Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

When all roads lead to Hell

The road to Hell - assuming it still exists - is paved with good intentions. So, apparently, is the road to utopia, assuming your utopia is a greener-than-green, carbon-neutral, zero-waste community.
67696_l

The road to Hell - assuming it still exists - is paved with good intentions. So, apparently, is the road to utopia, assuming your utopia is a greener-than-green, carbon-neutral, zero-waste community.

Unfortunately, the road to reality is often a different sort of path altogether.

In a form-over-substance announcement last week, we were trumpeted with the good news that 36 B.C. communities, including our very own, had signed on to a new building regulation designed to bathe us all in solar-heated water. Assuming the regulation goes forward, all new single-family homes in the 36 communities will have to be "solar hot water ready." What that means is they have to be plumbed to facilitate the installation of solar panels on the roof that heat water whenever the sun shines.

Fortunately, it doesn't mean people have to put the panels and other expensive mechanical infrastructure in their houses. You'd have to be a fool to do that in Tiny Town.

Lest you think I'm, once again, simply ranting off the top of my head, I'm not. For I am such a fool.

There is, on the roof of my Rainbow duplex, a solar hot water panel. There are any number of ways to describe its usefulness but none come as close to the mark as that old standby: like teats on a bull.

It was apparently pitched as a part of a green package for the WHA duplex - disclosure: I wasn't involved with the original purchase - that included, among other things, much more efficient windows. I believe it was strongly hinted the "payback" on the system would be in the neighbourhood of 20 years. The immediate payback, of course, would be basking in the self-righteous glow of being part of the solution, doing the right thing, being ever so more greenish.

After living with the cutting-edge technology now for 15 months, I can safely say the real payback is some number of years beyond infinity. This turkey will not only never pay for itself, we'll likely wear it with the same feeling of pride the Ancient Mariner felt for his albatross.

Let me give you an idea of how my solar hot water system (SHWS) works. A panel on the roof gathers heat gain from our friend, the Sun, and heats liquid flowing through a maze of pipes inside the panel. The hot liquid flows from the roof through a hot water tank in the mechanical room and heats the water inside; the hot water tank looks like, well, every other water heater you've ever seen. The mechanical room is larger than it would be otherwise because it has to accommodate the system's increased infrastructure.

The solar-heated hot water does not flow to the shower. This is a good thing because if it did, I'd be mostly taking cold showers. It flows into another hot water tank sitting right beside it. While they look the same, the other hot water tank heats water the old-fashioned way - by running electricity through heating coils - just like at your non-solar home.

The efficiency in this system is supposed to come about as a result of the solar preheated water flowing into the old-fashioned hot water heater at a higher temperature than the supply water entering my house, which, in Whistler, is often about as cold as water can be without changing states.

In the summer, this summer notwithstanding, everything works wonderfully. The panel heats the water and pretty hot water flows into the tank, easing the quantum of electricity needed to heat the water in the old-fashioned hot water heater.

There's just one problem. The amount of hot water I use in our short summers isn't very great or particularly significant in the overall, energy consumption scheme of things.

Perhaps recognizing this minor drawback, a room-heating system was installed in the house to increase the use of hot water. It's kind of a throwback, in a modern sort of way if that makes any sense... which it doesn't but bear with me.

Things that look like stubby baseboard heaters live in each room. They're "controlled" by individual thermostats. But they're not baseboard heaters, they're hot water radiators. Hot water - from the old-fashioned tank, not the solar tank, remember - flows throughout the house to the heaters. The hot water warms radiator-like fins which give off the heat to the room. They're assisted by little fans that help blow the heated air into the room. They do an okay job of heating the house during the winter.

Bet you can see what's coming next. The Hell this road of good intentions leads to is this: There ain't no friggin' solar-heated water in the winter! Okay, that's a bit of an overstatement. There is, occasionally, some small amount of solar-heated assist during the winter. On really sunny days, for a couple of hours, the panel can raise the water in its tank to, maybe, 40°C. That assumes it isn't buried under two feet of snow, which it was most of last winter. It wasn't supposed to be buried under two feet of snow but its installation was another neighbourhood of Hell at a cul-de-sac off the road paved with good intentions.

The net result of all this green technology was a total saving of $38.75 in Hydro over the last year. I was not forced to whip out my HP12C calculator to perform a complex net present value analysis to know this was an investment that will never pay back its initial capital cost. Especially in light of the sobering discovery, this energy-efficient, greener house actually used 32 per cent more hydro than the similarly-sized, electric baseboard-heated, older townhome it replaced. Caramba!

I suspect the increased consumption may have something to do with the way the system is plumbed. If I want to heat the room furthest from the mechanical room, an unused bedroom that was supposed to be the master bedroom but happens to be the coldest room in the house, hot water flows to every other radiator whether I want them heated or not. I'm not sure which part of Hell that is but I'm pretty much using that bedroom to hang meat in now.

Obviously, this system would work like gangbusters in, say, Phoenix. And why those short-sighted, eco-rapers don't have this kind of building code I'll never know. But in Whistler?

And so, I'm adding a plank to the Campagne de Fous. When I'm mayor, if we're going to Hell - and there's no certainty we aren't - we'll at least take the direct route, not the road paved with expensive good intentions. We'll get there choking on our own CO2, not impoverished as a result of purchasing carbon credits to make ourselves feel good about being something, carbon neutral, we're not. And if you want solar hot water, go for it. But I won't be insisting you join me in my own folly.