The Sierra Club has joined with 25 top environmental, health, and business groups to support Supervisor Rafael Mandelman’s proposed ordinance requiring all-electric buildings for new construction. The ordinance would deliver healthier homes while cutting climate pollution. Read our joint letter of support, including suggestions to strengthen the ordinance.
We’ll be reaching out to our members with opportunities to support this important health and climate legislation when it comes before the Supervisors in September. For more information, email Melissa Yu at melissa.yu@sierraclub.org.
In the meantime, SF Group Executive Committee member Howard Strassner has some simple suggestions for reducing your natural gas consumption at home:
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When you fry your eggs or sauté onions, cook over a burner where the gas flames do not flow beyond the edge of the pan. This is just wasted energy.
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Buy an induction electric tea pot. The kind without precise temperature controls are inexpensive and you can find a setting that is short of boiling. I did this years ago because I wanted my coffee to taste better while saving a little energy.
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For a few dollars more you can purchase a countertop induction electric cooktop with temperature and timer controls that plugs into any kitchen outlet. (I have to be careful because my 90-year-old kitchen wiring cannot run the microwave and the cook top at the same time without blowing a circuit breaker fuse.)
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If you own your house long enough you will probably have to replace your water heater. Commercial heat pump packages, which use a refrigerator-type compressor to take energy from the air, are available as hot water heaters. This equipment uses much less energy than a gas fired heater. This also works to heat your house and works especially well in our frost free climate. This is not an engineering article or investment advice, but doing this for your house in combination with solar on your roof can be a very good investment and so you can do good, and make money by doing good.