Gainesville Mayor, Pegeen Hanrahan, announced Gainesville-Green.com during a session at the 2008 Serve to Preserve Florida Summit on Global Climate Change. The video of that session may be downloaded from the conference website.
The Palm Beach Post also ran a story on the conference and Mayor Hanrahan’s remarks.
First, let me offer a word of appreciation and encouragement for what you are doing with this project. Your candor about layering data and the disclosure that this is a beta is encouraging.
But there is a problem, I think, and it may just be semantics. If it is, it ought to be easy for you to figure out a solution. Here goes:
It appears to me that your “efficiency” ratings are based on “consumption” and don’t actually measure the efficiency of the home in using the kwh delivered. All they do is compare consumption patterns. That’s not a bad thing (in fact, it is very important), but it should not be called an efficiency rating. We have worked hard and spent a lot of money upgrading our home so that our electricity consumption is reduced.
We spent more than $7,000 in July 2001 replacing our 12-year-old heating and AC system with a Trane 18 Seer (XL1800) and additional crawlspace insulation. We followed up in October of 2001 by replacing all the windows in our home with double-glazed windows and new doors/seals, etc. This cost more than $8,000.
The impact was immediate and can be seen on your data: our annual kwh dropped by half from the period 4/2000-3/2001 to the period 4/2001-3/2002 (it dropped from 40267 kwh or an average of 3355 kwh per month to 21058 kwh or an average of 1754 kwh per month).
We have continued to make progress. The replacement of window coverings with plantation shutters and the replacement of old kitchen appliances have reduced our monthly average for the last 12 months of your data to 1534 kwh. From 2001 to 2007, then, our average monthly consumption dropped 54.3%, yet your subdivision chart shows my home as “very inefficient.” That’s not right and that’s not fair. And it might discourage some people from doing anything (not me, because my GRU bill is about half of what it used to be!).
I would submit that while our consumption might be higher than some homes in our neighborhood (we have a pool — not heated), few could match our record of reducing energy consumption by 54.3% in the last seven years. I might add that we were ahead of the curve and thus, got no government subsidies for doing what we felt was the right thing to do (plus we knew that utilities such as GRU will have to continually raise the cost of power and we wanted to blunt the impact early in our retirement).
On another but related subject, I would be a big fan of instant-read home consumption meters, like those being used in Canada and some places in the U.S. (I believe Duke Energy is beta-testing them). You know, a digital readout, so that when you turn on the overhead fan, you see the kwh kick up. I floated this idea to a GRU employee downtown last year, but he told me they thought it would cost too much. Heck, I would pay for it myself. I might see how much that pool pump costs me to run and just plant a garden in the hole!
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
RO
Rob,
Thanks for the great feedback. There are definitely some semantic issues here. We are trying to rank homes based on how much carbon they produce per square foot, and “efficiency” likely isn’t the best word for that. The more technical term is “energy intensity”, but that’s a bit inaccessible for the layman.
Looking around what I think is your neighborhood (Magnolia Estates), it looks like the raw consumption numbers do put you over many of your neighbors, but there are some caveats.
1) Many of the other homes are much newer, which makes a huge difference. Ceiling insulation hasn’t impacted as much, leaks have had less time to form, better construction materials, etc.
2) Many of the other homes are much smaller, which also has a dramatic effect. Less space to cool and smaller air conditioners can save a tremendous amount of energy.
3) Several of those homes look like vacation or rental properties, having months of zero usage skewing their average.
Looking at the numbers, there also might be some miscalculation. When GRU over bills, it issues corrections later, and it those might be causing problems. The cleanest home has one month with -606 KWh, and that could be skewing their monthly average. We’ve got some more GRU data imports in progress, and when we pull that in we’ll re-examine the math to make sure we’re comparing things right.
One idea we floated around was to use a floating average in the rankings so improvements like yours could be rewarded more, and temporary vacancies wouldn’t be so influential.
Another idea was to add another ranking for “most improved” that would be targeted at homes like yours. It’s highly unlikely you’re ever going to get your consumption beneath the 1000 sq ft. house down the block, but your improvements are impressive and should be on a high-score list somewhere.
The instant-read meters would be tremendous from a data perspective, but I understand that the investment needed would be pretty drastic. Besides the cost of installation, there may be some re-training for the meter-readers, and teaching them to deal with many several types of meter could be a lot of overhead. Perhaps a contractor could hook one up for your home?
Thanks again for the feedback (I’ve added several items to the to-do list), and for making so many great improvements to your home!