Are you, like us, sick of being awash in greenwashing ?  Greenwashing.  You know, those ads –earnest, heartfelt, evocative, replete with images of virgin forests and cerulean skies – that proclaim how environmentally caring and sensitive a company is. Like Exxon Mobil, for example. Or our friends at Dow Chemical. While mega corporations craft eco-images, everything from lipstick to linoleum, messenger bags to mayonnaise are being recast as “green” products. Oh yeah, SUVs too.

Yes, of course, some companies are doing good. EcoTimber, with its Forrest Stewardship Council-certified wood products. Burt’s Bees with its chemical-free, no-animal-testing hair products. Thousands of cottage-industry businesses started by people who walk the talk. In Eugene, Oregon, where we live, we are blessed to have a number of these enterprises, a half dozen of them within an easy stroll of ThinHouse.

Still, the green hype we’re all being subjected to is disturbing, overwhelming – and…funny? Check out this “news report” on the newest environmentally friendly fast-food products, courtesy of the brilliant folks at The Onion.
–Lauren

Last week I spoke to a group of forty or so older folks about the Thin House project. These were men and women mostly in their seventies and eighties, although there were a smattering of sixty-somethings and at least one bright-eyed nonagenarian.

I was wary.

I was using the website and the blogs to help tell the story of what we’re trying to do, and I feared the internet would be unexplored – and perhaps intimidating — territory for many in the audience. I was concerned that new concepts like carbon footprint or carbon offset might be confounding. I was worried that new products like CFLs and biodiesel might seem too exotic. Would they know what a “locavore” was? How would they react to advice like “turn down the thermostat”? After all, older people are far less tolerant of cold (and heat) than us younger ones. Would they see me as some tattooed granola-muncher (guilty on both counts) out to threaten their way of life? read the rest of this entry… »

Three years ago I read, laughed along with – and laughed at – a little book entitled The $64 Tomato, which chronicled a guy’s efforts to create a high-end vegetable garden and grow prized Brandywine tomatoes. He figured, after adding up the (exorbitant, mostly unnecessary…in my opinion) costs of putting in and maintaining the garden — $800 for “garden design,” a whopping $8500 for “initial construction,” $1200 for “steel edging” and so on – that each of the lovely heirloom tomatoes he eventually harvested cost him $64. Ha. Ha.

Which brings me to the $4.22 egg.

That’s how much each one of the first three dozen eggs will cost us once Loretta, Wennie, Gladys and Phoebe (assuming Phoebe doesn’t turn out to be rooster, which is what we currently suspect/ fear) start laying in the fall. read the rest of this entry… »

We wish we had these nice windows instead of our old leaky ones

One of the weirder — and more sobering — things we’ve seen at ThinHouse was an infrared image of our windows. They’re mostly old double-hung windows, some probably dating back to the time the house was built in the 1930s.

The infrared camera, wielded early in the spring by our local utility energy-rehab expert, Sarah, turned our charming old windows with their views of leafy streets into something terrible. When seen from the inside of the house, where you want your walls to be a sort of neutral yellow (in infrared terms, that means warm), our windows showed up as squares of icy blue. Blue is cold, as in: look at all the cold invading your warm house. We took the camera outside and readjusted to a point where the house walls showed cool blue (this is good; we want the heat to stay inside the house). Now the windows were patches of screaming orange. Heat was flowing out through the windows as if nothing were there.

Given that, it came as no great surprise to learn that windows can account for up to a quarter of a home’s heating bill, according to the US Dept. of Energy.  The web page we’ve linked to also offers a lot of good information on what to look for in new windows. We’re going to get ours replaced as soon as we can. – Tom

Damn. We were just patting ourselves on the back for booking a rail vacation in Canada this summer. We would untether ourselves from our car. We would stay off nasty greenhouse gas-spewing airplanes and out of nasty Big(carbon)Foot airports. We would stay close to home. We would travel by rail. (I love trains.) We would walk the streets of Jasper, hike the Rockies. We were, we admit, feeling just a shade greener.

That is, until we read a report in today’s Scientific American citing a new study in the journal Environmental Research Letters that compares the impact of different transportation modes by taking into account everything from the steel in train tracks to the tires on aircraft landing gear. In other words, the study factors in embodied energy costs.

The bad news: It turns out that trains don’t fare as well as we thought. read the rest of this entry… »

Check out this comment we received the other day:

“Really? You are saving the polar ice caps by owning two homes? Really? You are going to save the planet by owning not just two but now three different mowers? Really? You[r] heart might be in the right place but this just scream[s] bandwagon jumping, sensational and trendy. Heck even NBC beat you to being green.”

Regular readers know what we’re up to. We want to see if it’s possible to cut our energy use dramatically (by as much as 80 percent) by greenhabbing an old house in Eugene, Oregon. Until the remodeling is done, we’re living in our big house outside of town (which we’ve nicknamed “FatHouse”).

I am more struck by the tone of the comment than by the content. I read a lot of environmentally oriented blogs, and am amazed at how much time people spend arguing over who is greener than who, who is purer in their work, and who is read the rest of this entry… »

Getting pushy

Power tools! Like most American men, I am engaged in a love affair with almost anything that uses gas, roars, and cuts through stuff. Out at our FatHouse in the country, we have large open fields around the house, enough grass to justify (in my mind) not only a riding lawnmower but an additional gas-powered push model for trimming the stuff I can’t get while sitting down with a cold beer. Yes, my riding mower has a beer holder.

Okay, none of that will do at ThinHouse, where the yard is small, flat, and tamed. There is still a significant amount of lawn, however. The low-energy answer: a reel mower, the fully human-powered kind, where you push both to make the mower move ahead and to make a cylinder of twisted blades whirl around and cut the grass. I used one when I was about eight years old, a memory that becomes vivid as I push it, whirring, around the yard at ThinHouse. And you know what? It works great. Even without a beer holder.

Just after we got the reel mower, a story came out in the Wall Street Journal describing a whole raft of “alternative energy” (read: non-gas-powered) garden tools. Watch out, though: Much of the equipment the WSJ considers “alternative” is spendy, high-tech, and electric-powered. Electric tools are  quieter, of course, and emit less carbon dioxide while in use, but they’re not much of an improvement, if any, over gas-powered tools in terms of the energy required to produce and run them. Remember that electricity in the USA is produced primarily by coal-burning and nuclear-powered plants. Electric isn’t always better, folks.  The best option, if you can do it, is hand tools.

“Hello. My name is Phoebe, and I am one of four new inhabitants at ThinHouse. I am three weeks old, and even if – like Tom – you think chickens are “filthy, smelly, lice–ridden and stupid” (yes, I heard him, and yes it hurt), you will absolutely think I’m cute. I am a wheaten Ameraucanas, a docile, blue-egg-laying chicken with a “fun” personality. Right now, me and my three feathered compatriots, my sweet-tempered red-brown Ameraucanas cousin (Loretta), a bossy Silverlace Wyandotte (“…a tendency toward domination” is how this breed is defined. Tendency my crested comb!) and my shy Black Austrolorp friend Gladys are living in a big wooden box in the living room at ThinHouse. I know that might not sound great to you – the wooden box thing — but it is very roomy, thickly carpeted with soft wood shavings and heated to a toasty 85 degrees. Lots of food (organic!). Lots of water. And several times a day people – not Tom – come to play with us. read the rest of this entry… »

I want to go back to Italy. I want to lie on the beach at Corfu, visit the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, walk the streets of the Bairro Alto in Portugal. I want to hike mountain trails in Costa Rica. I want to travel.

But back a few months ago, when we began doing an energy audit of our lives as part of the thinhouse project, I calculated the energy cost of the traveling I had done in 2008 and came up with the astounding figure of 2,392 watts. Faithful readers of this blog know we have our sights set on reducing our energy use to 2000 watts TOTAL per person per year.

Does living a thinhouse lifestyle mean I can no longer travel? I’ve been thinking about this, anguishing over this, since late fall when I did the calculation. read the rest of this entry… »

We’ve revamped our “Quick Tips” page to emphasize fast, easy, and ultra-cheap ways to save energy without buying any new gadgets, apart from a caulk gun and a washline. As a businessman in Portland used to say in his ads, “Free is a very good price.” Most of our ideas are free.

We’re always amazed at how many ways companies can devise to separate green-hearted people from their money. Mostly it takes the form of new gadgets, from electric vehicles to home energy monitors to hybrid lightbulbs.  OK, that last one’s a joke, but you get the point. You don’t need to spend a dime to make a big dent in your energy use.

Our list is a work in progress. If you have more ideas for easy, effective, and preferably free ways for homeowners to save energy (remember, we’re talking energy on this site, not carbon)  please drop us a line and let us know.  Thanks.  – Tom