Dr. Peter Tsou of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory once said, “you could take a two- or three-bedroom house, insulate it with aerogel, and you could heat the house with a candle. But eventually the house would become too hot.” So why haven’t we all been spraying our building’s with the stuff? Unfortunately, for the past 75 years the stuff’s been way too expensive, but that’s all about to change.
via Aerogel Becomes Affordable as a Home Insulator | Apartment Therapy Unplggd.
Forget global warming or environmentalism there are some simpler reasons to conserve energy in our houses, simply saving money. If you check out the video in the above post on Aerogels from Aspen Aerogels I think you’ll be impressed. Now I know not everyone gets excited about R values, but this stuff is crazy cool hopefully it continues to drop in price .
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I finished up Pillars of the Earth the other day and instead of starting in on another page turner (Pillars was just such a book, despite the topic of being about the building of a cathedral the book moves really fast and you get pretty taken into the back stabbing, the rivalries, and the crazy politics that existed circa 1100). Anyway I have a huge stack of books that are awaiting to be read and for some reason I have a lot of non-fiction in that stack (I think I should be reading more fiction, it moves quicker) but I’ve been meaning to get into 
One idea to help that might be a bit far off for some folks is a power off button for your house, where everything that can off is turned off (so your fridge, smoke detectors, clocks, etc. stay plugged in, but everything else is off, no more leaving your lights on upstairs as you hit one ‘on’ button on your way in – in Europe hotel rooms often have this requiring your room key to activate the lights).
Well the house in this story isn’t really energy free, its just that it gathers all the energy from the sun and earth without solar panels or other electronics. So how does it work? Well I can’t say I fully understand but after watching a video on it on youtube and reading about it, I’ll try… The house relies on having two sets of walls with the gap between the two serving as a space that is heated by the sun and rotates around the house allowing the house (which acts as a solar mass – retaining heat) to remain at a comfortable temperature year round without any carbon consumption, or any electricity of any kind. (Like your basement if you have noticed)
For the first time in a long time home sizes in America have stopped growing and some people long relegated to the suburbs are considering moving into smaller, inner suburb or city locations. Why the change? Well for one with family sizes shrinking, an aging population that is living longer and the traffic and commutes (as well as gas prices) get worse, living closer in is looking better. Add to that (maybe) a backlash at the 
Bottled water is and has been the rage here in the states and for companies, restaurants, ballparks and anyone out to make a buck, it is truly amazing, marking up essentially free water means high profit levels for everyone along the way. Bottled water in third world countries makes sense (although this too hopefully can change) where there is not clean water available, but here, in the US, a country with some of the cleanest, safest drinking water supply in the world? No matter, we still choose to bottle, ship and expend huge amounts of energy transporting around water, water that moves very efficiently through our underground pipes, but which we choose to duplicate on the road in trucks.
