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How to prepare for a power outage at -30°F

Image credit: Stephen Williams, lights of Jackson WY seen from Snow King Resort

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BuildingGenius: Making sustainable housing a no-brainer

Beyond Efficiency is highly motivated to solve the nation’s housing crisis and planet’s climate crisis through our technical work, but the traditional building consulting model isn’t going to cut it. To scale our impact far beyond what we’re able to accomplish as a small team working on one-off building projects, we’re excited to announce our new technology- and community-based initiative, BuildingGenius.

How I electrified my Northern California home

This is a case study about modernizing my 1200-square foot East Bay home by removing gas-fired appliances. The gas replacement work was done with some willingness to tolerate temporary inconveniences to minimize cost, which might be helpful for scrappy remodeling projects undertaken by many readers.

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How I electrified my Northern Michigan home

A few years ago, I had the opportunity and privilege to design and build a high performance all-electric home in northwest lower Michigan. Read on to learn about the electric equipment, our experiences to date, and some data on hot water, minisplit, and overall energy use.

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What You Can Do to Optimize Indoor Air Quality

Image credit: Douglas Zimmerman, SFGATE

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Residential Energy Feedback

Image credit: Sense, a home energy monitoring system.

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Optimizing Solar PV Systems

Have you ever wondered how solar panels capture energy from the sun to produce electricity? Or perhaps you want to learn how to get the most power output of your own PV array? Read on to learn how solar panels produce electricity, or if you are simply interested in learning how to optimize your solar system skip down to that section.

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Heat Pumps for Space Heating in Cold Climates: Costs + Performance

I’ve lived in frigid climates that have four distinct seasons my whole life. These places, like my hometown of Boulder Junction, Wisconsin, and my college town of Bozeman, Montana, have winter daily average temperatures in the range of 10-30 degrees F, and are certainly what you would call “heating dominated climates.” Air conditioning is often not needed at all. These cold climates deserve special considerations when selecting modern heating systems.

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