My sister is in the process of building a house in Ohio, and I’ve been having conversations with her about how to make it green. She and my brother-in-law both consider me to be eco-crazed (arguably rightly so given the climactic and political stakes) and so tend to raise eyebrows when I make one of my many helpful suggestions.
For example, I suggested they install a central heat pump instead of inefficient electric resistance heating, but only after consulting their HVAC guy, who is a fan of heat pumps, did they decide to install one (Woo-hoo! They’ll save thousands of dollars and pounds of CO2 with that choice). They are also making their home solar-ready and plan to install panels in the next couple of years — this is mostly because solar offers a sense of self-reliance that is perennially popular across political and geographic boundaries.
However, when I tried to talk them into installing a heat pump water heater, I ran into serious resistance. If you haven’t heard about heat pump water heaters, they are an enormously powerful energy/CO2 reduction technology lying hidden in plain sight in the most humble of appliances — the water heater.
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