Heat

The New York Times had a couple of articles about heat and its distribution this past week. The first was about radiators. Thin, stylish radiators, in many colours. Runtal North America will make custom ones that can serve as balustrades, or run floor to ceiling. And of course there are the towel rack ones. I grew up with radiators, but the big fat ones. At least they did not clank much!

More interesting was a "Second Homes" article about "green" heating systems. It's not comprehensive, but it mentioned a heating system that would also generate electricity. So while you are not there in the winter, it can be rolling your electric meter back (they do have net metering in Michigan).
The Freewatt system (Climate Energy Co.) has an internet hookup, and you can change settings remotely. The cost appears to be on the order of $20,000. It doesn't generate electricity in the summer, apparently, or during a power outage, although the propane version (to be released in April) may do that. It looks rather large for our house, the only size they mention is 12,000 Btu. It might be worth looking at some more; distributed generation is great (a huge amount of electricity is lost as it travels through the power lines). If you are a heavy electric user in a northern or winter-cloudy climate, I should think it would be a nice supplement to a photovoltaic system for year-round electric generation.

The other maker of Micro Combined Heat and Power (mCHP) systems in North America is East Troy, WI-based : Marathon with a grid-linked or off-the-grid system.
There is a New Zealand company, WhisperGen, that is setting up manufacturing in Britain.

Insulation recommendations by Zip code

The department of Energy has a little program that recommends minimum insulation R-values for your renovation or new house. You provide the zip code (first three digits), a very small amount of information about the house (like the type of heating system, whether there are cathedral ceilings and crawl spaces), and it calculates R-values. It's at this link: http://www.ornl.gov/~roofs/Zip/ZipHome.html. They have a good insulation fact sheet if you want to learn more about insulation.
Here is a link to their figure showing where to insulate: Insulation figure .