Gary Munson's Page
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- Are you interested in becoming an organizer in your area?
- Maybe--But Not Sure What to Organize
- Tell us about your experience with alternative energy:
- I encourage all my friends to employ cost effective means to reduce their electric bill by using simple, cost-effective energy saving strategies. I particularly push structure shading, insulation, radiant barriers and de-superheater heat recovery units on central A/C systems.
- What excites you about this campaign?
- Finally someone who can 'rally the troops' and save us from the fate that is surely going to befall us if we don't act.
- What do you want to do to help?
- Show people how to cut energy use without compromising their comfort level. Any successful conservation strategy must be able to produce results without the general public having to spend a lot of time and effort on it. The structures have to do the work....A combination of energy saving strategies and utilizing alternate energy sources will be required.
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27FEB09
Honorable Speaker of the House Congresswoman Pelosi,
I am an Electronic Technician Chief in the US Navy with 27 years service stationed overseas. I’m outlying an idea to assist and work with current plans for achieving energy independence. I urge you, as speaker of the house and the driving force to form the select committee on energy independence and global warming, consider for discussion and introduction into the house US Treasury Savings Bonds for Energy Independance.
In WWII America sold war bonds supporting the war effort. When young, my mother told me her primary school raised enough money through bonds to build a tank to support troops. I am impressed with the patriotism and purpose of our greatest generation that accomplished so much.
Selling energy bonds for RE (Renewable Energy) development would lower foreign oil imports and assist with the complex problem of funding. Bonds sold as “Energy S” could support new solar trough plants, “Energy W” to support wind farms, Energy “H” to support hydroelectric plants, Energy “T” to support RE transportation such as electric bullet train routes powered by RE, Energy "C" COOPS for small communities only needing a small quantity of turbines, and Energy “I” for needed infrastructure high voltage power lines to the RE site. Bonds will have the project name and include an artist’s perspective of the project and an American flag. President Obama had great success with the internet during his campaign. In a similar manner, using the internet, energy bonds could have a website listing current projects and an “electronic checkout” could purchase a bond $25 or higher. Simpler methods of payment such as “PAYPAL” and credit cards would be available and after an electronic purchase is complete a color print out of the bond is available with a follow up of the bond in the mail. The website would limit quantity of projects for each category until funding is complete. After a project becomes funded, a new project will be available. A tab on the site will show history and status of previous projects. Purchasers may take great pride in “collecting” and displaying bonds of various RE projects and participating at different levels of financial support. Solar trough plants in the multi-hundred MW size capacity with molten salt energy storage in California, Arizona, and West Texas can provide a major portion of electric needs. North Dakota has potential to support 1/3 of our nations electric needs in it’s class 4 wind zone areas. There are plenty of suitable proposed wind turbine farms now around the nation to significantly increase our RE if funded. Mid sized hydro-electric has not been used in America to it’s full potential. Following the example of our neighbor, Canada, it would provide a significant increase in percentage of electric production. Developing all three we could provide the majority of our electric and heating needs through renewable energy in a "New New Deal" fashion allowing natural gas for transportation as T. Boone Pickens is working for. Bullet train routes have proven a viable alternative to commercial domestic air service and when powered by electricity provided by RE suppliers America would be in the forefront of world technology. Example, I heard of discussion for a commuter train from Denver to Colorado Springs. Such a route built as a renewable energy project with charter requirement legally requiring to only purchase electricity from available renewable energy sources would be a model example. There are many train routes, city bus systems, and government vehicles that can be converted to run from alternative energy sources and fuels. Jobs created would bolster the economy, lower trade deficit, and strengthen national security. I would take great pride in print outs of bonds with graphics of each project I supported and many other Americans would also. The energy bonds could have tax breaks. BLM lands may be a viable place to start for some projects.
I contacted the US treasury department and was told that the marketing department for savings bonds closed several years ago. I was told there would be problems because savings bonds are at the federal level while the projects will be at the state and local level. I disagree and believe that these can easily be figured out in the way of grants to the state and local level using money from the bonds for those specific projects. I was told to check out auctions on the www.treasurydirect.gov website and found them to not apply to citizens wanting to buy savings bonds to support a cause such as energy independance. I was told by the treasury department to look into CREB (Clean Renewable Energy Bonds). I found CREB to be large scale funding that a citizen would not be able to participate in as a US Treasury Energy Independance Bond would provide. If given the tools to participate directly, the power of the citizens of the United States to help achieve energy independance could not be denied. Americans mean well and the Energy Independance Savings bond program will give citizens the power at their level to make it happen. If marketed through a web page, commercials, and to federal employees the word would get out and participation would spread like wildfire.
Mr. Paul Gipe, a resident of Bakersfield CA, an author of several books about wind energy, and recipient of multiple awards as a pioneer in the industry since the 1970's has put a letter I wrote to Senator Dorgan on this subject as well as an older letter I wrote on wind COOP in JAN07. These websites are:
http://www.wind-works.org/coopwind/RenewableEnergyBondsforEnergyIndependence.html
and
http://www.wind-works.org/articles/AmericanEnergyIndependencethroughCooperativeInvestmentinWindEnergy.html
Sincerely and very respectfully,
ETC(SW/AW) Mike Kendall USN
Mailing address: PSC 476, Box 879, FPO AP, 96322 USA
Telephone (803) 265-4756, Email: michael.kendall@ymail.com
Thanks for the tips on energy savings and keeping your electric bill low. A lot of good information there.
Pick plan with garage shielding house from sun...i.e. not one with a garage on the side or end of house. Remember in Florida, it's all about solar heat gain..through the roof, windows, and walls.
Choose a lot that allows you to orient house with garage on west side facing afternoon sun. This allows garage to block afternoon solar heating of the part of the house 'hiding' behind it. Minimize size and amount of west facing windows and doors. Use double pane, low-e glass in vinyl frame windows and fiberglass or vinyl doors. Plant trees and large shrubs to shade the west side of the house.
10' ceilings are desirable. Although you have more cubic feet to cool, you'll feel more comfortable at a higher temperature. A higher ceiling allows the air to stratify. The warmer air will accumulate at the top, well above your head where you can't feel it, the cooler air will sink, making the 'lower level' you live in more comfortable. With a high ceiling, activities that generate heat such as refridgerators, dish and clothes washing, showers, etc., that introduce heat into the living area have their heating effect minimized by the heat-at-ceiling stratification. Ceiling vents in a high ceiling house should be directed down rather than trying to spread the air sideways. Sideways deflection mixes the air, defeating startification. Ceiling fans are not as effective with the higher ceiling as they tend to dislodge the hot air and send it down, causing the air conditioning to run more. Spring or fall, when the windows are open, is the best time for ceiling fan use. Small pedestal fans and the popular 'tower' fans work better during AC use, circulating the cooler, lower level air. Air movement from them may let you set the thermostat higher and save energy. Running a ceiling fan in the winter to 'get the hot air back down' is counter-productive as any reclaimed heat won't compensate for the wind chill effect you'll feel. With 10 foot ceilings, a floor level air return is preferable to minimize disturbance of stratification but with normal 8 foot ceilings, a ceiling return will make the structure more comfortable by evening out the temperature.
Have 24" roof overhang to shield windows and much of the wall area from midday sun. The goal is to allow maximum view of clear sky from all windows to minimize need for interior lighting during the day without direct sun entering house during the summer. A 24" overhang will usually do this in the summer , while in the winter, the lower position of the sun in the sky will allow it to shine in for some solar heating although the desired low-e window glazing will minimize that. Be sure the engineering is correct for the wind load where you are building.
Two story structures in Florida require extra planning to minimize heat gain as they usually present more wall area to the sun. You lose the 24” overhang advantage shielding the windows and walls on the lower story. This can greatly increase solar heating through the windows and walls of the lower floor which will then convect the heat to the upper level. This is an advantage in northern climates but a liability in the south where cooling is the main concern. There is some advantage here in less roof/attic space, however..
Use hip roof construction...much stronger than gable design...will qualify you for a substantial discount on your windstorm part of your insurance. Check with your agent.
Use either galvanized ('bright metal', no colors) roofing...expensive, especially on recommended hip roof designs (a lot of waste cutting the metal with all the angles of a hip roof) or use a radiant barrier. This barrier can either be an aluminum/Mylar film draped over the trusses before the decking is applied or applied on bottom of trusses in existing structures or plywood decking with pre-applied barrier. The radiant barrier will keep the attic much cooler. Plywood makes a much stronger deck material than OSB at a minimal premium in price.
Use a roof design with 6/12 pitch. This gives sufficient attic height to maximize convection cooling. Also 6/12 is the 'sweet spot' for wind resistance. As roof pitch gets lower, the tendency of the roof to act as an 'airplane wing' in a windstorm increases raising the chance of roof lifting off. A greater pitch begins to act as a direct barrier to high winds increasing chance of 'push over' failure. A 6/12 allows wind to slide up and over but also creates turbulence on the lee side minimizing lift as well as down force on the upwind side.
Try to keep square footage as small as comfortable for you. A 4000 sq. ft. home requires far more energy use than a 1500 sq. ft one.
In Florida, build concrete block on a slab. We have hurricanes AND termites here...Code requires ground pre-treatment. Continuing the termite contract is cheap insurance. An extra benefit of on-slab construction is being able to take advantage of the cooling effect of a slab floor. The earth under a house stays fairly cool and especially with some hard surface flooring the small difference in temperature between the earth and the floor surface means very little heat gain from below. It’s helpful to think of heat as a fluid…just as water flows more forcefully as height of fall increases, heat moves quicker across a greater temperature gap.
Use several solar powered attic roof ventilators along with numerous passive vents. In Florida you can't have too much attic venting. We don't get enough cold winter weather to be an issue if you're well insulated.
Use R-30 or better in the attic. Insulated cells in concrete block walls are probably not worth the expense. Florida requires so many cells to be poured concrete now for windstorm resistance there’s little empty cells left to insulate. Check the Florida Solar Energy Center website and you’ll see that less than 17% of heat gain occurs through the walls (not entirely accurate for two story construction). Also keep in mind that there are many windows and doors that deduct from the wall area and upgrading them will have far greater effect than some fluff in the block cells. A better solution is a foam ‘underlayment’ beneath the stucco on the west side of the house. Be wary of spray-on underside roof insulation. This may prove to be a time bomb as the roof ages and begins to leak. The decking and trusses may be seriously compromised before you become aware of any leak problem. The 'sealed' nature of the insulation envelope may well lead to extreme damage in the long run.
Use fluorescent lighting wherever possible in place of incandescent. LED lighting will be preferable when it becomes more cost efficient
Refrigerators are a substantial user of power. Since about 2000, efficiency has been greatly increased in the new units. If yours is old, consider replacing it. Check the energy labels and you’ll see that top or bottom freezer models have consistently lower power usage than side-by-sides. Small access doors to get drinks out are handy and keep all the cold from getting frequently dumped out if you have children opening the fridge frequently. As in house sizes, get the smallest refrigerator you can be comfortable with. Note that external ice and water dispensers take up a lot of interior room and tend to make people buy a larger unit to compensate.
Unless you are really tied to using a separate freezer, today’s high energy prices far outweigh any savings you’ll get by buying food in bulk and stockpiling it at home. The possibility of increased power failures from more frequent storms and the accompaning food loss also makes freezer use less attractive than it used to be.
Point of use hot water heaters can't prove measurable savings. Tank type heaters have such good insulation now that standing heat loss is minimal. Point of use systems will quite likely lead to surcharges from the power companies in the future as the high instant current draw becomes more of a problem during peak power use time. Only tankless gas units can lay claim to significant energy savings due to the elimination of the central flue in a conventional gas tank type heater.
There seems to be a lot of misinformation being pushed about AC efficiency. Code requires a minimum of 13 SEER rated Heat Pump equipment. 14, 15, 16, and higher are available at much greater costs. Research will show the only difference between the very expensive high efficiency units and a higher quality 13 SEER is the amount of condenser coil and the controller PC board (also a fancier cabinet). They all use the same brand and model compressor (Copeland Scroll), the same fans, reversing valves, driers, etc. Most companies trumpet the boards as being the key to their high efficiency, this is mostly smoke. When the 'rubber hits the road', what counts for amount of electricity used is how efficiently the compressor can transfer the heat from one place to another. The compressor is what's putting that 12 to 20 amp load on the line. The more you can reduce that value, the lower the electric bill will be. The compressor is moving the refrigerant gas from an area to low pressure to high. That's the work it's doing that runs up your electric bill. As the gas enters the high pressure area, the condensing coil's job is to cool it and cause it to shrink. This shrinking lowers the high pressure and puts less back pressure on the compressor. This has the effect of reducing the work the compressor must do and therefore lowers it's amperage draw. An amp meter is a handy tool for the energy conscious homeowner as it will let him see in real-time what effect his efforts to conserve energy have. You can put it on your heat pump as it runs and perform a simple experiment. First hold a couple of sheets of cardboard against your condensing unit's grill as it runs. You'll see the amperage begin to increase as the compressor's workload goes up since the coils can't shed as much heat and shrink the gas. Second, remove the cardboard and spray a fine mist from your garden hose on the coils and you'll see the amps go down as the coils become more efficient from the evaporative cooling of the water and shrink the gas quicker. Keeping the coils wet all the time would lower your cooling bill but would also corrode the coils so is not a good idea. The way to accomplish this safely is to add a unit called a 'heat recovery unit'. An AC professional can install this by cutting the discharge line from the compressor and sending the hot gas through the recovery unit then back to the condensing unit. The heat recovery unit is a 'heat exchanger' that has two pieces of copper tubing wound tightly together and enclosed in an insulated box. One piece of tubing is the loop carrying the hot, high pressure gas from your condensing unit. The other makes a loop to your hot water heater. Whenever the AC is running, the small water circulator pump in the heat recovery unit turns on and in effect does the same thing squirting water on the condenser coils did as it circulates water through your water heater.The heat from the hot gas transfers through the walls of the tubing into the water causing the gas to shrink and cut the compressor workload. In addition, the unit now provides free hot water for your house, allowing you to shut off your water heater in the summer. These two savings together can easily total $50 a month (!!!!) on your electric bill. Remember, in addition to lowering the workload on the compressor and saving electricity there, your water heater is no longer online. An interesting side benefit is that the more you use your hot water, the lower your electricity bill goes. This doesn't mean using more water (longer showers, etc) but you can set your washing machine to use hot water rather than cold or warm and get cleaner clothes AND save energy. You are using that water anyway and by using it hot, you are 'shedding' heat from the system and increasing it's efficiency. Heat recovery systems are typically less that $1000 and FAR more practical than solar water heaters that have much more complicated control systems, are far higher maintenance items and cost much more. Pushing solar hot water in Florida is doing the consumer a great injustice. Heat recovery units are said to not be practical on high efficiency systems (15 +SEER ratings) but the addition of a heat recovery unit to a 13 SEER system probably raises the entire system's efficiency to the 15 or 16 SEER range if you bring the savings of the water heater into the equation. Water heaters are typically resistance element heaters...the most inefficient way to heat. The industry is cashing in on energy fears by adding more coils to their units and charging a premium for the 15 and 16 SEER units that's much higher than the cost of adding a recovery unit to a SEER 13 system. The higher efficiency unit may save cooling cost but then 'wastes' the perfectly good heat that could be put to use for your hot water by just ‘blowing it away’ outside..
Have you seen T. boones AUTO MATIC system to send
e-mail to your rep. You type in a few key strokes and
it auto adresses the e-mail to all your reps and the GOV.
of your state based on zip code. Has a sugested draft of a letter to send. NEVER EASYER. Spread the word to click on the ACTION CENTER at the main web site.
Add me as a friend, I would like to stay in touch. We are meeting with another EPA approved conversion shop today and I hope to have more info on cost for you.
Welcome from a former DeLand dweller! It doesn't appear that you have been "offically welcomed".
Welcome to the chance to make a difference in our lives!
Thank you so very much for joining.
Here are some ways that you can help. Please feel free to share any other ways with myself and the group.
PLEASE email the Pickens Plan video to everyone you know. www.pickensplan.com. Ask them to JOIN. Ask them to pass it along. Time is of the essence. If every member had 10 friends join today, we could put the number of members over 1 million very quickly!
If we can not get critical numbers how can we take advantage of this golden opportunity? High gas prices have "woken up" America to our plight and a paradigm shift like no other is in the wind. We need to do this now.
So many new members write "I want to help, what can I do?" This is a start. We may not get to the next step if we can not get this one done. Our leaders can not ignore millions of members of the Pickens Plan. We are not there yet.
Put a sign in your car window that reads...
" $700 BILLION IN FOREIGN OIL ANNUALLY. STOP THE LARGEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND.....TO OUR ENEMIES. JOIN www.pickensplan.com."
Run a small, inexpensive advertisement on the headlines page of your local online newspaper.Have small business card size notes that you can give to friends with the same message. It's grass roots, but that is what this is going to take.
If you know someone in the press- get them to cover this.
If you know someone who blogs- get them to cover this.
If you can write a letter to your Representative or Senator- get them to see and understand this. Ask them if they support 100% clean electricity in the next 10 years.
If you know someone who is in the public eye - ask them to support this.
If you can write a letter to the editor of your local paper- please do.
If you want to print downloadable flyers and put them in your car and/or business window- please do.
Join any of the Groups and get involved. Add discussions in the Forum and let me know how it goes.
Have a nice day. Please friend me if you like.
James "Gator" Fiske
Thanks for your comments on my question about that DOE paper.
Dave
That has been the case up til now. Two things to consider, climate
change may make us windier and FPL is doing a wind farm in St. Lucie county that is worth monitoring. http://www.stluciewind.com/
Also coastal and offshore wind farms will produce more than inland ones.
Welcome to Paradigm Shift Institute. I hope you will join us in making this great endevour a success.
Best Regards,
Norman
I was beginning to think there was "nobody out there" until I saw your comment in July about what is and is not energy. Bless you. The problem I see is not many to be blamed because it is now erroneously thought, taught, politicized, propagandized etc. until now a "Gordian Knot". If you might possibly be looking for a job what my new PickensPlan Associates are about, might be interested. We will have technology for the only two things to be done with energy; conserve it or convert it. These projects to begin immediately with one going into the next century. Don't know if any of my stuff can be found on the Plan. E-mail address is "havilah@hotspringsmt.net"
Galen Calvert
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