Living Green In Your Home

Heating In Japan

A heating element which burns its fuel at source is most efficient. Electrical heating is very inefficient. Electrical heat comes from (usually) burning some fossil fuel at a distant location, heating something up to make mechanical energy, using the mechanical energy to make electricity and then pumping the electricity over long distances to our homes. Then if we turn around and put the electricity back into heating form it is all very redundant and wasteful. I forget where I read this, but it makes sense for me from the limited stuff I learned in two years of physics at school.

So, I decided the best thing was to look for a kerosene or gas heater. Overall, I am told the gas heaters are most efficient and stink the least. However, my apartment wasn't plumbed with enough tubing for me to get one. If your apartment is make sure to check if you have LP gas or city gas; each heater is designed to run on a specific kind.

But the gas ones are clean burning so while you don't smell them they are still deadly. I guess every hour you should change the air. Every year people die from burning the gas heaters after falling asleep. Yick.

But don't dispair, there's another idea. You can whack out hachi man and get a kerosene heater with a vent. A guy can come to your apartment and drill a hole in the wall. It took five minutes because my apartment is basically made out of compressed cardboard from what I could see. There was barely any insulation at all in the walls. Ughh.

Anyways. Now we can burn our kerosene heater and it hardly stinks at all. If we run it for less than 3 or 4 hours we don't even change the air. So its effecient in the sense it burns the fuel on site and it vents the fumes outside. But it cost us a fair amount of money. And I skipped asking my city hall for permission to put a hole in the wall. (I think they would have said no and told me to run the air-con, which I know is old and runs off of electricity.)

Of course this stuff is all just temporary until we all get to build our solar homes which heat off of the sun's rays. I've seen some really cool ideas lately about using solar energy to heat up water and then run it through concrete flooring with tiles on top to create homes heated from the floor up. Then in the summer time you run water through tubes drilled up to 30 meters deep in the earth (about 15 degrees) and pump it through the floors using a pump hooked up to a PV source for cooling. Pretty clever, no?