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April 2, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

14:13

How to save ENERGY for your HOME

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	Welcome, everyone.
	Today's topic is how to save electricity for your home.
	I know it might sound like a mundane topic.
	It's not the philosophical discussions we sometimes have here, but it's a practical matter and people are asking me about it, so here we go.
	You're listening to Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, editor of naturalnews.com.
	Well, how do you save energy?
	How do you use less energy?
	Well, all right, big picture.
	For most homes, the biggest consumption of energy is In the winter is heat and in the summer is cooling.
	That's not news to you.
	However, most people live in homes that are poorly insulated compared to what they could be.
	So number one, insulation is actually the key to reducing consumption of energy used to produce heat or cool air.
	Most people want affordable homes.
	And so affordable homes are homes that have very little insulation, like R9 sometimes or R13. And just to give you an example, I recently built a large warehouse, like 20,000 square foot, roughly, warehouse for the Health Ranger store.
	And I had the entire warehouse insulated with R30 insulation, R30. Now, Yeah, that cost me, I don't know, $75,000 in spray foam insulation or something like that.
	But why did I do that?
	Because if you don't do that, you're going to end up paying more than that in your monthly energy consumption costs anyway.
	And of course, I have to control the temperature of all the food and superfoods and nutrients that we're shipping to you.
	Thank you for your support, by the way.
	If you shop at healthrangerstore.com, rest assured that I just spent $75,000 on insulation to make sure that your foods are kept at a, you know, reasonable temperature because I don't want them to get too hot.
	It starts destroying nutrients.
	Well, getting back to your home, it's the same concept.
	You spend more up front and then you have much lower costs over time.
	You want your home to be very well insulated.
	I think that R20 is minimum.
	You know, R24 is better and for the The ceiling or the roof or your attic, let's say I think R30, is a great idea.
	So you could add insulation to a structure you have already.
	But if you're building, you want to make sure you're getting very high R values in terms of insulation.
	Now the second thing is, you know, you're losing heat and air conditioning through doors and windows.
	And many people don't think about all the window space they have.
	There are a lot of folks who have very nice homes with very large windows.
	And I agree, they're beautiful, and they let in a lot of natural light.
	Well, in the summer, that light is working against you.
	It's heating up your home.
	And those windows, unless they happen to be like triple pane, you know, vacuumed gaps between the panes and all that stuff, you know, super high-tech, if they're not super high-tech, all your heat is transferring right out through the glass, right?
	Because glass is not, frankly, a very good insulator.
	It's the empty air space between the glass that is the insulator.
	So all your window space is losing heat and losing cool air as well.
	Doorways and such can be another big factor.
	So a lot of people will also have a problem with the efficiency of their heating and cooling system.
	The number one thing that I encounter with people is that they fail to Clean out their air filters.
	And I know, again, it sounds so simple.
	You can go to, like, Home Depot and you can buy a pack of 20 filters for $20, or I don't know what the cost is, depending on your filters.
	But people don't change out their air filters.
	And what happens is, of course, the electrical efficiency of the blowers for their HVAC systems, the efficiency drops to a very inefficient state.
	And if you can't pull air through that system, and you can't distribute the air, then your system's going to run much longer than it needs to.
	So you're just wasting electricity during that entire process.
	So that's a very easy thing to do.
	Just change your air filters more often.
	I know, it's crazy.
	But it's worth doing.
	Alright, now here's another big thing to think about.
	Let's say we're talking about a wintertime scenario.
	What actually sucks the heat out of your house?
	Well, believe it or not, a big part of the answer is the wind.
	The faster the wind blows, the more heat it sucks out of your house very quickly.
	Now, you may not recognize this because you have an automatic heater and you're not shoveling coal into a boiler, for example, to compensate for the wind.
	You might not even think that makes any sense, but follow me, I'll explain this.
	I heat my place where I live with an outside boiler.
	And I shovel wood into the boiler to heat water.
	Not quite too boiling, by the way.
	I only run it at 190 degrees Fahrenheit.
	And then I use the hot water circulated into the house with a blower to blow the heat out of the water.
	Now, the water itself recirculates so the water doesn't go away.
	In fact, I have like anti-rust additives in that water, which, by the way, you can just buy sodium nitrite and that's anti-rust.
	You just dump it in there.
	And I use baking soda in there to lower the acidity or raise the pH of it so it doesn't rust out the boiler.
	Maybe I'll do a podcast on that later.
	But I heat my house with wood and a boiler, okay?
	And when you do that, it's actually, you learn a lot about what sucks the heat out of your house, and it's wind.
	Because if you think about it, cold air that's not moving doesn't feel very cold, does it?
	Even if you're just outside in short sleeves, On a cold day, if the wind is not blowing, you don't feel that cold.
	But then there's the so-called wind chill factor.
	When the wind is blowing, oh my God, it's making you feel crazy cold.
	You've seen those forecasts where they say the temperature is 25 degrees, wind chill of 5.
	Well, that's a very strong wind.
	And by the way, the more humid the wind is, the more heat it sucks out of your house.
	So a dry wind in a place like Arizona, on a cold desert night, doesn't really take that much heat out of your house.
	But a wet wind in a place like, I don't know, Houston, Texas, or Louisiana, or Mississippi, very humid areas will suck all kinds of heat out of your home when it's cold.
	And so when that happens, I have to shovel a lot more wood into the boiler.
	In fact, based on the wind, it can require 400% more wood to heat overnight.
	Just because of the wind.
	And what does that tell you?
	Well, if you put up wind barriers, i.e.
	you grow some trees, like big pine trees, evergreen trees, on the windy side of your home, that can vastly reduce your consumption of electricity for heat or natural gas or whatever you're heating with.
	A lot of people don't think about the wind.
	But it is a huge factor.
	So if you can do something to eliminate or partially block some of that wind, that's going to save you a tremendous amount of money.
	And again, this is something where you wouldn't be aware of it, perhaps, unless I mentioned it because I happen to use a wood boiler.
	Now, that's the other solution here, by the way.
	You know, I pay almost nothing for electricity.
	Which tells you that I use almost nothing because I do a lot of interesting things to really reduce my eco footprint.
	I try to live in a sustainable way as much as possible.
	I still use electricity, obviously, for things like computers and so on.
	However, I don't use electricity for heating.
	In fact, the heater that I have in my house has not been turned on for four years.
	Now, if you think it's surprising that I haven't used my heater for four years, just think.
	I live on a ranch, so I have trees that fall down automatically on their own every year.
	There are storms.
	Wind blows trees down.
	If you have 10,000 trees or whatever I have on my ranch, just out in the wild, it's not like I planted any of them or anything.
	But if you've got 10,000 trees, you're going to have 50 that fall down every year.
	So All you need is a chainsaw, which, by the way, I use an electric chainsaw, and I just carry spare batteries with me, so I don't even have to use a gas-powered chainsaw.
	I use an electric chainsaw to chop up those trees, and then I use that wood to heat.
	You should think about using an outside boiler if you have a wood supply and you have the physical capability to do the chainsawing and the wood You know, moving the wood around and everything.
	It's not ideal for everyone.
	If you don't have a wood supply, you might end up spending more on the wood than what you save.
	So, I'm only recommending this for people who live in rural environments.
	Also, if you're elderly and you have trouble lifting big pieces of wood, then this is also not ideal.
	I should also say, every once in a while, this is especially at first, before you learn how the wood boilers work, but when you open that wood boiler door, There can be a giant fireball that comes out.
	I'm not joking.
	It'll burn your eyebrows off.
	But the thing is, the thing is, I don't know if you know how these wood boilers work, but a lot of times, you know, the oxygen is intentionally limited in them to stop the heat when the water reaches a certain temperature.
	So you've got, like, a blower.
	There's a blower that's temperature sensitive, and when your temperature, when the water gets, you know, below 180 degrees or whatever, the blower comes on.
	And then there is a big fire in there, right, that's heating your water.
	But when the blower goes off, because the water has reached the temperature, then there's a lot of smoldering and smoking that goes on inside the wood-burning stove.
	There's a lot of smoke.
	Now, if you've never owned a wood stove or you don't know anything about fire, you might not know that all that smoke is flammable.
	That stuff burns.
	Smoke is not the byproduct of burning.
	Smoke is stuff that could burn.
	If it has the right conditions.
	People don't understand this.
	They think smoke is like the byproduct of burning.
	No.
	Something that burns all the way produces no smoke at all.
	A clean burn is a smokeless burn, frankly.
	It'll just produce carbon dioxide and other things, other chemical byproducts of combustion.
	But anyway, in a wood stove, if you happen to open that sucker up when there's a bunch of smoke in there that is in a near-combustion condition, the fact that you're opening the door suddenly adds oxygen And there's usually enough smoldering coals in it that the whole thing can ignite.
	So don't open the door and just peer in there.
	Like, hey, what's going on in this stove?
	You'll lose your eyebrows.
	So, seriously, this is something to consider.
	If you can work, if you can lift small limbs and things, you can get a lot of free energy out of that if you've got trees on your property.
	I've also seen companies that make these wood-burning stoves where you buy wood pellets.
	To me, that just sounds like way too much trouble.
	You've got to buy the pellets, and you've got to have a pickup truck to carry the pellets, and then you've got to shovel the pellets.
	It's like, well, at that point, why not just have a regular furnace?
	So, again, I think the wood burner only makes sense if you've got free wood, and you've got a lot of ability to manage the wood.
	Oh, and by the way, if you do that, get a big burner, because the less you have to chop up all the branches, the better off you are.
	I have a burner that I think can handle like 40 inches long logs or something, something in that realm.
	So I don't have to chop things up very much, which is good.
	And also in Texas, we have a lot of mesquite trees that grow like weeds everywhere, and we're always trying to cut down mesquite trees.
	And that's actually a hard wood, so it burns very, it has a lot of energy in it.
	It's actually a great wood for burning.
	And you can barbecue with mesquite wood if you have a smoker.
	You can just take chips of the mesquite and put them in the smoker, your barbecue smoker, your brisket smoker.
	And so I don't ever have to buy wood and I don't ever have to buy mesquite chips because there's mesquites growing everywhere.
	I just have to cut them down.
	Alright, I know I got a little off base here.
	I started out as an energy-saving discussion, but everything I said here is true.
	Even the part about the mesquites.
	I'm not kidding.
	Thank you for listening.
	If you want to know more about the energy power grid and energy supply, we've got a website called Power.News.
	Power.News is about electricity, not Tony Robbins.
	It's not a self-improvement website.
	And it's not like praising Mussolini or Adolf Hitler.
	It is actually about electricity.
	So check out Power.News.
	And read my main website, naturalnews.com.
	You can also listen to more podcasts at healthrangerreport.com.
	Thank you for listening and next time you look in the mirror, thank yourself that you have eyebrows.
	Learn more at HealthRangerReport.com Thank you for watching.
	If you want to support our mission, visit us at healthrangersstore.com for the world's largest selection of lab-verified superfood and nutritional products for healthy living.

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