PS:  California is not equal to the United States.  Just sayin’.

False. We use more energy moving water from where nature put it to where we use it. In California, 57% of all energy is consumed pumping water.

It’s true!

Occupancy sensors used to be expensive, today are a cheap component. You make it a replaceable piece, like the light bulb. Its tested regularly when the light is tested. If its failed, its replaced.

The lights going out while you are on the toilet is a programming question – you don’t design a sensor in an exit light to work the same way as a bathroom. Get it?

Same with range. And I’d say the sensors would be made to be activated by smoke, not defeated by smoke. 

High traffic? Look, if the office building is empty at night, at least they go off.

So in the 70s we had ourselves a little oil crisis, anybody old enough to remember that? The shock of waiting in gas lines, buying gas on even and odd days? We panicked for a few years, Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the white house, then we went back to building houses the way we always did. Crappy.

We were not the only place that had an oil crisis then – most of the developed world did. If we look at Sweden, the got slammed too. But they didn’t have their own oil resources (like Norway for instance). When it was over they did not go back to same old same old. Instead, they completely re-invented the way that they build houses. Today their houses outperform ours by a wide margin – it is embarrassing.

Sweden is interesting because like the US, they build wood houses. Most of the rest of the EU its not so – masonry houses are more common. But Sweden has a sizable timber resource (side bar: much better managed than ours) and so they build wood houses – just like we do. In fact up until the 70s oil crisis the US and Sweden built houses in just about the same way. But not today – Sweden spent 40 years improving the wood house, and today they make housing in the US look like an amateur show.

So here’s the thing. Sweden has done all the heavy lifting here. All the hard choices about how to build better performance economically have been made, they’ve broken all the new ground. Its all there for the taking. And in fact in the 1980s was all laid at the feet of the US Housing industry – HERE IS HOW ITS DONE. A ground breaking research project by the late Lee Shipper, and Henry Kelly parsed all this and documented the revolution in Sweden, and delivered it here in a detailed report, and companion book COMING IN FROM THE COLD. These were brilliant researchers who went on to have stellar careers doing important work in Energy. Look them up if you doubt me. I wrote about this here: http://blog.lamidesign.com/2010/11/coming-in-from-cold-story-behind-story.html

What did the American Housing Industry do? Abso-fucking-lutely nothing. Buy a new house today and you’ll get 4″ of lousy insulation, maybe a few inches more if you are spending. Its really hard to believe the story that America leads the world in technology, when something as ubiquitous as home building is done in such a profoundly incompetent manner, and its born out by our national energy bill. Yeah, we need to fix Exit lights, but the first thing we need to fix is to get over ourselves and start working on this in earnest.

I consider LED to be the highest quality exit sign, with electoluminescent as the 2nd. place runner up.  I have almost all my buildings switched over to LED. (i’m just waiting for the last of the incan signs to die)

If a building loses power or something, there’s a pretty good chance that the lights were on just prior to the dark!  Now, of course you’ll need them on all the time in areas that may not have constant illumination.

Ever been in a bathroom that has these, but you are in the stall for longer than the programmed delay, and it can’t see you in there, so you have to finish up in the *&^! dark?

It sucks.

Imagine that the smoke is starting to get thick, and you know there has to be an exit around here somewhere, but the sensor can’t see through the smoke, so it stays off…

That’d really suck.

Reliability has a higher priority than economy.

Adds an unnecessary point of failure to life safety equipment.

> Or, you know, glow-in-the-dark paint

Mostly useless unless you have a light shining on it all the time.

One of the programs of the recent recovery efforts was low interest loans to do energy retrofits for older homes. It was a great opportunity. However it was limited in several ways – if you already had a second mortgage on your home, guess what – you could not participate in the program. Guess who have second mortgages on their homes, lines of credit or otherwise? The very people that would benefit most from energy retrofits. Programs like this have to be carefully designed, or they don’t help the people that need it most.