. You have two basic options, a high efficiency toilet (HET) with a reduced amount of gallons per flush or a dual-flush toilet with two flush options (typically up for #1 and down for #2). Home Depot lists 3 HETs for between $128-149 each. It lists a dual flush option for $289 online purchase only (and currently out of stock). Both offer huge savings over older models, but the HETs offer only .35 gallons savings over much cheaper 1.6 gpf toilets that are readily available. The dual-flush is a little harder to figure. The #1 flush uses about half of the water over a conventional toilet, but uses the same amount for a #2 flush as a typical 1.6 gpf toilet. So it depends on your families usage patterns how much you can save in that way.
Ultimately, a more efficient toilet will help to reduce your water usage, depending on what you currently have, it could cut your water consumption from toilet use by 75% up to 70 gallons per day!
Next time I will write about clothes washing machines, the #2 water consumer in the home.

The Key to Energy Efficiency

I am often asked what it is that I think is the most important part of designing energy efficient homes? The first thing that comes to mind is that you need to educate the building owner and occupants about energy conservation. This is a no brainer, consider the graph at the top of the page. Danny Parker gives a presentation where he talks about a housing development in Sacramento by Beazer homes. The homes are designed to be Zero Energy Homes (net energy of course). The homes are designed to perform identically, if the owners used them identically then the orange bars would all read the same. Obviously they don't.
So what is it about how we live in a house that can create a spread of over $1200 ? In theory, if the owner of house number 6 lived more like the owner of house 8, that would be $14200 per year in their pocket! The thing you should take away from the graph is that turning off lights, unplugging electronics that aren't in use, and probably setting the AC lower can have a sizeable effect on your bottom line.
As always, this doesn't only apply to energy. Similar graphs could be made with regards to water consumption and waste management. Our behavior is the number one thing that will effect the end performance of the building. Remember that in the graph above, all of the houses are designed to use the same or less energy than they produce. Two of the homes used more energy than your usual non-solar home, can you imagine how much their living habits would have cost in a conventional home?
The key to energy efficiency is you, and the way that you wisely manage the building you are in.

Newspaper Interviews

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to be interviewed by phone for the local business journal. I have done it before. I was very naive in my first interview and didn't realize the extent to which the journalists need to pare your comments to fit into the story. It seemed that what I remebered saying and what was printed weren't really in sync. The reality was that I wasn't misquoted, or even that my words were twisted, it just didn't feel like me talking in the article.
So going into this interview, I was hyper-sensitive to what I was saying and constantly wondering how it would all come out in the end.
The subject was the upcoming changes to the US Green Building Council's LEED rating system for buildings. The new changes are fairly significant as they increase the number of points you get for energy effeciency and water conservation and that they have added a sort of "wild card" regional category. The intent is to address criticism (from lots of folks like me) that a national sustainability standard is inherently week on regional issues. If your community is low on water resources, it may be more important to focus more points on water conservationn and reuse, where you have a critical shortage of landfill, waste management could be more important. All in all the revisions will be positive for LEED in general.
A large portion of our conversation ended up being on the idea of sustainable guidlines in general. LEED is a check list based voluntary system. You pick which categories are the most relevant to your project and then attempt to meet the guidlines in the program. I think that the future requires a mandatory performance based system. Where performance thresholds are codified in the local code and you get fee/tax bonus' or demerits depending on the actual performance of the building. This has as many downsides as ups, especially in the commercial end of construction, where the owner wont necessarily occupy the building. Since the owner is would be responsible for the actual performance, how does he manage his tenants differently. If your taxes and fees aren't fixed but vary with things as capricious as the weather, how do you budget and plan for that. I'm not sure, but if what we really want buildings to perform better, we have to track them for life.
A recent speaker on designing zero energy homes pointed to a experiment where they built identical homes in a development, with the same orientation, materials and such. They tracked the actual energy consumption and found that their was a wide range of actual performance due to the different ways in which the occupants used the home. This is something that is inherently hard to design for, especially when so many of the buildings we design are for future, unknown occupants. Thus my belief that there needs to be a bigger carrot and a bigger stick tied to energy consumption. Tiered rates go a long way, but ultimately the energy company doesn't want you to use no energy, where would they get the money to stay in business? This fundamental conflict (at least in California) is tricky, the energy companies are primarily responsible for energy conservation in California. They have an interest in keeping consumption in lines with their production, but not to far below what they can supply, because that wouldn't be good business practices. To illustrate, here is a story from my dad.
In his town, due to a drought, the residents were encouraged to conserve water. They did a smashing good job of it. So well in fact, that they were notified this year, due to reduced demand the water rates needed to be increased in order for the water district to pay for its operations.
Well, the same potential is there for energy and waste and any number of other green topics.
Some day we may figure this all out, but it certainly isn't going to be simple.
I will update when the article hits, so you can see how much of our conversation actually makes it into the paper.
j

Can you do "Modern" houses?

I got a call yesterday from a long time client/contractor that I usually do commercial and industrial work for.
"So, your website is all residential/sustainable, can you do modern style design?"
"Can I do Modern? You bet!"
It was like a strange surreal dream! Most of my work is pretty traditional, not because I prefer it to Modern/Contemporary styles. In fact, if I were to design my own home (which honestly I am constantly doing) it would be a very Asian inspired modern home.
Most of the potential clients I speak with aren't interested in Modernist design. They usually have a "traditiional" style in mind when they first contact me and more often than not the preceding conversation would have been,
"Hi Dwellsol, can you do Victorian style homes?"
"Why, yes I can."
The most interesting thing about this is that most people don't REALLY want a Victorian/Mission/Tudor home, what they want is a home that the exterior APPEARS to be traditional. A home truly designed in one of the preceding styles has an interior that is highly compartmentalized, small bedrooms, and few bathrooms. Like the one pictured.

Most clients want a highly Modern interior, with open floor plan, rooms that transition into each other without doors and long hallways, they want a spacious kitchen and 1 bathroom per bedroom plus 1 and 1/2 for guests. Most want a nice cozy traditional exterior and a clean, flexible modern interior.
So, my contractor freind was looking for someone to help him with his own home. He recently bought a more modernist looking home that had been renovated in a less than compatible manner and was hoping that I might help him to get the clean modern look back. I said it sounds like fun.
I guess we will see...
j