Forward to the Past: Online Contest Participants Brave Cold to Conserve Heat
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Conservation is good. That’s why we provide helpful tips on how to insulate your home; how to maintain your heating system for maximum efficiency; energy audits and how they can help you save; even how roof color can reduce your carbon footprint and energy consumption.
However, there may be taking a good thing too far. As USA Today reported Tuesday, across the nation, many people are challenging themselves and others to see how long they can go without heat this winter. There’re going back to the pre-central heat past and living—at least temperature-wise—like our ancestors did. (Obviously, northern and western residents only need apply—no boasting about not needing heat in the winter, Floridians!)
Overall, the goal is two-fold: save money and help the environment by reducing fuel usage and carbon emissions. Of course, for any one person or family, one or the other goal may predominate. For example, Laura Nichol of Maplewood, New Jersey, who won a trophy last year for going without heat, is focused on saving money, which she certainly did—she received a $1,000 credit on her utility bill. On the other hand, Deanna Duke, creator of the environmentally focused blog Crunchy Chicken, gladly takes any monetary savings, but puts helping the environment first.
Similarly, how aggressively people try to “chill out” varies as well. For some, it’s enough to lower the thermostat—Duke sets it to 62 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, 55 degrees at night. Others, like Nichol, leave the furnace off entirely, relying on dachshund heat. (Apparently long, flexible, 30-lb dogs make great bedtime legwarmers.) And some go even further yet, like Daniel Filene of Maine, who bought a home that doesn’t even have a furnace—a wood-burning stove, electric blankets, and hot water bottles are all he uses for heat in Stephen King country. Generally speaking, even the most aggressively anti-heat contests allow the use of stoves, fireplaces, and space heaters—people may be going 19th Century, but they’re not going Paleolithic.
These contests are purely voluntary and are run on the honor system—no “heat police” enforce the rules. And since the people who choose to join them save money and help the environment, what’s to object?
Well, burning wood or pellets—if you’re using your fireplace or stove—may not actually be as good for the environment as popularly supposed. Studies show that pellet stoves release 50 times more particulate matter than oil furnaces. And pellet stoves are generally the cleanest of wood- or pellet-burning alternatives. Despite that, they also give off more carbon monoxide than oil furnaces, as well as large quantities of certain detrimental organic compounds.
In fact, oil furnaces are one of the cleanest types of combustion widely available. According to the EPA and DOE, oil furnaces, on average, give off only one-fourteenth the particulate pollution of other combustion sources, as well as one-fourth the nitrogen oxide and 2 percent of the carbon monoxide.
Similarly, electric space heaters are highly inefficient. It’s one thing to use them to “spot heat” part of a room, like the area near your lounge chair on the three-season porch, while reading a book on a crisp fall morning. But if you use them as a general alternative to central heating, you could increase your energy costs by 70 percent—and the electricity that powers them comes from burning coal for the most part in the United States, mitigating (if not eliminating) any carbon savings from not using combustion (heating oil or gas) to heat your home.
Whenever looking at saving the environment by your personal actions—the “think globally, act locally” strain of environmental activism—make sure you check out the all-in impact of your choice. What looks like a good bet at first may have hidden—or least not immediately obvious—costs. (British car show Top Gear made that point about the Prius once—sure, it uses less gas than a Mercedes, at least when not driven at top speed, but it’s manufacturing process and the materials that go into it do significantly more environmental damage than building a Mercedes.)
Beyond that, though, here’s where I absolutely draw the line on freezing for the environment—at the notion that we don’t need to use heat because (as one contestant said) a century and more ago, people got by without it. That’s true…and they also go by without antibiotics or dental care, and the average life expectancy was around 50-odd years. Speaking personally, I’ll take my central heat and modern medicine.
If you’re interested in trying the indoor Arctic lifestyle, it helps to have support and get tips. The Crunchy Chicken invites you to sign up and seems to have an active discussion going on about heat-optional life. Another website, the nonconsumeradvocate had run a challenge, but it seems to be over now that we’ve entered December.
