Sustainable Spaces: Helping Homes Get Greener
Among clean tech solutions, we often hear about wind, solar, geothermal, and then “energy efficiency.” This one large category rarely gets the specific treatment–other than a mention of compact fluorescent lightbulbs–that the other segments of the market do. But one company we found, Sustainable Spaces, has taken on residential energy efficiency head on and can offer a quick analysis of your home and sell you services to make it greener.
The company seems to be striking a cord, and they are in the process of scaling up. Since Matt Golden, the CEO of Sustainable Spaces founded the company in 2004, they’ve grown to several dozen employees, and took seed capital from angel investors Blueshift Partners earlier this year. They’re already a profitable company and now they are looking for several million dollars of venture capital to build out their labor-intensive business.
They’ve also found some surprising results. For one, those fancy Energy Star windows? They’re not worth much without a properly insulated house with an efficient heating and cooling system.
It’s not often that you hear someone advocate the low tech cleantech solution that simply a better HVAC systems can offer a solution for climate change, but that’s exactly what Golden does. In fact, the way Golden figures it, with houses responsible for about a quarter of US emissions, leaky heating and cooling ducts account for a staggering 2-3% of electricity used in the US.
That’s because the HVAC system, which he calls the heart and lungs of a home, is responsible for a lot of a building’s energy usage. Any problems in it are directly reflected in the overall efficiency of the house. In that way, a home’s HVAC system is like a micro transmission grid. All in all, Golden says his company can reduce an existing home’s energy expenditure by 10-50 percent. (Imagine if we could retrofit cars to generate those kinds of energy reductions?)
The problem is that fixing a home’s HVAC system can still cost thousands of dollars, and even if the payback is measured in months, not years, many homeowners don’t have that kind of excess cash sitting around. To fix that, Golden would like to see solar-style incentives for gains in energy efficiency. (We would too!)
Even without government help, fixing all those leaky ducts is going to take a lot of “green collar” workers.
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This is where I’d be working if I hadn’t decided to retire and become a full-time crank. The last decade before retiring was mostly involved with home construction.
Two quick comments: not only Energy Star; but, even Low-E glass is a problem if you’re designing and building in passive solar gain. A contradiction in goals. And there is nothing more energy-wasteful than traditional right-angle plumbing runs – the sort utilized in 99% of all residential and commercial building.
The Rocky Mountain Institute calculates that ~30% energy savings could be realized just by stubbing out your plumbing in home runs. Further savings are realized – depending on climate and geography – when you sort use vs. flow rates to realize the final size of air and liquid handling runs.
All very easy stuff. Almost never considered by civil engineers or architects. Maybe that’s changing. It’s overdue.
Let me know if you are interested in looking at AspenAirInside.com for Whole house High-efficiency Air cleaning with low energy consumption, and without harmful ozone production.
Exactly the kind of businesses we should be paying more attention to!
I am a big fan of retro-fitting for all infrastructures, both residential and commercial. In most cases, much cheaper that tearing down the old and building new. And so much more environmentally sound.
More work needs to be done on financing end however.
http://lamarguerite.wordpress.com
I had Sustainable Spaces out to my house and was very impressed by the people and the approach. We are going to have them help us do a major upgrade to improve energy use, and my wifes allergies.
Per lamarguerite, you can retrofit onto the hvac a whole home air cleaning system in 40 minutes or less.