Five Percent: Conserve a Little Energy

Wow, conservation works. I posted preliminary results of our simple conservation measures from October and found a significant year-over-year reduction in usage of about 8%. But we only really got started with our efforts in October, so this month’s bill might be a better measure: over the period from late October to late November in 2004 we used 999Kwh; during the same period this year we used 801; just about 20% reduction in electricity consumption! If we had used the same amount of electricity as last year, we would have spent $29 more.

The thing is, I really don’t think we have made that many changes. (more…)

I recently finished reading Cradle To Cradle, by William McDonough & Michael Braungart which raises some wonderful concepts of design and ways of thinking about how we do things that address really broad issues including:

• Energy consumption
• Waste and how we deal with it
• Design in harmony with nature
• Designs that model natural systems
• Sustainability

The authors propose a really different way of thinking about things. (more…)

The NRDC is one of the really great organizations out there raising awareness and more importantly being a voice and a force to offset some of the more egregious environmental legislation being proposed.

Well, I have assiduously avoided mentioning Global Warming to this point. This is not because I don’t care, but because my “little” mission is to focus on how we can reduce energy consumption.

I think there’s a real danger in losing focus by getting too broad. (more…)

Are you like many Americans who spend more than they earn? Well, if you’re talking money, that ain’t the half of it.

Americans “spend” more resources than we make by about 5 times (more…)

Perhaps you’ve seen advertisements recently by oil companies. I was struck recently by Chevron’s advertisement .. indeed campaign, to reduce the amount of their product that we buy. BP also seems to be in the mix. Exxon/Mobil seems conspicuously absent.

Ok, the cynic in me says it’s really a PR ploy, but it’s not really (more…)

Modern computers can turn off the monitor, turn off hard disks, go into “standby mode” and even turn themselves off completely in a way that they leave everything just as it was.

Hibernating is a great feature of Windows, introduced in Windows 95, but really works now, 10 years later :-) (more…)

Many electronic devices use transformers to convert the power you get from the socket into lower voltage more like that of a battery. These are the black “bricks” that are such a pain to plug in — some have dubbed them “vampires” since their two teeth stick into the socket and suck electricity. But many are built into the device. Most use electricity even when the device they are powering is turned off. (more…)

We probably get 5 or 10 catalogs every day in the mail, and several times a week an advertising newspaper. We get some magazines, most of which we actually read, but the junk is unbelievable. We make such a fuss about phone and email spam and have passed legislation in both cases to prevent it, yet both are nearly costless compared to postal spam!

I can add my phone number to the “do not call” list, and I can unsubscribe to most email spam (or at least filter it out pretty effectively). I would think it would be to everyone’s benefit to make it easy to cancel the catalogs. (more…)

In several posts, I have talked about the massive energy cost of food, and food related waste. So I have started trying to address this problem by making changes, specifically by trying to buy organic or locally grown food, and by considering ways to reduce how much needs to get hauled off to be recycled. It’s only been a couple weeks so far, but I have to report that neither endeavor is proving to be easy. But I still think there are incremental changes I can make that will have value.

Eating organic food is harder than I had imagined. (more…)