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Can Your Massive Book Collection Help the Environment?

By crooky | April 21, 2008

Boing Boing had a great posting yesterday about the environmental benefit of lining any walls that are exterior walls with book cases. Their argument, in a nutshell, is that the insulating properties of books stacked up against the wall is bigger than you might assume. As a book lover, I’m enthralled by the idea. As someone who has their office in a cold basement with the only exterior wall consisting largely of a sliding door onto the patio, I am doubtful that I will be able to lower my energy bills by much with my book collection.

Friuch HQ - Where all the magic happens

On the left hand side of this picture you can see the patio doors going onto the deck. This is the only exterior wall in my office. On the right, you can see my floor to ceiling book collection. This runs all along this wall behind my desk. Alas, it’s running along a well-insulated interior wall.

I can’t say that I’d like my office very much if it didn’t have some natural light coming in so the opportunity for me to really save any energy by insulting an outside wall in my office is zero. However, I know other people who have office space with exterior walls that could be insultated by a healthy book collection.

There’s also something to be said for having a healthy reference library on hand. You could argue that you’re saving up to 70 watts per hour by not surfing the web for data. On the other hand, you’ll need some light to read by in your heavily insulated, windowless office. That’s going to add up to some watts as well.

My conclusion - the idea of using books to insulate your home or office is a nice idea but probably impractical for most people.

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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