Charming, quaint, and ornate are all adjectives one could bestow upon our residence in Santa Fe, but modernity is one quality it lacks. The house still features a refrigerator and dryer-washer combo from the late 80’s or early 90’s, old windows, and an insulation-scheme that serves it poorly in this elevated desert climate. There are two-pronged outlets aplenty, but finding a three-pronged outlet for high-power devices (XBOX, Andrew’s space heater of a laptop) requires an Easter-egg hunt.
Heat runs through the house like water through a sieve. Both exterior doors feature gaps through which sunlight can be seen and none of the windows shut with solidarity. We have a cute fireplace, but when it’s not containing a fire, it scavenges heat through convection. Like all the local buildings, our historically aesthetic abode is constructed entirely of adobe, which has low thermal resistivity. Adobe is slightly redeemed by its high specific heat capacity during the summer months (ECE’s, think capacitance), but sleeping next to a wall in the sub-freezing temperatures we’ve experienced here is like sleeping with half of your back resting over a pit of punji sticks.
The whole house is heated by a natural gas furnace, which is hard to criticize (for convention's sake), but one of the purposes of our project is to explore renewable alternatives. Would a pellet furnace be convenient enough? What about solar panels? Might as well do something with that antiquated roof.
The water heater is worthy of complaint, for it truly embodies a mentality of compromise. It performs adequately when one person is showering, but falters when both showers are being used. So, it compromises. Instead of relaxation, what the showers provide is merely lukewarm disappointment to two people with cold reminders to hurry up thrown in.
Of course, all the physical constraints to energy efficiency can be improved upon. The question is, “To whom would it be worthwhile to perform the necessary actions?”
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