At the main house which is a condo in a hoity-toity neighborhood that they decided in the their wisdom to paint dark brown so the inside is oh, 150 degrees in the summer with the A/C cranking and being especially wise, there is one, count them one window facing south, sadly the answer is a qualified "no" other than using all CF, a super smart thermostat that people drool over and as many energy wise appliances as we can afford.
One thing tho. Recently the hot water heater took a crapper. I asked about tankless; requires a larger gas line into the house, our supply line is too small for one so they'd have to dig from the street and replace the meter also (honest to God, that's what we got from the gas company and the installer). So we opted for a White energy efficient model with lights flashing on the control panel that has some kind of computer control in it (probably a 16 bit) that senses the times we use the most hot water and readies the tank for us and turns itself down during the day.
Well, we got the first DTE bill. $40.00 less, -52% less gas usage from last year, -21% from last month. Apparently it is indeed energy efficient.
Now, directly behind the condo are several hundred acres of wetlands that the association owns and protects. Our deck juts into the forest/wetlands - the first part of the first video was shot on the deck. We've got a herd of deer, turkeys, woodchucks, several types of squirrels, chipmunks, one very large cat that we don't say anything about, several million tree frogs (that keep coming in the house in the late fall so we keep them inside and release them in the spring), 4 varieties of hummingbirds (3, count them 3 hummingbird feeders on our deck to keep up with the things), several owls and a hawk (red-tail).
The cabin, which "
This Old Shack" is based on has a very tiny carbon footprint. It's entirely off the grid, solar powered, most of the appliances are 12 volt. Even my boat is solar powered. The generator I use to equalize the battery bank has a cat on it, carries an EPA certification (that I'm suspect about but that's another story) and I have the exhaust carried into a small water tank that gets black as coal after 50 hours or so. Because everyone up in northern Michigan has been sinking wells since the 1950s sucking the land dry (including the oil companies up there that use water to extract the oil from the shale deposits) the original well that was 20 feet deep is dry as a bone. The few neighbors that we have are down to 250 feet to get water. So I carry my water with me and use one of those fancy carbon/carbon filters for the gray water and a dry composting toilet. Later this summer I'm going to spend an entire episode on building your own solar panels (100 watts for about $100), which people ask a lot of questions about at the site.
So the simple answer to the question is "as much as I can" to be environmentally friendly within the confines of my life.
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