It is time for a change!

Working at a desk was never what I dreamed of doing and after a lengthy medical leave in 2006 I decided life was too short to spend it doing something I was not passionate about.  After 17+ years in a rut I had decided enough is enough, I needed a change and was going to finally make it happen. 

 

Even though I had been in an office environment for all of my adult life, I still dreamed of building a house one day and regularly dabbled in various construction-related projects I came across.  During my high school years, I had worked as a helper in my neighbour’s brick and stone laying business. In the early 1990’s I had renovated my Condo (full bare stud gut) in the City of Vancouver. Since moving to North Van in 1998, I have been a part of many of the neighbourhood construction projects on the block.   

I felt comfortable working in most of the trades (not some – who really likes drywall filling and sanding anyway?) but knew that I did not want to do any of the trades on a full time basis.  I knew I wanted to work for myself (Corporate Life had reinforced this characteristic first developed in high school) and I knew I liked working directly with the end client.

Being a Property Appraiser, my neighbour one day mentioned an interaction with a home inspector and the light simultaneously went on for both of us.  That was the perfect outlet for my interests and skills.  The next month, I was enrolled in the 5 course program at BCIT (local technical college) and went to my first inspection association meeting not that many weeks later.

By spring of 2007 I had completed the required schooling for my new inspection career.  That summer, I convinced my employer to let me quit and provide overflow services under contract for the next 12 months, but this time with me working from home.  This perfect arrangement provided flexible work schedule, regular income, and provided the time I needed to set up a new home inspection business. By March of 2008, I had also completed my required field training and finally set out my shingle and have never looked back since.

So, I had done it!  I was no longer chained to a desk and was finally working in an industry that complimented my personal interests.  An industry I had passion for.  I had expanded my knowledge of buildings and was now able to help my clients make informed purchasing decisions and then provide ongoing guidance on making their homes more durable, comfortable and in the end – economic!

Insulation R Value compared with IQ

I was reviewing my notes from BC Building Envelope Council's last AGM meeting on September 21, 2011 and wanted to share this quote from John Straube of Building Science Corporation.

While speaking to insulation values in current construction he stated: "R values are like IQ, if speaking in single digits, you are an idiot!"

I am reminded of this quote every time I look at the towers in the downtown core of Vancouver, which collectively represents a thermal resistance of R2 with all the glazing present.  If this represents modern architecture, it might be time to have somebody, other than the architects, start making the important design decisions we need if we are going to start building in a sustainable fashion.

We own a House

During the period I was sequestered to my ‘desk job’, I still regularly dreamed of building a different kind of home for myself and my wife.  I had magazine clippings, dating all the way back to 1987, of products that were ‘energy efficient’, or related to capturing the sun, wind, & biomass energy. I was usually in attendance at each year’s home shows looking for the ‘What’s New’ in modern and efficient products.

However, in the back of my mind I always worried that this was going to be just a dream and I suspected reality would never fulfil my dreams.

In 1998, my wife and I bought our first house and it was at this time that the cost of heating came to the forefront for me.  I was used to paying very little for me heat.  My $117 per month Strata fees included unlimited hot water for domestic and space heating.  Now it was a different story, we had purchased a 1954 bungalow with no insulation (unless you count foil backed cardboard installed at the inboard side of the wall assemblies), aluminium frame single glazed windows, and enough air leakage to compete with a 747 jet engine!  On the coldest winter days the boiler never shut off (something I now understand means it was designed with the right sized boiler).  My average heating bills (gas) for the first year worked out at $60/month but as I bought in the fall; my first bills were approaching $200.  We had stretched to buy our first house and I worried how we were going to afford higher energy costs like this.

The house was very draughty, a problem I generally solved by accident.  Shortly after purchase, I re-painted the exterior of the house.  The house had lapped cedar siding and I decided to take a case of caulking tubes and seal off every seam and penetration with caulking before painting.  I really was not thinking specifically about air leakage at the time, as far as I remember, and just liked the look of the sealed joints, but boy – what a difference to how the home felt inside with significantly less drafts.

The success of air sealing led me to start looking at other ways to actively reduce energy costs and improve comfort.  I switched much of our lighting to CFL’s as soon as they became dependable and affordable (see my blog on a CMHC article discussing energy savings with CFL’s to gauge if this was a wise decision).  When an old fridge started to show its age and threatened to quit, we bought a new energy star model.  We perceived a drop in our electrical bills but did not accurately track the savings at that time.

I also bought a programmable thermostat to allow for day time (while at work) and night time setbacks. There is no sense heating an empty house or the whole house if I am just in my office – right?  I will test this theory in the near future and post actual results.  The balance between the savings of a setback always has to be balanced with the additional energy needed to bring surfaces back to comfort levels.  Large night time setbacks were brought about by noise concerns more than energy saving desires.  Due to a poor design of our hot water heating system, (we have metal pipes rubbing up against the wood as the system heats up after a long cool down period) having the heat on during the night resulted in too many sleep interruptions.  So the system was turned down so that it generally did not come on at night and a small electric oil radiator was located in the bedroom to maintain a comfortable temperature in that room for most of the heating season, at least for me, my wife is cold any time the temperature is below 75°F :-).  This resulted in a sounder sleep and I hoped a more energy efficient system.

I then turned my attention to turning of devices like computers, printers and monitors when not in use (writing this sentence made me realize, I did not need that second computer monitor on while typing this article – so off it went). I also tried to make sure all charges are unplugged when not actively charging.  In upcoming blogs, I will try to document any savings that may have resulted from these efforts. We have received the odd rebate from BC Hydro for meeting our reduction targets set out in Power Smart so we must be doing something right.

During the last three years, I have also expanded my personal carbon foot print reduction efforts by looking at my retail habits.  I started to make life changes that were small but could have a large impact if adopted by many. After watching a documentary in 2007 about the plastic floating around the Pacific Gyre (this YouTube video by the captain featured in the documentary summarizes the findings of the much longer documentary quite well), I made a commitment to never throw out a piece of plastic again.  I started using reusable cloth grocery bags and also found a recycling program that accepts all hard and soft plastic (for plastics that cannot go in the local Municipal Blue Bin program).  Pacific Mobile is one such company that takes in these plastics.  Yes it costs a little money to drop off these plastics, but I now know they will be put to good use instead of landing up in a landfill or worse, into the ocean!  I also started to look for packaging that used fewer materials.  I switched toilet paper brands to one that did not over package the rolls into plastic wrapped sub-packs before assembling into the final pack size.  I looked for cleaning products that had refillable options and reduced packaging (Method is a product that fits this bill and actually works unlike so many of the ‘eco’ cleaners on the market today). My latest effort involves reusing the wonderful plastic containers that Cactus Club serves its take out in for future Cactus Club orders.

Bit by bit, I am starting to make a difference and it feels good.

Temperature Setback Follow up Note: I am now better educated on temperature setbacks and realize they are only reasonable if the heating system is capable of a fast recovery.  These type of systems tends to be inefficient and often over-sized for the dwelling being served.  You would not want to do any form of setback if using a highly efficient ground source or air source heat pump, as doing so will usually result in the activation of the secondary electric element heating system which has a lower efficiency factor and a much higher operational cost which will generally more than offset the savings that were originally desired from the setback.  I will discuss this further on a future blog entry but trust me; they are not the best way to operate on these systems.

Energy Auditor Team Promotion Video

This video is good for a laugh.

Do CFL bulbs make sense in Vancouver?

A CMHC study identifies that although CFL bulbs do reduce the electrical energy needed for space lighting by up to 68%, in a predominately heated region these savings are offset by an increase in space heating loads as the interior of the home is no longer being partially 'heated' by the traditional 'inefficient' light bulbs.  In Vancouver, this increased heating load clawed back much of the savings and only resulted in a overall energy savings of $10-12/year (based on 2008 energy costs).

A further consideration before switching is looking at what provides the heating energy in the home.  For those of us concerned about the environment and the planet's ability to survive the onslaught that we humans throw at it, does it make sense to replace an electrical heating source ('inefficient' light bulbs) operating at 100% efficiency with a gas heating source operating between 50% to 90% overall efficiency (depending on age of gas appliance) and at the same time belching out all that carbon compared to our relatively clean electrical supply we enjoy in BC?

I welcome your comments.

School is Over!

Here is the next installment of how I came around to wanting to build and live sustainably.

High School is now but a distant memory and I never need to learn again, right?  Now what?

Well, I had trained to be a carpenter, so let’s get going.  I came to an agreement with a Journeyman working on a dwelling a few doors down from where I was living in Richmond.  I just needed to sign the apprenticeship papers.  I had been working for this fellow for a few weeks as a labourer to get a feel for the ‘real world’.  On one particular day, I had spent many hours prying out 2”x12” Floor joists installed at 12” centres with a nail gun (they had been set at the wrong spacing and elevation - but not by me). That evening, I ended up in the hospital with a set of pulled back muscles, interrupting a Christmas get-together with my uncle’s family in Abbotsford.  I took the opportunity to re-analyze my career path.  My family members generally had a history of bad backs and I soon realized a life in construction was probably not a prudent course for me.  Looking back, with hindsight, this was probably one of the best decisions I have ever made, as I avoided the downturns of the construction sector throughout the 80’s and 90’s and saved my body for the project I plan today - 25+ years later.

So after a few part time jobs I landed up in a spot I would have never guessed.  I landed a desk job as a professional purchaser for a chemical engineering firm with plants all over the world.  I generally worked in a two man department responsible for sourcing and supplying spare parts and replacement equipment for our 60 plus clients at locations throughout the planet.  This was a good fit for me as I was given a LOT of autonomy and wore many hats.  I became known as the “efficiency natzi” during my 19 year career there because I was always looking at ways to make the processes more efficient.

The frustration I had for inefficient processes raised its head one day when I was asked to take over the logistics on a project that was almost completed and ready to start up.  Those in the business will know that this is when the most activity takes place and ALL shipments are RUSH shipments.  My frustration with a spreadsheet based shipping and logistics system reached a climax one day and I proceeded to become self taught in Microsoft Access data base design (I thought the learning part of my life was over – I already know everything - right?)  I created a program that took a process that previously took hours to prepare the data and close to an hour to just generate the print job, to a process that just required ongoing updates to the order data and then the press of a button when it came time to print the packing lists.  15 minutes later, the 100 or so page packing list was ready at the printer.  Not wanting to stop there, I then pressed to expand this system to include purchase order and requisition generation and was able to reduce information previously entered 3 times into different systems into only 1, saving hours of work and reducing errors.

It was while working at this company that I started to think about the bigger picture.  I saw the destruction that many of our clients were causing to the environment and to the residents living near their chemical plants.  And while many of the products designed by the company I was working for greatly reduced the impact of our client’s plants (we had a division that did nothing else besides producing processes and equipment that reduced the amount of nasties discarded by a plant), I still was developing guilt for what ‘we’, as a company, were part of.

It was also during this period at the beginning of the 21st century that I also started to make personal changes to how I impacted the planet.  At work and at home, I switched to a generally paperless system.  I started scanning all inbound paper so that it could be stored and retrieved efficiently in an electronic format (why continue buying filing cabinets).  I moved away from faxes and snail mail and now emailed most documents to all my vendors and clients.  The volume of paper printed by me had dropped by many factors and I was now able to retrieve information in a much more efficient format allowing me to handle larger volumes of work (sounding a lot like my high school projects).

I was now determined that no matter how small my contributions were, I was going to start making a difference!

Living Life in Vancity

A shout-out to a colleague (Alexis Morgan) who is also documenting his personal journey through renovating an older home in the East side of Vancouver into a modern and efficient structure to serve his family for decades to come.

Check it out at http://life-in-vancity.blogspot.com