green washing dirty laundry — my love affair w CHP continues.

So several weeks ago, while doing laundry across the street from my apartment, I tried speaking w the Chinese owners about an Idea.  The idea of using his natural gas to generate electricity before running the dryers.  His english was not so good and my mandarin was non-existent.  He thought I was trying to sell him something.  He thought it was a scam.  He said electricity was too expensive so how could he make it.  He said he already had a private natural gas contract.  He basically flipped me away w his hand.

But hold on.  I live across the street from a pharmacy, a pizza shop, a chinese joint, and a grocery store loaded with refrigerators.  And of course, a laundry and drycleaner that doesn’t seem to do any of its own drycleaning.

Not only that, there are a ton of residential buildings.  And the laundramat is open from 7am to 8pm, hitting both the morning and evening residential peak loads.

Here is the basic flaw in logic.  People know that generating heat from natural gas is >80% efficient.  So why make electricity?  well, bc electricity is being made elsewhere at 35% efficiency and wasting heat all over the place.  What is so great about the stores across the street from my apartment, is that they have diverse energy needs, not all complementary, but certainly, my laudremat would make more money selling its natural gas fueled electricity to its neighbors than burning straight w my 4 quarters to dry my clothes for 28 minutes.

Combined Heat and Power (CHP) is appropriate in certain circumstances and city laundry would be one of them.  (Say nothing of the fact that CO2 IS the organic dry-cleaning solvent and why organic drycleaning makes me crazy that it is more expensive – so wouldn’t it be neat if someone captured the exhaust CO2 and compressed it into liquid form to make the solvent).

Good News!  This weekend, I spoke w Llew Wells of Living City Block… an initiative to develop a green neighborhood in the dirtiest community in the 5 borroughs.  He said there was a gigantic laundry facility in the middle of their target block… NYC is going to have CHP and it’s going to be SMART and Very clean.  My kind of green washing.

Local Law 38 – will someone please make an ap?!

To reduce brown-outs, NYC implemented Law 38.

“Local Law No. 38 prohibits commercial establishments from unnecessarily opening their doors while air conditioning is on, in an effort to conserve energy and reduce strain on the electric grid. The legislation provides for escalating civil penalties for successive violations and specifies the Department of Consumer Affairs as the enforcing authority. Intro. 264 was approved by City Council on Aug. 14, 2008 and signed in to law by Mayor Bloomberg on Sept. 3, 2008.” -NY League of Conservation Voters

If you’ve never experienced the sheer insanity of it, here is a great blog post about a person’s walking tour of open door retail stores flooding the street with A/C in 2009. Here is a NYT article 9 stores that were fined $200-$400 for leaving their door open in the summer of 2010.  These are single day incidents of single locations – but it happens everywhere in NYC, summer and winter and it makes me crazy!

Unfortunately, as this is not an energy savings law, it is a ‘let’s keep the grid from unnecessarily failing’ law, this does not apply to retail doors propped open in the winter letting out heat.

Will someone please make a reporting ap – so that next summer w my new i-phone, I can report every door I see propped open and do some citizen surveillance of common sense!

Please?

DontFlush.Me

Last weekend, I participated in NYC’s first ever ECOHACK - a room full of well-intentioned geeks that come together to try to integrate environmental data and effect change thru knowledge generation.  It was so much fun.

Besides eating a delicious vietnamese sandwich, I was completely charmed by the incredible and generous atmosphere of cooperation, the diversity of skills and talents, and the innovative spirit.  There were many interesting projects and I chose DontFlush.Me (Information on NYC sewage outflows in this blog come from discussions w Leif Percifield and Liz Barry at the Ecohack event).  Together, our group of almost all strangers, created a web presence to assess how a NY-er can be alerted to minimize their water-use during storm events to help reduce the 27 billion gallons of untreated waste water that enters NYC waters annually. In brief, 70% of the NYC sewage system combines storm water with industrial and domestic sewage. So when NYC has 1/10 inch rain in an hour or 4/10 inch rain in 24 hours, the sewage system gets overloaded and raw sewage is released into NYC waterways.  The objective of our Hack, was to have a user input their home address and be notified when rainfall in their ‘sewage collection shed’ was likely to overload the system and release raw sewage.  That a water user could modify their behavior for a 24 hour period until the storm water passed.  While problematic in many ways in its current state, it is a wonderful first draft.

Innovate on DontFlush.Me

It is ridiculous that NYC still has 8 gallon flush toilets, both on gallons of  drinking water use and volumes of diluted sewage requiring treatment.

So, I’m proposing a ?simple? innovation topic to act as an example group innovation build upon Leif Percifield and Liz Barry’s Don’t Flush Me project.  So please comment and I’ll manually include your comments into this post.

PROPOSAL:  UPGRADING (NYC) TOILET WATER USE EFFICIENCY.

PROBLEM:   27 billion gallons of raw sewage is dumped into NYC water ways every year due to storm events overloading sewage treatment centers. [LP]

Fact – 70% of NYC sewage treatment combines storm water with industrial and domestic sewage. [LP]

Fact – the 14 NYC sewage treatment plants can handle 2x normal day load.  Rain and storm events often exceed the twice normal loading. [LP]

Fact – when NYC receives 1/10 inch in an hour or 4/10 inch in 24 hours, many of the treatment plants are over capacity and untreated sewage is dumped thru 460 Combined Sewage Outflows directly into  the harbor (CSOs are emergency release pipes located below the water line and when the treatment system gets overloaded, monitors open the gate and raw sewage is dumped directly into NYC’s harbor). [LP]

“Fact” – Some NYC toilets use as much as 8 gallons per flush. [LP]

Fact - My toilet uses 1.6 gallons per flush. [JW]

“Fact” – The average NYC flush uses 5 gallons. [LP] Concern –  I’m surprised at the AVERAGE of 5 gal/flush in NYC. [ML]

“Fact” – Most NYC water (in) and sewage (out) is paid for by landlords. [JW]

PROPOSAL – create 3 documents that give an estimate of cost/benefit for retrofitting NYC apt buildings for installing lower water-use toilets.

Brainstorm a cost analysis:

1. money paid for 1.5, 3, 5, and 8 gallon toilets
2. money paid for water in and sewage out 
3. money paid for labor to change out toilets
4. in 30-unit, 50-unit and 200-unit apartment building (prewar, +/-6 stories)

Potential User: Designed for  tenants (and/or landlords) who want to reduce the cost of rent, reduce the untreated sewage released into NYC waterways, and conserve fresh drinking water use in their building.

GOAL:  Active tenants can choose the appropriate assessment for the toilet type, building composition, etc and present a ready-made cost/benefit argument to their landlord for replacing 5 or more gallon toilets simply on sewage and water use pricing. 

Plumbing Question- Does a 1.5 gallon toilet require different pipes or pumps to achieve a certain flush pressure? ANSWER:  there is no difference in terms of installation between 5 (or 3.5) and 1.6 gallon toilets–it’s the tank size, not the waste pipe size. [ML]

Energy Question- How much energy does one save by pumping 1.5 gallons of water up 1 floor as opposed to pumping 8 gallons of water per floor? ANSWER: unless they are taller than 6 stories (I think), buildings do not pump water up to any floors but instead rely on city water pressure. Therefore, calculating the cost of pumping certain amounts of water up certain numbers of floors depends on how many total floors there are and who’s paying for it. [ML]

Cost Question – How much does one (a home owner, a landlord, and NYC govt )pay per gallon of clean water? ANSWER: The cost of clean/tap water is $3.17 per one hundred cu.ft. (1 cu.ft = ±7.48gal) as of July 2011: But, the minimum charge for service is $0.43 per day per water meter within a Bill Period. So for very small buildings, this might factor in). [ML]

ALSO there is a flat fees per toilet: Ultra low flow toilet, as approved by the Commissioner is $30.40; All other fixtures are $66.52.  So the building saves $30/year/toilet if they go to UTLRA low flow (don’t know if that’s 1.6 gal or not).[ML]

Cost Question - How much does does a homeowner, a landlord, and NYC govt pay for a gallon (cubic foot?) of waste removal?  ANSWER: To calculate the waste water rates, see this:”The wastewater charge for any property supplied with water from the Water Supply System is … 159%…of the charges for water supplied to that property from the system, including any surcharges, unless otherwise provided in this Rate Schedule.” So use the clean water supply cost and multiply by 1.59. [ML]

Labor Question - What kind of contractors, laborers would we need to hire, for an average installation (hours) and estimate of appropriate NYC hourly rates?

Building Type Question – What should we use to make 3 scenarios for a tenant to use as a rough estimate to landlord? (building age, number of units (bathrooms), number of floors (energy), 1.5, 3, 5 and 8 gallons)?

Jeni in Black, Leif in Grey, Meret in Orange, Coburn in blue

Concern – I seem to remember a recent news article about a minimum amount of water being needed to keep the solids moving in the system and low flow toilets were aggravating the situation.  Assuming my recollection is correct, placing high waste water commercial users at the start of each line would be a good fix. [CW]

Tangential Point - Permeable surface parking lots help also [ML]  

Tangential Point - Are grey water systems legal in tenant-occupied buildings?[ML]