Zero Is The New Black

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This February, we finally moved into our new home in the countryside. We bought the property over a year ago, and loved it at first sight. But quite a bit of modernizing had to be done to ye’ olde homestead, the place having been built in 1925 with minimal updating done over the years. For instance:

• We replaced many of our borderline antique single pane windows with low-e double pane ones.
• Added insulation to much of the house, where none was before. Considering we live in a part of the Midwest where it will hit 103+° in the summer and -20+° in the winter at least once almost every year, we were a little surprised to find no insulation when we opened up a few walls. (As an aside, apparently the house is built very well, because even the portion of the house that isn’t insulated hasn’t been particularly cold when the last bit of winter moved through.)
• Removed the scary fill-half-a-room coal-burning… then corn cob-burning… then, in the end, fuel oil furnace. We replaced it with a modern high-efficiency heat pump system. We were tempted to go with a geothermal system, but unfortunately, space in the budget for it just wasn’t to be found.

Needless to say, we substantially increased the energy efficiency of our little home, which we certainly will appreciate when the utility bills roll in.

But it leaves part of me pondering how much energy was used bringing us that efficiency. i.e. How much energy was spent - and waste created - assembling the components of that shiny new heat pump system?

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