Title: ECO. Festival 2010 Tampa
Location: Downtown Tampa
Link out: Click here
Description: Live music. Local food. Street festival. Urban bike race.

ECO.festival 2010 is an afternoon full of fun, enlightenment and entertainment. The outdoor festival is highlighted by live music, food, wine tastings, green products, educational seminars and children’s activities.

The Urban Charrette and Mise en Place are proud to announce their partnership with 2nd Annual Tampa Twilight Criterium at this year’s Eco.lution festival. The Criterium or “Crit” is a fast paced, urban bike race through the streets of Downtown Tampa. Participants and spectators attending the Crit will have the opportunity to join Eco.lution and sample local food and drinks, listen to live music and learn about how to make Tampa a more sustainable city. For more information on Tampa’s Twilight Criterium visit the event website at www.tampacrit.com
Start Time: 11:00
Date: 2010-03-27
End Time: 21:00

When I started this blog, my intention was to provide information about various ways and products to improve the sustainability, energy efficiency and or healthiness of your home.  As an ASHI home inspector for the past 10 years, I have seen countless “improvements” or “upgrades…some with the best of intentions, and some, well let’s just say misdirected!  Sometimes the results are good but sometimes things go horribly bad.

As part of the economic stimulus plan, the federal government is offering tax credits for a wide range of energy-efficient products, from windows and doors to solar water heaters.  This can be a great program helping people to improve their homes.  However, these increases in efficiency if not planned with the “whole house” in mind, could lead to some serious “unintended consequences”.   As we start to increase the efficiency of homes, building science comes more and more into play as we must take into consideration what negative effects may be brought on.

One of the most common improvements is to upgrade or replace the heating and air conditioning system.  This used to be a relatively straight forward job. You just replaced the existing system with an equivalent system.  These days, with the very high efficiency systems and different options available like variable speed fans, there really needs to be new calculations done to determine exactly what size is needed.  If other energy improvements have been made to the house such as additional insulation or high efficiency windows and doors, it’s even more important.

For example: Say that the existing system in a home was installed in the mid “90’s and is perhaps a 3 ton system and the SEER (Seasonal Energy Efficiency Rating) rating might be 10.  Now with a little encouragement from the government and a desire to decrease energy bills, the home is upgraded to a new 14 or 15 SEER system with perhaps a variable speed fan.  If it is replaced with a similar sized 3 ton system, the home could develop humidity and mold related issues as it may be oversized.  When all these factors are not taken into consideration, you end up with at best a poorly performing system but at worst what a colleage calls “a science project” in your home.  Excessive humidity, mold, poor indoor air quality and increased rather than decreased energy consumption could result.

This is just one example dealing with heating and air conditioning, but there are often “unintended consequences” from any high efficiency upgrade.  Just remember that changing one system in the home often affects another. Does this mean that you should shy away from improvements for fear of related problems? Of course not, but keep in mind these things:

• Do your homework on the improvement you are planning.  Is it the best for your money?  Are there known downsides?
• Hire a reputable contractor who is knowledgeable about and willing to discuss the interactions of the systems in the home.
• Never accept the explanation “that’s the way we always do it”.   The times they are a changin!

It seems these days that the word “green” is being applied to everything.  Obviously the current belief is that to add “green” to your site/blog/product label/whatever, there will be instant success.  Although common sense tells me that this just isn’t going to happen, the upside is that more and more attention is being focused on the “green” issues such as sustainable building, renewable energy and environmentally friendly products.  This overload of information does have a tendency to turn some people off, but in the long run I believe it will make these ideas become mainstream much quicker.  Certainly, this information is not new and has been around for a long time, but they just never seemed to catch people’s attention.  Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” got a lot of people thinking on both sides of the issue, but I think the important thing is that people are thinking about it more and more.  

Next year, 10 years from now, perhaps the buzz word will be “brown” (especially if we continue down the same road we’re on) and we’ll all be tuning into the “Living Brown” series.  In the meantime, it just seems to be common sense to conserve and protect what we have.  Where is the logic in creating huge amounts of waste or pollution just because we can?  

Perhaps everything doesn’t have to be “green”, but for me and my family, if it helps to contribute even a little bit to increasing even one person’s awareness of current climate issues, then you can paint everything as “green” as you want!