Roofing materials given a second life

We've been working on a project that included removing part of our roof, and with it two layers of shingles and several roof decking boards (tongue and groove). You know, just a little weekend project ;-) So anyway, like all our projects we wanted to figure out a way to make this one as green as possible. Unfortunately, rather than putting on a metal roof or a green roof, we went with 50-year asphalt shingles. I say 'unfortunately,' because those options would definitely make us feel better about ourselves. But the rest of the roof is asphalt and this section needed to tie into the rest of the roof.

Anyone who has ever re-roofed a house knows what an incredible mess it makes. Most people hire other people to do this terrible job, there is usually a dumpster involved, and a big pile of asphalt, wood, aluminum and nails heads off to the landfill. In fact, I would be lying if I said that's not what happened when we had the front out our house re-roofed last year. But we all learn from our mistakes, and this time we did the work ourselves, and therefore took care of the aftermath ourselves as well.

The first step was to separate out the old demolished gutters and drip edge. Those we took, along with some other metal we had laying around, to Calamari Recycling in Essex, CT. We have brought several loads of metal to them in the past, and they give you a decent price for your scrap metal which they sell to companies that melt it down for re-use.

The second step was to separate the shingles from the roof boards. We didn't just scrape all the shingles off and then remove decking, instead we cut off chunks of wood and shingles. So we separated the two materials into piles, removing and collecting most of the nails along the way as well (those will head to Calamari in a subsequent trip).


Once we had the shingles separated from the wood, we drove the shingles up to a place in Bloomfield that Nicole found online. This company, Incorporated Industries, LLC, happens to be the only company in Connecticut that recycles asphalt shingles. They grind them up, separate out the nails (we were nice enough to do this for them), and sell the ground up material to companies that mix it in with regular asphalt for paving roads, driveways, etc.

The big pile of wood, which also contains scraps from the framing lumber, will be chipped up in a rented wood chipper and used for mulch.

All of these steps, in addition to re-using the bricks from the chimney we removed as a walkway for the garden, have taken what would otherwise be several loads of landfill material and turned it all into reused material.

FSC Certified Wood

Nicole and I are in the midst of doing a project on our house that requires a fair amount of lumber. We tried for weeks to track down FSC certified wood and I am very sorry to say that we were not able to find any that made sense for us to buy. What I mean by that is I did track some down but the company is an hour away, they would have charged a couple hundred dollars to deliver the wood, and at that point it was a deal breaker. I do not believe that any of the local lumberyards purchase old growth wood, although some of the wood does come from Canada, where the rules are lest strict about managing forests. If you are setting about building anything, I do encourage you to see if you can find FSC certified wood. They are very strict about their certification, which factors in the forestry management, shipping distances and practices, etc. It is with head in hands that we were not able to use this kind of wood. Not every battle can be won, I suppose, but it stinks to want to do everything we can and not really be able to do something this important to us. Kind of like our desire to recycle all our plastics.

Solar Panels

Get comfortable, this is going to be a long one.

About a year ago, Nicole and I were about to sign up for a Green Architecture class at Wesleyan University, in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program in which we are both enrolled. We had already done a lot of research into green building materials, some of which you have read about in past posts, some still to come. But a major investment was sort of in the works. We knew we wanted to do something big, and for our age, I think seriously considering a photovoltaic (PV) system a year after buying our first hybrid car was certainly big enough.

By the time the summer semester began, Nicole had already made some phone calls for information about different systems and we had a few sales reps come out to the house. The problem is, the peak of our roof runs North-South, meaning the slanted sides of the roof face due East and West, the exact opposite of what you want for a PV system. We have dreams of ripping off the back half of the roof and putting a full dormer across the back side of the house, and while trying to draw up plans for that, we went to great lengths to try to design the new roof in such a way as to make it somehow face South. It just wasn't happening. The best we could come up with was about a 2-degree pitch to the South, partially blocked by the peak of the roof during the latter half of the afternoon, and the ideal pitch for PV is 33-degrees, due South.

The last company we talked to (we didn't need to go any further) was Solar Wrights, who have an office in Stonington, CT, among others. Dave Cohen (email) was our sales rep and we now consider him a friend. Dave took a look at our roof and really listened to our ideas. He was unlike other people we had talked to, in that he really worked WITH us to design a system that we would be happy with.

Dave has a ground-mounted PV system at his house and noticed our large, mostly unshaded backyard. We hadn't considered a ground- or pole-mounted system but as soon as he suggested it we were on board. Our whole yard is a work in progress, much like the house, and Nicole and I both find solar panels to be gorgeous additions to a property, and not something to be hidden up on the roof necessarily. Everyone that has seen them so far agrees.

Anyway, We signed a contract in July, 2007 for a 4.2 kilowatt pole-mounted, tilt-able PV system that will produce, on average, all the electricity our house will use. We are still on the grid, and there is no electricity storage system, like a bank of high capacity batteries. We don't have the space (or money) for something like that, and in all honesty we don't often lose power, so going "off the grid" is not really a concern of ours. There will be months that our electricity bill will be a couple of dollars and others that we will have a credit balance. The credits can carry over month after month, in case we continually produce more than we use.

After beginning the process with Solar Wrights, we had other projects in the works like overhauling our heat and hot water systems. The new tankless hot water heater we got was strategically electric, so that it will basically run for free.

At the same time, however, we had to figure out how the hell to pay for the PV system. Without going into too many numbers, it is very a pretty expensive forray. Almost prohibitively expensive, in fact. Nicole and I do not have a lot of money, far from it. She works part time jobs and I work for a university, both of us coming from middle class families and both have parents that have worked their asses off to give their children better opportunities than they had growing up. We have both learned the importance of saving money and living fiscally responsible. All that said, this is not a financial commitment to be taken lightly. Luckily, the Connecticut Housing and Investment Fund offers an Energy Conservation Loan, which we applied for. It is a 10-year loan and is based solely on debt-to-income ratio, and does not take into consideration any jointly held assets. It does put a lien against the property, however, and would need to be paid off prior to selling the house, if we were ever to sell. The maximum loan amount is $25,000, which may or may not cover the cost of a PV system, depending on the size of it. Think of it like a home equity loan. I think the interest is tax deductible as well, we'll find out next year.

There is also a federal tax credit for PV systems installed before the end of 2008 as described here:

Tax credits are available for qualified solar water heating and photovoltaic systems. The credits are available for systems "placed in service" from January 1, 2006 through December 31, 2008. The tax credit is for 30% of the cost of the system, up to $2,000. This credit is not limited to the $500 home improvement cap.

Of course, like almost every tax credit, the maximum credit is nowhere near being 30% of the cost of the system. But hey, it's still a size-able credit nonetheless.

The only way we ever could have afforded this system, aside from the CHIF loan, was because of the rebate program offered by the CT Clean Energy Fund. They offer rebates for up to 40% of the installed system, based on the efficiency of the panels. The efficiency is determined by the number of modules, size and orientation of the solar array, shading, etc.

After being approved for the loan, Solar Wrights has really taken care of the rest, including the rebates. Tonya Morgan has been extremely helpful with all the paperwork, and her husband Charlie did an amazing job project managing the installation. This has been strange for Nicole and I, since almost every project we have done on the house we have done ourselves or with the help of our parents, siblings, and friends. Anyway, when we signed the contract with Solar Wrights, we were aware of the full cost of the system, but really never had to be concerned with the full cost. Your solar installer will take care of the rebates, and they deal directly with the CCEF before even determining the amount you are responsible for. By that I mean, we are not paying the full amount and then getting a chunk back in rebates, we just pay the post-rebate amount, and in our case there was a deposit and then 3 installment payments during the course of the process.

Installation: The system consists of two poles, set in a LOT of concrete. The concrete bases required 5' square holes to be dug 9' deep. The plywood forms were put in the holes and leveled, with the poles leveled within the forms. We also needed to dig an 18"-deep trench from the array to the house, for the conduit that would carry the wiring into the basement. This process made a much bigger mess of the yard than I had envisioned, but our yard was already kind of a mess anyway, so who cares. It's worth it.

Equipment: On each of the two poles are ten 210-watt SunPower solar panels, for a total of 20 panels. Each set of ten is independently tilt-able, so that in the winter we can tilt them more upright to catch more of the sun's rays, which is lower in the sky. We'll tilt them more horizontal in the summer months. And then in the basement is a SunPower 4000 inverter, which will convert the DC electricity produced by the panels into AC power that can go into the grid. There is also a meter in the basement so we can see how many kWh we are producing on a daily basis, as well as a shutoff switch next to the main panel, so we can turn off the power coming out of the inverter in case we need to work on the electric panel. There is another shutoff switch on the outside of the house so that if Connecticut Light and Power needs to work on the power lines, they can shut down the panels so that they won't backfeed into the system and electrocute the workers.

Long story short, this is a pretty complicated and expensive process, but if we can do it, anybody can. Before beginning this process, we really didn't know that much about PV systems, but it is such an exciting step to take that we are both happy to talk to everyone we know about it, share what we know, and hopefully make it less complicated for anyone else considering doing this.

On-Demand Water Heater

These are all the rage these days. I guess they have been around in Europe for a long time (we Americans are a little behind the times in many facets of Earth-friendly living it seems), and so we bought one. With the planned solar photovoltaic (PV) system, we went with an electric model made by American Tankless.

These are kind of hard to research I found, and most of the information you will find at this point will be on the manufacturer's websites, which of course all boast that their model is the best. I bought the American Tankless one because it came with a lifetime warranty. Who knows if this one is any better than the next one. Home Depot and Lowe's are pretty much useless sources of information, and last I checked only Lowe's carried a model in stock and it was a natural gas model.

Anyway, These come in oil, gas/propane, and electric models. The basic gist is that this is a little wall-hung unit that is never running or maintaining a vat of water at a certain temperature. You open a hot water faucet, it turns on. You close the faucet, it turns off. Very nice. With an electric model like mine, it consumes no electricity, ever, unless you turn on the hot water. That is pretty sweet. When it does turn on, it requires a 125 amp breaker (your house needs to be juiced up to run one of these things...like an electric oven or electric heat), but even without the solar panels installed yet, the water heater only raised our electric bill maybe $10-$15/month (and is 98.5% efficient). Admittedly, there are only two people showering in our household, but considering at $10/month, that's only $120 bucks a year to run the thing. I'm guessing a standard tank-style electric water heater uses a lot more electricity than that. On-demand models do cost more than a tank heater, but since water is never sitting in them, they should last longer.

The big selling point of on-demand hot water heaters are that they don't run except when you need them to. When you are off at work all day, there is no quantity of water having its temperature maintained. This saves electricity if you have an electric model, and obviously oil or gas if you have those models. The oil or gas models can typically vent right out a wall as well, and don't need to tie into the chimney. Electric ones could even be (and often are) installed under a sink or in a closet behind the shower... Doing this makes the heated water have less distance to travel to the place it is needed, and thus retaining more of its heat.

Ours is installed in the basement and is only pushing water up to the first floor right now. I'm guessing once we renovate the second floor, we may install a second on-demand heater upstairs.

I should note, this little thing is ONLY used for domestic hot water. Not for heating the house. I should also note that this type of water heater can be installed in-line with a solar thermal or geothermal system, so that those systems pre-heat the water before it gets to the electric water heater. If the pre-heated water is hot enough already, the water heater won't even turn on. If it needs to come up a couple degrees, the water heater will kick on as the water travels through it. I would imagine a solar thermal system will be added to our arrangement sometime in the future. Gotta get the solar PV system up and running first. More on that soon. It shouldn't be long now.

Heating, part 1

We live in Connecticut, which is a pretty cold climate. Today it snowed and sleeted and it has been down in the teens at night a few nights. Folks in this part, and other parts of the country are cranking up the thermostats these days, and with it the levels of pollution. it just so happens that of the some 8 million homes heated with oil in the United States, 6 million of those are hear in the Northeast. If you are in a position of having to replace your home heating system, as Nicole and I were this year, there are several options for how to heat your house.

Chances are if you have duct work in the walls for a forced air system, you will probably stay with that kind of system, as you would if you already had hot water baseboard radiators throughout. There are different levels of expenses that people can look at practically. For example, We converted a garage into a dining room. That process allowed us to put in a zone of radiant heat, which is essentially a plastic tube that snakes back and forth in the concrete, and as the hot water flows through the tube, it heats up that mass of concrete and warms everything in the room, not just the air. We have found this room to be far more comfortable, even when set at a lower temperature than the rest of the house. It is possible to retrofit floors with electric radiant heat, where you basically attach something to the underside of the subfloor from the basement, and the heat radiates up through the floor.

When we bought our house, we had the old cast iron radiators and an oil boiler dating back to the 1970’s. While the iron radiators did put off a lot of heat, they were not very attractive and had years of gunk caked into them. We decided to send those to the scrap yard, where they no doubt were recycled, and replaced them with low profile Slantfin® radiators we bought at Home Depot.


The issue of replacing the boiler became a pretty big research project. We are fed up with oil and made the decision early on to get rid of that whole disgusting behemoth of a tank in the basement and the sickly old boiler. The last time we had it cleaned we were told the fire box was cracked, which I guess meant its days were numbered. Since we live in a colder climate, and are renovating and not building new, our solar and geothermal heating options were somewhat limited, not to mention we have budgeted other large scale projects that I will talk about in future posts. We had to stick with burning something to heat the water that goes through the radiators and radiant floor, and the other most common options besides oil are natural gas (preferred), propane (not as good as natural gas), and there are wood pellet stoves that can do this job as well.

After a lot of phone calls we determined that natural gas is not in our street, and because of that it was ruled out, unfortunately. It is the cleanest burning of the home heating fuels, and boilers these days can get up into the 95% efficiency range (which happens to qualify for a $150 federal tax credit right now). We settled for LP, or liquified propane, which is slightly worse than natural gas, but nowhere near as bad as oil. I will post some statistic in the days to come to corroborate these claims. We got a Buderus 142/30 propane boiler, which is actually a natural gas boiler that we had to change one small part on to make it burn propane. It came with that part. We just missed the federal tax credit because this model, which produced adequate BTUs to heat our house and then some is 94.7% efficient. This is a really slick unit that makes virtually no noise. I mean that too. If I am standing next to it while it is running, the only thing I hear is the circulator pump installed on the wall next to the boiler.

Wall-mount is a wonderful thing. Hey, so I have to run but will be back with much more on this topic and more soon.