Folks: This week I find myself stranded in the wilds of Pennsylvania, bereft of my home computer and thus without my stash of renovation photographs. (So much for living the digital lifestyle.) So forgive the lack of pretty pictures and exquisite line drawings. But I'm still fighting the good fight: Last night, when a local friend told me about digging a well for her property, I blurted "While you're down there, you should put in a geoexchange system!" It was like an infomercial, with me playing the role of the overenthusiastic emcee. "Act now and we'll throw in this solar-powered calculator, absolutely free…"

A while back I went to a talk entitled, simply, "What's Next," a discussion of what sustainable building really means and where it's headed. One money quote came from David Johnston, speaking of the current state of inefficient and not-at-all-green buildings most of us work and live in today: "We got here by not designing the future very well. We didn't think about the future of buildings; we thought about getting them done on time and under budget." He was talking about changing the builder's mindset, from one that measures economy and efficiency in purely financial terms to a more whole-picture approach, one that includes things like how much energy goes in to (and out of) building materials when considering lifecycle costs.

Johnston's quote came to mind when I was writing last week's post. Take another look at the heating layout of our house.


Note that the new water heater – the one providing hot water for the main bathroom and the new master bedroom, as well that bedroom’s in-slab radiant heat – sits right at our house's outer edge. Between it and the cruel elements of the outside world – really, I'm not exaggerating – sits a single plywood door. No insulation – no foam, no fiberglass, no old torn-up jeans, even. Its envelope – the barrier between it and the outside world – is zilch.

It's a reasonably efficient heater in it own right, somewhere around 85 percent, but stashing it in a totally uninsulated hole in the wall makes it work a lot harder to heat. The harder it works, the more natural gas it burns, the more carbon gets spit into the air. While water tanks generally have decent insulation sheathing their insides – the idea is to keep the hot part on the inside, after all – something tells me this one wasn't intended for outside use. But in putting it there, the thinking was probably that it was immediately cheaper and easier than re-piping the whole house.

I'll put up a special, two-for-one post next Tuesday with pics of the tank and its little outdoor home.