How Bakersfield Goes Green

Written by Charlie Durgin

Talk about your “no-brainer.”

Bakersfield and energy are synonymous. Whether you are having lunch at the Bistro and catch a glimpse of a pumping unit producing oil on California Avenue, or driving along the Bluffs taking in a view of one of the most prolific oil fields in the country, you are never far from the business of cutting-edge energy recovery and creation.

How close are we to the business of energy conservation, though?

With its abundance of sunlight and favorable weather, and its respect and knowledge of the hard work and effort that goes into pulling energy from the earth, Bakersfield is fertile ground for folks who wish to conserve it.

The following citizens are doing their part, in different ways, to reduce and reuse. And it isn’t as hard as you think. Being green, conserving, and reducing waste are more than buzzwords. They are components of a lifestyle that saves money and is considerate of the finite nature of our energy resources.

Oh yeah.

They also save a lot of money. Your money.

Take a look at the following stories and learn how easy it is to make the green lifestyle work in Bakersfield.

Caetano and Sherri Montano of Bakersfield were comfortable in their 1,100-square foot home. The tidy, well-maintained East Bakersfield home was well on its way to being paid off when Mrs. Montano decided that she had to have more square footage for their son and younger cousin who lived with them.

She found an attractive new home nestled in the foothills, and its spacious floor plan tipped the scales at nearly double her old home. It was love at first walk-through.

Mr. Montano balked at the prospect of doubling his cooling and heating bills by doubling the square footage. While he conceded that the need for more space was there, he worried the family’s finances would be stretched thin by the upkeep in addition to the larger mortgage.

But Mrs. Montano had a secret weapon in the argument. She was going to save his green by buying green. A different kind of green.

The home she’d fallen in love with was built in 2007 and the builders paid great attention to available green design methods. The most prominent being the solar panels affixed to one side of the roof. The solar panels generate electricity. So much that the electrical bill is around $4 a month.

In 2007, the Montano Family paid PG & E bills of $250, $237, and $247, for the months of June, July, and August respectively. The bill in their new house for the same peak Summer months? $44, $25, and $23. That’s for gas and electricity.

While the solar panels actually generate a lot of electricity, many of the house’s other green features reduce the need for it.

All of the windows are double pane, with a special coating that reflects heat away from the interior of the house. Mrs. Montano later installed solar screens that prevent UV rays from even reaching the windows. It keeps fabric curtains and furniture from fading and oxidizing in the intense summer sun. These factors combine to reduce the amount of time the Montanos run their air conditioning in the summer.

All of the house’s light fixtures are fluorescent, which according to PG & E’s website, consume much less energy and last longer than incandescent bulbs.

If you didn’t buy a house in the last couple of years that was outfitted with the latest in green technology, don’t worry! There are still ways to reduce your power bill without breaking the bank or doing a complete solar retrofit and replacing all of the windows.

Remember when your dad would say “Close the doors, I’m not paying to heat the backyard!”? Turns out he was right.

Many of the energy saving tips on PG & E’s website have to do with making sure you aren’t living in a leaky house. For about $3 a roll at any home improvement store, you can buy foam weatherstripping tape. Applying this to leaky windows and door frames will keep your pennies, nickels, and dimes from slipping out into the great outdoors. It also makes sense to make sure your ducts are not leaking hot or cold air into your attic or crawlspace. Using mastic to seal leaks, and wrapping ducts in insulation will prevent your air conditioning unit and central heating unit from working too hard and sucking down more energy than is necessary.

One single leaky hot water faucet can waste 212 gallons of water a month. And since the water was heated in your water heater, you are also wasting the energy that it took to heat it. Plumbers tape or a twist of the wrench is often all it takes to put an end to the dripping.

While you are saving water by tightening or replacing worn fixtures, why not put a low flow shower head in the bathroom? At the showerheadstore.com, you’ll find new shower heads that don’t exceed the maximum rate of 2.5 gallons per minute. You can find shower heads that run lower, and that come equipped with a $35 thermostat that causes the shower head to pause when the appropriate bathing temperature is reached, and keeping you from running hot water down the drain while waiting for it to warm up.

Again, this saves water and gas or electricity because it reduces the amount of heated water used.

Going green isn’t just about reducing the volume of energy that runs your home, it’s also about decreasing the volume of waste that leaves your house.

Refuse. Trash. Garbage. Americans produce a lot of it, and Bakersfield resident Mark Mensch became self-conscious about it one day when he was driving to work.

“I noticed that my trash can, and the trash cans of many of my neighbors, were absolutely overflowing,” Mensch said, “the lids were barely closed and refuse was spilling out of them.”

Motivated by the stark image of out of control waste, Mensch investigated ways to reduce the amount of junk he sends to the curb and then to the landfill.

“I discovered that BARC was willing to take a lot of my stuff,” Mensch said of Bakersfield’s Association For Retarded Citizen’s recycling center.

“We now have separate receptacles for mixed paper, glass, plastic, mixed metals-like soup cans, tin foil, and wire, and then the regular garbage and green waste containers from the county,” he added.

The result has been amazing to Mensch. He now puts the garbage can down at the curb twice a month. While it’s not a scientific measurement, he estimates that he’s more than halved the amount of waste he sends to the landfill every year.

And he’s not only saving time wheeling the can out to the street. He’s become a pickier shopper who avoids flashy and excessive packaging in favor of dressed down generics, and bulk-warehouse style purchases of staples.

“You really start to realize what you consume and in what volume when you are separating your trash,” he said, “I’ve cut down quite a bit on pizza and certain bottled refreshments, because the truth is right there in the open on recycling day! You really come to realize how much you consume.”

Jon Hartford’s gardening hobby gave him a reason to cut down even further on the amount of refuse he was sending to county operated landfills. Already an avid recycler, Hartford was introduced to composting his household food scraps by a fellow gardener.

Composting is the sometimes delicate art of turning food scraps into a fertilizing soil amendment. Food gives off heat as it decomposes and breaks down into its basic parts.

“At first I was concerned about attracting pests and roaches, but I purchased a prefabricated composting tower with a locking lid and haven’t come across any critters yet,” he said, expressing a common concern of other first-time composters.

“You can keep the smell down by not putting meat and dairy products into your compost; I also add soil to the top layer from time to time to keep flies away in the summer. You also need to keep it damp in the Bakersfield heat, and turn it occasionally with a pitch fork. Do that, and come spring, you’ll have a rich and organic fertilizer that will rival the stuff you can buy at the garden supply,” he said.

Going green is a lifestyle that will pay dividends other than financial. You’ll become a more conscious citizen and neighbor. Conservation will become an ethos that bleeds into other arenas of your life. You may find that you become less wasteful with intangible things like time and your own energy. Why not conserve and focus that as well?

Solar Panels, composting, insulation, recycling, oh my! Instead of trying to do it all at once, try picking one of the examples and following their lead. In a short time, you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes. Compare bills from month to month after you’ve made the changes and put aside the savings in a special fund. You may find that it’s more entertaining to take the savings to Las Vegas after a year than watch it slide down the drain and out the window cracks.

Between the savings on your power bill and the proceeds from your recycling, you might even be able to upgrade to a suite!

Article appeared in our 26-1 Issue - April 2009

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