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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."
...by sitting back and doing nothing.
Oh, you mean electrical energy? Well, 90% of the lights in my house are compact florescent. Maybe 15 bulbs x 70Wh savings = 1050 watt reduction.
I have to drive 1h/day (no choice), but my car is decent on gas. I want an electric-hybrid car. Solar panels would be nice too. Its sunny here a good % of the year.
Energy conservation doesn't solve the energy problem!
The problem is that we are using energy far quicker than it is created or the by products of energy production can be consumed.
All conservation does it make the energy source last longer it does not solve the under lying problem. I tend to the idea that prolonging our dependence is a very bad idea.
Some people might argue that 20 minutes is too far to walk when I can drive it in 5 and parking is free at my office.
But the way I see it is that programming does not provide my body with the excercise it needs. Fresh air and a brisk walk in the morning helps wake me up.
I also walk to pick up small things like milk, bread, or a bottle of wine.
Oh yeah and shooting assholes who enforce CC&Rs or other restrictions on clothes lines.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Probably the biggest thing is to turn down thermostats in winter and up in summer. Electricity/Heating Fuel are the biggest bills aside from debt payments, it appears.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
I don't mean computerize your home.
I'm betting most people live in older dwellings. My house was built in the 50's when no one cared about energy. This will only apply to people that own homes, but here goes.
Windows:
I've replaced my windows. It was a large expense ($10,000+) and I won't get my money back in increased home value or energy savings for as long as I live here, but I will save energy in two ways. First, and most obvious, I have more energy efficient windows. The original windows were single pane and many were large fixed pane windows. The new windows are double-pane and insulated (low-e and all that) and I replaced fixed pane with opening windows. Now I can get a nice breeze through the house so I don't have to switch from heater in the morning to A/C in the day.
Insulation:
My home has vaulted ceilings with exposed beams. There is some old hard fiberglass type insulation there that's maybe 4 inches thick. With a large unshaded southern exposure, I get a lot of heat pouring down. This is great in the winter, but miserable and costly in the summer. I'm putting insulation between the exposed beams with drywall covering. Not only do I get better insulation, but I've now given the house a more modern look.
Fans:
I've got a ceiling fan in almost every room. It works great for pushing warm air out of hot rooms and into cold ones in the winter or drawing cooler outside air in through windows in the summer. I'm not sure about the efficiency or energy savings here, but it sure does make a room more comfortable.
Most of these items will not return any value to the house, but in the end I'm more comfortable in my home and I'm saving some energy costs.
Not an easy thing to do, and not everyone can do it, but one thing that really surprises me about Tucson, and this is true for many cities, I think, is how incredibly inappropriate the building materials are that people use. Most of the houses in Tucson are made of wood, with minimal insulation and huge black roofs to collect maximal solar energy during the long summers. Many houses are cooled with swamp coolers, which typically go through 100 gallons of water a day, even though this is a desert climate. Many people have lawns, which of course have to be watered daily throughout most of the year.
When we moved to Tucson, we knew we weren't going to buy a wood house, because wood is simply a lousy material for this climate. Back in the days before massive cookie-cutter developments, houses in Tucson were made of 12-18" thick adobe or 6-8" burnt adobe/slump block masonry. This material is good for the climate, because it has a lot of thermal mass. This means that if you get the thickness right, the outside temperature at night will be coming through the walls during the day, and the outside temperature during the day will be coming through the walls at night. So if you open the windows at night, and close them during the day, you can be fairly comfortable even in the heat of summer, without using any heating at all, and in the winter you might want to put on a sweater, but you'll basically be warm enough, again without any heating.
However, it turns out that buying a house built this way nowadays is quite expensive, unless you buy an older house, and older houses have the problem that most of them have wood floors, meaning that you're very vulnerable to termites.
We were very fortunate to find a builder who is working on renewable-energy housing right in downtown Tucson - our house is made of concrete masonry, but is insulated on the outside, so rather than depending on the diurnal cycle, it is isolated from the outside temperature swings. The thermal mass of the all-masonry construction and the 10" thick concrete floor mean that once you get it to a certain temperature, it tends to want to stay there. So it's quite cheap to keep cool, even in the dead of summer.
On top of this, there's a solar hot water heater and 1500WDC solar panel on the roof, so that although we still draw energy from the grid, we draw a lot less of it, and our air conditioning can run mostly off the solar panel during the day, when energy is in most demand. To back up the solar hot water heater we have an electric instant-hot-water heater from Seisco that works really well - the hot water out of the tap has a really consistent temperature with no pulsing.
That's really our big way of saving energy. We'd like to have a hybrid car, because unfortunately we aren't quite able to go cold turkey on automotive transportation, but for now we're making do with our Honda Civic, which gets pretty good milage.
As for computers, unfortunately I think the best solution is to always buy newer ones, but it costs energy to make them, so this isn't perfect. Newer computers do seem to use less energy as long as you're not pushing them to extreme clock speeds. Probably using just a laptop would help, but for work it's really handy to have a faster disk and processor.
Is it so inconceivable that some people want to save energy regardless of how much it costs to do so? I actually pay a higher rate on my electric bill for "green" energy -- yes, I'm aware that I'm not actually purchasing "green electrons" but that money is directed to sustaining and developing renewable energy resources in the state.
I just bought 500 watts of photovoltaics, which, given a sufficiently large battery bank, will enable me to run my Mac Mini and the LCD it is connected to entirely off-grid. Did I do that to save money? Obviously not.
But I guess putting your money where your mouth is when it comes to the environment gets you labeled either insane or stupid, at least in the USA.
I don't think you're a bad person for leaving using all that electricity.
I think you're a bad person for not thinking there is anything wrong with it.
Pretty Pictures!
Buy a programmable thermostat. I have mine programmed to turn off when I leave for work and turn on shortly before you come home. That way you save energy and still have a warm house when you get home. In addition, I turn the heat off when I go to bed and it comes back on just before the time you get up in the morning. According to gas company, I have used 25% less natural gas than I did last year (it was installed in the summer) and it is colder this winter than last.
Dang! I can't believe I forgot to mention that earlier. I have a Kenmore HE3 washer/dryer set and they rock like no appliances I've ever bought. First, it barely sips water - the advertising is completely accurate. Second, the spin cycle is awesome. The radial velocity of the edge of the barrel on the "high" setting is something like 170 miles per hour. Third, my wife, three small children, and I use almost exactly one 5-gallon tub of soap every six months. At $10 per tub (we buy them once a year when you can get them 2/$20), that's about $1.70 per month in consumables. Fourth, they're huge. A big washer means fewer loads of laundry, which means that you don't have to spend a whole weekend washing your stuff. Finally, this giant graphite washer and dryer pair looks like it came straight out of Darth Vader's laundry room. It frightens small children and impresses the heck out of other geeks.
They're still really expensive, but if you can at all afford them, you have to get these.
install low flow toilets or those kits that limit the amount of water per toilet flush.
Yeah, because 4 1.5 gallon flushes to get rid of Taco Bell is much more efficient than 1 2.5 gallon flush. I'll stick with the "stand up first or take your chances" model I currently have, thanks.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
btw, you won't find the word 'triphosphor' on a lamp. Just avoid "coolwhite" and "warmwhite".
I just found these online: 12 LED fits in bulb socket
Don't put out a lot of light but might be good for some situations.
FYI, in modern cars, using engine breaking on the downhills can will use less gas than putting it in neutral. The inertia of the car moving keeps the cylinders turning with minimal fuel. Of course, this might not be helpful if you're just going to have to go back uphill.. but if there's a stop sign or light at the bottom of the hill, its probably worth it.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
It is actually worth replacing the incadescents before they wear out. Assuming that for ease of calculation, a 100 watt incadescent bulb lasts 1000 hours, and electricity is $0.10/KWH. Over the life of the bulb, the incadescent bulb will use 100 KWH of electricity. At the going rate of 10 cents/kwh, which is actually on the low end of the scale in the northeast, the bulb will burn $10.00 worth of electricity during its life. A CFLB with the light output of a 100 watt bulb burns 25 watts, and can be purchased in multi-packs at Home Depot for about $3.00 each, or even less. I have brought 60 watt equivalents for 6 for $10.00.
If you junk an incadescent 100 watt bulb that is worth a buck when it is new halfway through its lifetime, you will forgo $0.50 worth of bulb life. In the 500 hours it would have burned, it would have used $5 worth of electricity, for a net cost of $4.50.
Replacing it with a $3 CFLB will use $1.25 worth of electricity during that 500 hours, assuming an equivalent CFLB uses 25 watts. Even if the CFLB lasts only 500 hours, you are no worse off than waiting for the incadescent bulb to burn out. Chances are, your CFLB will last several times as long as a regular bulb, so the cost of the bulbs themselves per hour of use is down into the same range as incadescents, and the cost of electricity is 75 percent less.
In warm weather, replacing incadescents with CFLBs provides an added bonus: CFLBs use not only use 75 percent less energy than incadescents, they also give off 75 percent less heat. This will reduce your air conditioning load, saving even more money!
The only time it might not make sense is if you are heating your home with straight electricity, in which case it does not really matter if you burn the lights, as resistance heating is resistance heating.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, most of them revolve around irrational whackos getting in the way.
We don't shut down coal or oil or natural gas power plants after 30 years, we upgrade them. Yet we worry about how to decomission power plants properly?
More people are killed each year in accidents at non-nuclear-related plants, mines, and processing facilities than are killed at nuclear plants, mines, and processing facilities.
The radiation put out by the thorium and uranium in coal is greater than the allowable amount of radation allowed out of a nuclear power plant.
We don't build Chenobryl-style reactors anymore. Three Mile Island was about as bad as things could get with our reactors and a pebble bed or IFR is even safer. Remember, if TMI was so bad, why wasn't there a cancer spike?
Nuclear waste is only a problem because we're not allowed to reprocess it. We already know how to reprocess the fuel to get more use out of it. We also have a good line about how to deal with the really toxic stuff -- bombard it with neutrons in a controlled fashion to reduce all of the stuff that won't burn in a reactor will be transmuted to lead.
Remember, the really radioactive stuff that makes it dangerous to be around and hot to the touch is much decayed after periods as short as 10 years.
Yep... Only rational reason to be wary is just the problems caused by irrational folk.
Gentoo Sucks
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter14.ht
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter12.ht