We’ve been thinking a lot about sustainable living over the last few years. It’s always been something that Tammy and I have been conscious of as far back as when we first met in Berkeley over a decade ago.

Of course, we take part in the obvious things — recycle and compost what you can, reduce the use of single-use materials, use public transportation when possible — and we will continue to think about living more sustainably by reducing overall consumption. But living through 2020 has forced us to scrutinize our personal consumption a lot more, both from a consumer goods standpoint and also from a public utility standpoint.

Don’t Waste Conditioned Air

It’s easy to lose sight of the material cost of public utilities. If it weren’t for the monthly bill, we’d think about it even less.

As homeowners that live in the Bay Area, we’re fortunate to live in temperate climates year-round, but even for us, more radical temperature swings have caused us to use our heating and cooling a lot more.

The thing is, although our cities are committing towards using more renewable energy, we’re still hooked on dinosaur oil until we can bring our total consumption down as a whole.

Here’s where updating our old homes becomes a big variable in our equation to becoming more sustainable. Because most of the Bay Area housing stock is “under-renovated”, the homes we live in are based on old building code and are therefore poorly insulated and not thoroughly enclosed. Leaky building envelopes lead to inefficient use of heating and cooling in our homes because we lose a small percentage of the conditioned air to the outside. These air leaks add up just like water leaks and they hurt us in our monthly utility bills. These increases on our bill reflect a larger issue with our homes that translate into an increased overall utility consumption for our regions.

The easy way to improve our sustainability is to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels by installing renewable sources of heating and cooling the home — solar is the cheapest and most accessible. The hard way is to encourage homeowners to spend the time and money to update their homes just like we update everything else — our cars, our phones, our clothes. Just like appliance upgrade programs in cities around California, there should be a greater financial incentive for cities to encourage homeowners to improve the efficiency of local housing stock.

Building beautifully remodeled homes is not enough. Coupled with renewable heating & cooling like solar or geothermal, we’ll be able to improve the sustainability of entire cities and run more efficiently on our renewable energies. Changing the efficiency of our homes is an extremely important variable in getting our cities to run on only sustainable energies in a shorter timeline than 2045.