Green Part 3: Insulation & Gray Water

It will take a while to make the house as green as we'd really like. A couple of items still on our green to-do list are:

Gray Water: We will be taking our shower and laundry waste water and routing it though a filter system (we plan to use an Aqua 2 Use unit - using Solution B shown above), and then distributing the water to a few different zones in our yard on a daily rotation using a dirty water drip irrigation kit. This is a system we set up before, at Vanessa's mom's house, and it worked well. One lesson learned: the low-flow faucet head on the bathroom sink didn't dilute our toothpaste and soap enough to make the bathroom sink a good source of water for the garden.

UPDATE: We have installed the Aqua 2 Use system, but only have the laundry going into it at this time because we don't need a permit for that. Also, we have not yet setup any separate zones and probably won't since we are learning that the Aqua 2 use system can move the water out to the garden very efficiently.

House sealing and insulation: We have put a lot of effort into sealing up the interior of the house as much as possible in an old house. Simple things make a difference, such as sealing any holes you can see from the crawl space up into the wall cavities, caulking around the floor boards, door, and window trims, and also sealing any holes from the attic down into the house space (overhead lights) and walls. We have back-draft dampers on our bathroom fan and range vent hood. The windows in the house were unfortunately changed out to vinyl double pane windows at various stages over the last 5-10 years before we bought the house. The good news is that they seal quite well and provide decent insulation. The bad news is that they are vinyl! We would like to replace them at some point, but the embedded energy cost of the windows is pretty high, so getting a full lifetime out of them is probably the most energy efficient course to take. As an intermediate effort to increase the overall heating efficiency of the house, we will be covering the crawl space to create a sealed and insulated space (this process is often called encapsulation). This will help to minimize heat loss into the crawl space and also minimize dust being pulled up into the house through the floor. As a long term insulation effort, we may eventually choose to carefully pull off the outer siding of the house to install insulation and a weather barrier behind the siding, and then put the siding back on.

UPDATE: We have finally replaced the remnants of the knob and tube wiring powering the front exterior lights, which was not pulled out when we did the kitchen and bathroom remodeling (for reasons that probably made sense at the time, but was annoying to have to go back and finish it). We will now feel better about increasing our attic insulation from 4" (R-15) to the code required ~13" (R-38), knowing that all knob-and-tube wiring exists in the attic.

UPDATE on the UPDATE: After some research, we learned that what was most important in our attic insulation was that it was completely uniform throughout the attic. So, we have not yet (2025) added more insulation to the attic, but we did take a garden rake into the attic and make sure the insulation was completely uniform. In Green Part 8: The Smartest HVAC on Earth, I will show some data that suggests that we do remarkably well for heating efficiency in our home and explain why. See also Green Part 4: Goodbye Gas Water Heater (and Gas Meter!!), Hello Closet and Green Part 5: Reroofing in an environmentally friendly way...