EXCEPT:

-They are not designed to and Cannot deliver a significant amount of heat to the building.

-They are not designed to be used as a major heat source

-They Must be used only in a well vented (read leaky or with an open window) space

-They Will produce and deliver large amounts of carbon dioxide to the enclosed space

-They Will produce and deliver large amounts of moisture to the air

-If not running perfectly, they will produce significant amounts of Carbon Monoxide

-They Will deplete the oxygen in the space

-They cannot be used with closed glass doors

-They should Never be left running without someone in the room

-They are forbidden in bedrooms and bathrooms in many places

-They are forbidden outright in California, Massachusetts, and Canada, along with many other countries

 “So other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”

After you get through the ad and are excited about getting one of these, you start reading the actual documents. The first thing you will see is “Strongly recommend that it be installed by a professional”, The second thing you will note is the 2-4 pages where it notes that for health and safety reasons you must either have a very leaky building, or bring in (vent) outside air. It’s a little tough to heat your living room when there is a window open.

When running properly, the unit will provide significant amounts of carbon dioxide. At high levels, CO2 affects your breathing and level of consciousness. When running properly, it will produce significant amounts of moisture. Your house may be dry in the winter, but dumping large amounts in one room will not help the cracked hardwood floors on the other side of the house. It will produce high humidity in that room, and if your walls and windows are not well insulated, you can get condensation and mold.

As noted, several states within the United States, as well as other countries, have completely outlawed ventless gas fireplaces because of health concerns. Canada, Massachusetts, and California ban these systems because of their potential to build up carbon monoxide, deplete oxygen, and lead to unconsciousness or even suffocation. Check with your local building code before purchasing one of these appliances.

Manufacturers are required to warn you that gas leaks or inefficient burners can cause a fire in your home. The warning about glass doors is that they are not designed to take the concentrated heat from a ventless unit, and could explode. Because the units have to be open to the room, you must be concerned about anything that comes close to the fireplace (children?) Clothing and other materials can ignite.

Vent-free fireplaces tend to deplete the oxygen supply within a room. Most new models are required by local code to have oxygen sensors. But these can be deficient or fail after time. These units are also not designed to run for more than a few hours at a time. Most user guides will warn about this.

So – don’t use them to heat your house, don’t use them for more than a few hours, don’t use them without an open window,   don’t –  Buy Them.

Please “like” Butterfly on Facebook here.  Germany continues to lead the world in renewable installation and production. It was already on a course to be largely self-sustaining before the nuclear disaster in Japan last year. The previous administration was a coalition of the Social Democrat Party and the Green Party, which committed to moving away from all nuclear power production over several decades. The government put in place the most generous FIT (feed in tariff) in the world at the time. It did not have any demands or new taxes on current power production – mostly coal and nuclear.

What it did do was let the free market run free with production incentives for renewable power. How you got that production and whether you participated was up to you. What happened over just a few years was an economic and environmental miracle. The German solar industry became one of the largest in the world overnight, going from tiny to a multibillion dollar industry in a few short years. And 380,000 new good quality jobs appeared. Renewable power production soared from under 6% of the overall power production to over 20%. With a good mix of solar PV (photovoltaic) and wind power from the North Sea, Germany’s total carbon dioxide production actually dropped last year, the only major country where that has happened.

The result of all this is that the new renewable energy can produce more power at peak than the country needs, and that energy has been sold to other countries. On a single sunny day this May, the total German PV production delivered 22 gigawatts, equal to the output of 20 nuclear plants at full power. It was so much that it provided half of all electrical needs for the entire country.

The FIT has been so successful that the government recently rolled back the tariff on new production. That has not slowed the growth. Wind production grew at 30% last year. PV energy production jumped by 60% in the same period. One farmer was interviewed last year. He noted that he had made more money growing PV power than he did on the rest of his large farm. He noted that he planned to plant more solar arrays this year.

This revolution has created a new set of challenges. First among them is that the current electrical grid, which was built around large base power production, has to be redesigned and rebuilt to function properly with potentially millions of small power production systems, including rooftop units owned by homeowners and wind turbines along the North Sea and in the mountains.

Secondly, they are already faced with the issue that the US is just getting around to thinking about: most renewable energy sources are variable. Tying wind and solar together helps, because most high wind is at night when the solar panels are not producing, but the early morning and early evening present problems, since production from both sources is at a nadir. Power storage is the key, and much work is being done to find solutions.

Finally, in order to span the planned shutdown of all nuclear plants and the future where 100% of all power is delivered by renewable, there may have to be a Faustian bargain with the classic power utilities. As nuclear plants are taken offline, the short term load shifts to the existing coal plants, causing a rise in CO2 and air pollution, which is already a significant problem in Germany and the EU. A solution may be to add some subsidies to the utilities to rebuild their coal plants to take natural gas. This is not what the government wants to do, but the choice is to decommission the nuclear plants more slowly than the government wants or rely more on fossil fuels than it wants to.

These are issues that the US does not yet face, but will in the future. If the US government does not move more rapidly to encourage the shift to renewable here, we will be dependent on the  Germans for the solutions that the U.S. could be demonstrating to the world.

a new partnership between the DOE Challenge Home program and the Passive House Institute US to cooperate on the promotion of various levels of high-performance buildings on the path to zero net-energy.

This news is a huge development for the passive house community and for PHIUS. The endorsement of PHIUS+ passive house certification through the DOE instantly makes passive house the most energy efficient option for builders, designers and developers who want to achieve a zero energy building. This recognition will go a long way toward making passive house mainstream.

The partnership will not substantially change the PHIUS+ process but projects that receive PHIUS+ certification will get both the Challenge Home and Energy Star labels.
The most noteworthy change for Passive House will be the inexpensive requirement to install provisions for a future renewable system. Solar readiness must be built in so that getting to zero with a small affordable renewable system down the road is possible without any hassle, the right thing to do to show that we are walking the talk!
Beginning with all newly signed contracts starting September 1, 2012, PHIUS will provide a one stop-shopping option: Getting certified under PHIUS+ simultaneously gets the Challenge Home label and the Energy Star label, all which enhance market recognition and incentive opportunities.

The St. Louis County SAVES™ program restarted in January with mandatory certified audits and quality control procedures in place. At that time, Butterfly Energy Works chose to join the program, providing our high quality audits for homeowners and contractors.

St. Louis County SAVES™ is a financing program for homeowners in St. Louis County – designed specifically for energy efficiency measures. Qualifying homeowners can borrow up to $15,000 at very low rates, averaging around 3.5%, for improvements that address the energy efficiency of your house. Homeowners interested in implementing sustainable energy practice projects through this program, please contact us. We are certified and approved, and would be happy to get you started.

Butterfly Energy Works 314-961-8418

Two Oak Knoll Park

Second Floor Gallery
Clayton, MO 63105
Gallery: 314-727-6266
Susan at Butterfly: 314-961-8418

When: Tuesday August 16th, 6:30 to 9pm

Join us this month to meet the faces behind local green blogs including:

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg who blogs about everything at blog.sustainablog.org, one of the longest-running green blogs on the web.

Mary DeWeese who blogs at sprawlstainable.com about her own suburban adventure to reduce energy consumption by 50% in two years and to grow some of her own food.

Kate Frowzy who blogs about household toxics and the challenges of green housekeeping as a mom of 7 young children living in the city for Better Life, the local green cleaning products company, cleanhappens.com/blog.

Melissa Richert Brown is a brand new mom and blogs about bike commuting, health and wellness, and her family’s attempts at living a green life at hergreenlife.wordpress.com

Suggested donation $3

But a Brazilian researcher, who also happens to be a banana lover, has taken an interest in the lowly banana peel and is helping to remake its image. The banana peel, it turns out, can take water dirtied by heavy metals from mining operations or other activities and turn it to clean drinking water.

Magic? No, actually, it’s chemistry. Gustavo Castro is an environmental chemist at São Paulo State University who says he’d heard for a long time that the peel of the banana was the best part of the fruit, where most of the nutrients and proteins reside. So he decided to investigate its chemical composition to see if these banana peel boosters were right, he told the American Chemical Society in a podcast.

What he found was that banana peels contain nitrogen, sulfur and organic compounds such as carboxylic acids. Castro was especially pleased to find these acids because they can bind with positively charged metals that leach into rivers from industrial operations.

To test the peels, Castro and his colleagues chopped up and dried a bunch of them and mixed them with water from Brazil’s Paraná River, which was polluted with copper and lead. The peels performed as well or better than many typical filtering materials, like silica or carbon. What’s more, the peels are a cheap waste material. Castro found they could be used up to 11 times before they stopped working as purifiers.

The findings were published earlier this year in the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, a publication of the American Chemical Society.

Of course, with any brave new idea there’s always a word of caution. The banana peel can’t get rid of bacteria in water, so don’t strap one around your faucet just yet.