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."
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.
Sure. Did it occur to you that some people go about it in really stupid ways that cause more problems than they solve? For example, you just trashed the environment to get your photovoltaics so that you could feel good about self-powering your computer. Your pollution-per-watt is much, much higher than the equivalent coming out of your wall.
I want to live on a nice planet, too, but realistically speaking that means centralizing production to a few good, clean resources (read: nuke) than building hundreds of millions of dirty plants across the country. Short-term "solutions" that make us feel proud of ourselves without actually helping the overall situation are wasteful and not something to aspire to.
If you're trying to live off the grid to see if you can or as a personal challenge: good for you, and I wish you the best of luck! If you're trying to do it because you think it's making the world a cleaner place, then you've wasted your time, money, and our natural resources.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
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.