Slashdot Mirror
How Are You Conserving Energy?
ThosLives asks: "With oil again pushing historic nominal prices and all sorts of articles on alternative power, what are people doing practically to reduce their energy consumption? It's fairly clear that conservation is an overlooked solution to the 'energy crisis'. Has anyone come up with really nifty ways to cut their energy consumption without sacrificing their technical lifestyle? What methods work best for you? At what point (price of gasoline, electricity, etc) will you start to change your behavior?"
"Take me, for example. I'm looking to cut much of my consumption, including moving closer to work to cut my commute, possibly putting a throttle restrictor plate in my car, buying fluorescent lights, and even trying to build a small wind/solar generator. I love technology, and I'd love to see how it can be used to reduce demands for power rather than just being able to make more power more cheaply (conservation arguably being the better side of the energy coin). I'm even interested in how folks conserve other things too - I'm always amazed at how many plastic (or paper) bags the grocer insists on giving me every week and how much waste society generates in the form of packaging."
I wear warmer clothing (sweaters, etc) and thick socks, and eat more, and I use the house heater a lot less.
Also, accelerating like an anemic grandmother does wonder on your car's fuel consumption. That and using a stick shift (manual transmission for the SOTBE)
"Piter, too, is dead."
Unless you're significantly shortening that drive, the upfront costs of relocation will burn through years' worth of fuel savings.
possibly putting a throttle restrictor plate in my car
Are you insane?!? If you want to drive slower, then drive slower. That's a good thing. Do not make your car drastically more unsafe by removing its ability to accelerate quickly when the need arises. When an out-of-control semi is bearing down on me, I'd rather lose an ounce of gas to my foot on the floorboard than a gallon of blood to my face on his grill.
buying fluorescent lights
I'd do this if I could find a nice brand that didn't flicker and had a spectrum reasonably close to an incandescent (or better, the sun). I can't stand that 60Hz strobe or the washed-out colors. Any suggestions?
I'm always amazed at how many plastic (or paper) bags the grocer insists on giving me
OK, I'm with you there. Basically, I'm one of those greedy, selfish jerks who refuses to compromise his lifestyle. However, I was also raised with "waste not, want not" and I hate the gratuitous use of resources. If I'm only buying one or two things at a store, I tell the cashier that I don't want a bag. I turn the lights off when I leave a room. I use DPMS on my monitors so that they're not painting a picture while I'm asleep. I keep my tires properly inflated. I have an electronic thermostat that's set to 68F during the day (in winter) and cooler at night. In short, I've configured my environment so that it doesn't try to make me comfortable when I'm not around to enjoy it. If everyone took those simple steps, I think we'd save a lot without sacrificing a bit of the creature comforts.
Oh, and if you're one of those "free heat because I'm on Welfare" people who leaves the heat cranked and the windows open, I hope you catch pneumonia and die.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Of course conservation isn't the silver bullet of environmentalism, but to say conservation is bad is nuts. If I can save a hundred dollars in heating fuel, I will.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Okay, I know it's not electricity exactly, but...
- install low flow toilets or those kits that limit the amount of water per toilet flush.
- consider a front load washing machine.
- and stop washing your car every freaking weekend for crying out loud! Especially those of you who live in Seattle. It rains every couple of days anyway!!!! Same goes for your lawns. Brown is okay. It will grow back.
Unfortunately that is the solution the government here in Hangzhou, China uses. During summer 2004 when the temperature was over 100 every day and everyone was using air conditioners, many factories and residences had their power cut off three or four days a week. Most of the larger factories I work with have generators, but when all the factories here have their generators running it makes the air pollution even worse than normal.
Things might be even worse this coming summer due to El Niño. Perhaps what the Chinese government should do is raise energy prices just like the rest of the world is doing, according to supply and demand. But so far their strategy is mostly forced electricity usage limits instead of price-induced ones.
Manufacture in China
We just recently built a house and looked into energy saving ideas. Going with CF bulbs was a good idea for energy savings, but there are some drawbacks.
First, and most obvious, is cost. To outfit our house with all CF was nearly $350. While in the long run they should save quite a bit, they still are expensive compared to incandecents.
Another drawback is that they do not fit in all fixtures. We broke a couple bulbs by trying to get them into smaller fixtures. Also, the swirly bulbs look terrible in track lights and uncovered can lights. You can find some that have a second shaped bulb around them though that look like regular bulbs.
There also is a bit of a delay to lighting up, but this is only a minor annoyance (~1/2 second). Also, most bulbs do not give out full light until about 1-5 minutese after they are turned on. This is fine in the bathroom in the morning since it gives your eyes a couple minutes. However when you want good light right away CF lights do not cut it.
All that said, I do prefer the idea of savings associated with the CF lights and the problems are mostly annoyances...
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
You don't have to put up with accelerating like an anemic grandmother, if you've got a manual transmission. Use the fuel for acceleration, then shift to neutral for downhill/flat coasting will really decrease your car's fuel consumption- though I'm in Western Oregon, we have more hills here to take advantage of, might not work in the plains.
Manual tranmission all by itself will increase your energy-to-movement conversion by 50% as well, as we found out the hard way when my brother converted my grandmother's Datsun 720 to electric (we wondered why it only got 26 miles to a charge- then realized that the electric engine was never generating low enough torque to get the automatic to shift out of first gear).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
It's fairly clear that conservation is an overlooked solution to the 'energy crisis'.
It's not fairly clear. In fact, I think the opposite it true, that conservation is the first solution looked to. It's the solution that's been used for the last thirty years.
How many times have you heard your mother say over the years: "Turn off your lights when you're not using them! Do you think electricity comes from a well or something?"
We could conserve more, but a lot of us don't really know where our energy goes. Do you know how much energy your computer consumes? So why don't you turn it off when you're not using it? I see far too many "environmentally concerned" citizens that keep their computers on all the time. At work I turn off my computer on the weekend and people actually look at me as if I'm nuts for doing it. I've got a friend who's in Earth First, and owns an NVidia card with more fan horsepower than my Hoover vacumn! Where's the sense in that?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
There's a couple major problems with fluorescents, a lot of which have been pointed out. But I havent seen my #1 beef:
1) Its impossible to find dimmable fluorescents.
They used to make em, a reasonable premium, but they're completely AWOL now.
Other grievances:
2) 60 hz DEATH TO EYES magical powers
3) hideous spectrum: what is it, like 3 different narrowband peaks?
Can someone recommend a dimmable full spectrum non-flickering fluorescent? cause that'd f'ing rock.
-Myren
Buy well-known name-brand bulbs. I bought an off-brand (IIRC, it had a large picture of an American flag on the package) 5-bulb package at Sam's club once, and they all burned out within three months (all five). I replaced the last bad bulb with a GE, which has lasted for three years at least.
I was going to back you up by finding out how many thousands of years it takes to go from organic material to oil
To "oil", in the sense of the big underground lakes of black goo, it takes a VERY long time, on the order of millions of years rather than thousands.
To turn plants into something useable as fuel, however? It takes a few hours to a few months, depending on what you want.
Slashdot itself recently covered a fellow who has come up with a way to turn just about anything organic into substances similar to the end products of oil refining (gasoline, kerosene, diesel), which even proveably produces more energy than it consumes (discounting the organic waste that goes in for processing, of course), as it uses just the gasseous fractions produced to power the entire process.
And of course, turning corn (or any high sugar or starch content plant matter) into ethanol (really quite a good fuel - clean, high energy content, no exotic conditions needed to burn it, and not even toxic to humans in reasonable quantities) we've known how to do throughout all of known history.
And let's not skip the obvious one - firewood. Granted, the way we get it now taps into a resource that takes decades or even centuries to regenerate, but we could specifically use five to ten year rotating microforests of ultra-fast growing plants such as paulownia (particularly interesting because you don't need to replant them when you cut them down - With a bit of care in the first year, a new one just grows from the stump when you chop it down).
So, can we get new underground-viscous-black-goo-oil on a timescale of a few years? No. But currently, and for at least the next decade or two, the single most efficient way to use solar energy (the only real "source" of new energy available on our planet) has existed on this planet for longer than we have - Photosynthetic green plants. We just need to exercise some care in how we make use of them so as to minimize the environmental impact of harvesting.