Greening the ranch
I was just over at the blog of a fellow ranch house owner, Denise, who describes her blog as “One ordinary family’s quest to ‘green’ their 1950s ranch house in a part of the country where green technology and green products aren’t easy to come by.” The name of Denise’s blog is Eco-Ranch in the Midwest.
If you find yourself fatigued by the seemingly endless stream of self-promoting commercial green blather, please visit Denise’s blog. This is the real deal. This is not a commercial venture, this is one family that would simply like to reduce the amount of CO2 they generate, save a little more water, recycle a little more, and reduce the amount of waste they produce. They’re trying to make changes where they can, on a very practical level, with the resources (financial and otherwise) they have.
Denise admits it’s a tall order, considering the age of the house and shape it’s in:
“We’ve got leaky, single-paned aluminum windows, and the original 1956 gas furnace is pumping away in the basement. The roof needs to be replaced, and the air conditioner looks like it was fresh out of the box in 1982. …It’s a great house, but let’s face it, it’s as green as a mid 1970s coal-burning power plant.”
Talk about starting from scratch. But what an incredible opportunity, and fortunately for the rest of us, Denise is working through some of these changes where the rest of us can learn from them. She’s already discussed rain barrels, faucet aerators, using a clothes line to dry the wash, and composting, some of which they’ve already implemented (and I was shocked to hear that a neighbor actually complained about the clothes drying on the line AND about the rain barrels — am I living in a happy bubble down here in GA? ) Not all of the changes they’re contemplating are so small, either, as evidenced by her discussion about the relative merits and costs of a geothermal heating system to replace their aging furnace, but the thread running through this blog is one of useful information.
It is possible to go green, right from where you are. It doesn’t require that you raze your old place or buy a bunch of fancy stuff. As Denise is proving in real time, even small changes can yield big results, both individually, in terms of the impact on one family’s utility bill and carbon output, and for the greater community as well. Go Denise!
Here’s a link to Denise’s blog, Eco-Ranch in the Midwest: http://ecoranch.blogspot.com/
And if you’re so inclined, visit our new sister site, greenremodel.net, and tell us how we can make it more useful.
‘Till next time.
Jen Wolf
