April 5, 2007

Yellow Springs community members Larry Halpern and Gail Keen have spent the past several years reducing their household reliance on energy and are now using one-fourth of the energy they used in the past.

By Lauren Heaton

The commitment to reducing energy use varies from household to household, and few are as determined as Yellow Springs community members Larry Halpern and Gail Keen have been over the past two years to conserve energy in their home in Springfield. Through a combination of changes such as reducing the thermostat to 52 degrees, unplugging their refrigerator and graduating to a composting toilet, they now use one-fourth of the electric, gas and water they consumed in the past and save hundreds of dollars each month.

Economics was one of the driving forces behind the couple’s change in lifestyle, according to Halpern, who said he and his wife both work as musicians out of their home. But doing their part to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and foreign oil is as important to them as living a comfortable lifestyle in a warm house during the winter. They think about the devastating effects that consumption of underpriced fuels has had on the underdeveloped world and will have on the environment for their grandchildren, they said, and they conclude that the only way to live responsibly is to reduce their dependence on the resources many take for granted.

“We’ve realized that if we’re not doing it right, then we have no right to ask someone else to do it right,” Halpern said. “We’re trying to make a meaningful change in ourselves that might help make meaningful changes in the world.”

One thing leads to another
As often happens with change, the motivation comes from an event, which for Halpern and Keen was the 2004 presidential election. After contributing a good deal of energy to local election politics in support of the Democratic party, they were devastated and stupefied, they said, at the outcome. They needed to take a deep breath and figure out where they went wrong. That winter they received a $550 heating bill for their 2,200 square-foot house, the biggest they had ever seen, and they weren’t even feeling that warm, Halpern said.

Then came The Community Solution’s Peak Oil Conference that focused on sustainable living, and all the parts added up to their deciding to take action to reduce their personal consumption in any way they could.

The couple started with turning down their thermostat to a serious 52 degrees to reduce the natural gas used to heat their home. Next they bought a new energy-efficient furnace and insulated their roof.

Halpern and Keen wanted to know the effect their actions were having on their gas consumption, and they became scrupulous about recording their gas meter readings. The first year they managed to reduce their natural gas usage from a high of 929 cubic feet (ccf) in 2003-04 down to 588 ccf the following year. It was a big improvement, Halpern said, but they thought they could do better.

In stepped Bob Klahn, a Yellow Springs resident who performs what is known as a blower door test to measure the permeability of a home and find air leaks where heat can be lost. The couple found they were losing large amounts of heat from their early 20th century farmhouse through gaps in the heating duct registers, the joints between the brick and sheet rock walls and the attic. They reinsulated their attic and caulked the other spaces with a foam core seal and watched their gas consumption decline to 461 ccf in 2004-05.

Then last year Halpern and Keen custom built pop-in window covers made out of styrofoam sheets covered by fabric, framed with wood and edged with felt for easy daily installment in all 22 of their windows. And instead of spending large sums on storm windows, they screwed fitted sheets of plexiglass to the outside of each window for an extra layer of insulation. Their gas consumption again went down the following year to 332 ccf, Halpern said.

Going down the rabbit hole
In the meantime, the couple figured while they were making progress on their gas consumption, they might try addressing other systems, such as water and electricity. The biggest water saver, according to Halpern, and one which helped reduce their consumption from 3,740 gallons of water a month down to 600 gallons per month, was installing a composting toilet.

Restroom habits are a rather taboo subject in this culture, Halpern said. But if people can get past the cultural norms that make it an uncomfortable topic, they might find a composting toilet makes a lot of sense. The toilet itself consists of nothing more than a conventional seat and cover that sits over a bucket. After each use the waste gets covered with a fresh layer of shredded leaves and each week the bucket gets mixed into a composting pile in the yard, which also includes food scrap compost, grass clippings, more shredded leaves and saw dust or wood chips. Mixing the nitrogen-filled “green” compost with the fibrous “brown” material heats the compost pile naturally to above 120 degrees to kill harmful bacteria, and according to Halpern, there are no unpleasant odors in the entire waste cycle.

“We have social conditions about sanitation, but we also have social conditions that water, oil and fuel are free,” Halpern said. “Well, it’s not; it’s being subsidized by cheap energy.”

The next step to reduce their electricity usage began with a mouse that inadvertently got into their refrigerator. Once Halpern and Keen unplugged the appliance to clean it out, they realized they didn’t really need it. In the winter they could store things in an unheated part of the house, and in the summer, they hardly needed storage because they were moving toward eating only fresh foods picked daily from their garden and produce from the Heartbeat Farm community supported agriculture program Andrew Maneiri runs out of Yellow Springs.

In addition to the refrigerator, the couple also replaced their bulbs with compact fluorescents and saved electricity with their new furnace. Their electric bill went from $1,600 a year in 2004-05 to $400 last year, according to Halpern’s readings.

After the low hanging fruit
Keen and Halpern feel they have exhausted the low-hanging fruit, but they still have plans to go deeper into conservation mode. They are working on devising a water catchment system to collect and use rain to water their garden. They would also like to install solar panels to heat their water, use a solar cooker to cook on their flat roof, and purchase a wood stove to be even less reliant on natural gas.

On their 1.5 acres, the couple grows all manner of summer vegetables to eat and to can for winter. Last summer they canned 20 jars each of tomatoes and zucchini, which lasted half the winter. Now they have a better idea of what they need to last them an entire season without supplementing their supplies from the grocery store. Their goal is to eventually rely only on their own garden, organic food from the CSA and bulk foods from the New Carlisle food cooperative they belong to.

“We’re interested in sustainability not just as an abstract or symbolic concept but as a goal to shape what we can do that would really make a difference,” Halpern said. “We can’t change the world, but we can change ourselves.”

Halpern and Keen have received a lot of help from local resources from the Community Solution and contacts at the Peak Oil conferences, as well as Internet sites on sustainable living. They don’t consider themselves particularly handy or good at engineering, Halpern said. But they were committed and they made measurable changes given the skills and resources they had.

“We’re not handymen,” he said. “If we can do this, then anybody can.”

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com