Free Republic

Let's talk washers and dryers. The washers and dryers today have sensors to meet EPA Standards. I want to put a big frontloader washer and dryer in my garage which hardly ever gets too cold. When the plumber looked at the set up he said, you are right, there is no danger of the pipes freezing, however, there is water in all the sensors of the washers (and probably dryers) and that minute amount of water will freeze and ruin the sensor and render the equipment inoperable. I have been thinking about this. Is there a way to find a...

When President Obama announced his $4 billion initiative to finance energy efficiency programs at the White House on Friday, a number of Bay Area allies were, literally, right behind him. There were senior executives from San Francisco's Metrus Energy, which committed $75 million of private capital to the initiative, and from Sunnyvale's Serious Energy and Santa Rosa's Ygrene Energy Fund, both contributing $100 million. They're among the 60 private companies and other entities "stepping up," in Obama's words, in an effort to retrofit public and commercial buildings nationwide, pitching in approximately half of the $4 billion needed. The rest of...

Participation in Sonoma County’s ground-breaking energy retrofit program for homes and businesses has dropped dramatically over the past six weeks, and recently issued federal rules are to blame, county officials said. Since July 6, when federal housing officials said the retrofit program and others like it posed a risk to the government-chartered mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac and ordered a clamp down in lending practices, the average number of weekly applications received by the county’s program has dropped by nearly half; signed contracts are down by a third. Total applications received in the six-week period this year are...

Days before San Bernardino officials were set to ink a deal for cleaner trucks at a local rail yard, the trucking company partnering on the project has pulled out of the project. San Bernardino Associated Governments officials learned this week that J.B. Hunt Transportation was postponing the planned retrofit of 262 of the company's trucks from diesel engines to natural gas. "This was based on business priorities," said Michelle Kirkhoff, director of air quality programs for SANBAG. The project, to develop trucks that run on natural gas as opposed to diesel fuel, was funded by $19.2 million in state and...

The 1,400-page cap-and-trade legislation pushed through by House Democrats contains a new federal policy that residential, commercial, and government buildings be retrofitted to increase energy efficiency, leaving it up to the states to figure out exactly how to do that. This means that homeowners, for example, could be required to retrofit their homes to meet federal “green” guidelines in order to sell their homes, if the cap-and-trade bill becomes law. The bill, which now goes to the Senate, directs the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop and implement a national policy for residential and commercial buildings. The...

SACRAMENTO – Gil Moore has been steadily selling off his gas stations across the state, unwilling to risk hefty fines or shutdown orders for not replacing old nozzles that release unhealthy toxins with every gallon pumped. “What a nightmare,” said Moore, who has sold about two dozen stations in the San Diego area and may shed another three amid the additional costs in a tough economy. Moore is one of many gas station owners in California dreading Wednesday – a long-standing state deadline for retrofitting pumps with technology that's cleaner, but more expensive.

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Monday he would appoint an auditor to look into why the cost of the seven-bridge Toll Bridge Seismic Retrofit Program has grown from $2.6 billion to $7.4 billion. The program was created to fix the state's toll bridges that were most vulnerable to earthquakes. The Bay Bridge, which links San Francisco and Oakland, is the main part of the program, which includes five bridges in northern California and two in the south. The Bay Bridge was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, but has yet to be fully repaired. Its costs have...