Five Percent: Conserve Energy

TED 5000 in my Hot Little Hand

I am waiting for a good time to turn off the power so I can install the little doohickey that makes it work. But there’s a lot more information about what it does available now. Here’s my summary.

First, TED is a home energy monitor, kind of an electricity meter on steroids. It can tell you how much electricity you’re using at the moment. The TED 1000 series did that, and is very similar in function to my PowerCost Monitor from Blue Line (same one as now sold on the Black and Decker label).

Knowing how much electricity you’re using at the moment is incredibly instructive, and has saved us hundreds of dollars in electricity by helping us identify and change a few things … and to keep us honest. I caught my wife using the dehumidifier in the basement last week, for example.

The TED 5000 gives you another feature, potentially more interesting than the real-time monitor, because TED 5000 remembers. (more…)

GreenTech Media has a good post on how email spam wastes more than just your time — it wastes electricity! Oh, and not just a little, according to the report: enough to power 2.4 Million homes — that’s about 2% of the households in the US. Yikes.

Sounds like a job for the EPA, to me. (more…)

There has been a lot written about how much power is consumed by the computers that drive the Internet. A lot has been written about “green” data centers. But I think there’s a far more significant trend when, combined with more efficient computers and data centers, will make a 10x or greater reduction in power demand possible: cloud computing.

Data centers, brown or green are huge buildings — they are truly incredible places, with thousands of computers owned by multiple companies. I have negotiated the contracts for “co-location” in a number of data centers: you pay for floor space, bandwidth, and power and get a facility that has great connectivity, power that never goes out, and a carefully cooled environment for the computers. This blog, and most other websites are located at such data centers. Little sites like this one share a “slice” of a server with a number of others. Large sites like the ones we have at the Internet companies I have worked at have our own computers and other equipment “co-located” in data-centers.

I have been paying attention to power since 1998 when we moved the first servers for the Direct Hit search engine to a co-lo. Our first boxes were about 8″ tall, and bolted to special racks, and I think we got 7 to a rack, along with a few other needed parts. These days computers are many times more powerful, yet are 1/4 as tall — “pizza boxes” — thin computers that use a lot of juice, and put out that much more heat.

One of my companies had a space with ~100 servers at a facility in Waltham, MA but had to move — the data center “ran out” of power (more…)

So Paul Graham and his Y Combinator venture firm have done it again: a new site called CO2stats has a clever way for any website to offset the carbon emissions associated with electricity needed to make the Internet magic happen.

And trust me, it ain’t magic. There’s a lot of electricity going into making that magic. And all that electricity creates a lot of greenhouse gases.

According to the CO_2stats site:

The carbon footprint of air and automobile transportation is widely known, but few people are aware that the electricity generation required for information and communication techologies (ICT) is now responsible for 2% of global CO2 emissions, exceeding the emissions of the entire aviation industry.

(emphasis mine). (more…)

I Mean it in the Best Possible Way

But I suppose that one man’s pork is another man’s passion, to paraphrase most terribly. And in the case of this bill, tax credits for renewable energy were … renewed. And unlike several other add-on’s, this one makes sense, in context. (more…)

Apple's Time Capsule

We have a Windows PC setup in our broom closet. It holds a bunch of files; our pictures, digital music, backups, and other stuff we all use. It’s also a shared printer server. Finally, it runs a bit of software that works with several “Squeeze Boxes” that let us play our digital music on the kitchen radio, and in our living room and outside patio. There’s a small monitor, keyboard and mouse which are needed when updating the machine. We also have our wireless network router in there.

The only problem: when all of this stuff is on, my Kill-a-Watt meter shows that it uses 108 Watts of electricity. And it’s on all the time. No wonder the closet is so hot!

Apple to the rescue! (more…)

It is a wonderful thing that car manufacturers are moving to hybrid versions of their vehicles.

Like many of the incremental features introduced in cars over the years, the good ones catch on. Shoulder belts, air bags, anti-lock braking, and many others have made cars safer.

And now, many cars are available with hybrid engines. This adds to the price of the car a little (or sometimes, it seems, a lot). And a hybrid system makes the car greener, right?

Why, the Chevy Tahoe is the green car of the year if you can believe that. (It costs $11,000 more to get the “green” hybrid version, so the car can get a paltry 22 miles per gallon).

A hybrid system does not make a car “green”, it just makes a car a little less of a bad thing. (more…)

Reuters is reporting a water powered car by a company called Genepax. Almost every source I could find left it at that: you pour in some water (any kind will do) and its generator will separate hydrogen from water, then use the hydrogen to power the vehicle. Just pour in more water to make the car go further. Just like the press release says. Nothing more.

Phew — our energy problems are solved!

(Oh, except for one little thing. Pesky annoying laws of physics. (more…)

Windows XP will not go into standby or hibernation in many cases. As I learned a few weeks ago after installing my Smart Strip and measuring the result with my Kill-A-Watt, when the computer is on, it uses a lot of electricity. But my Windows XP PC would not go into standby mode or hibernate. I believe I have finally solved my stand by issues.

(Update, 10/2008: See comments and responses below for troubleshooting and a updated windows hibernate and standby problem post I am maintaining as further information becomes available)
(Update, 2/2009: I am going to try to highlight notable comments in the comments thread below, as there are some good ones)

When the computer is on, it uses around 68 Watts. With the Smart Strip, when the monitor is off, other devices are also turned off, but it still draws 28 to 30 Watts. Standby gets me down to almost nothing, Hibernate gets me to nothing. Now my computer goes into “suspend” (sleep, stand by) all by itself, just as it’s supposed to. (more…)

Open parking lots are a blight on the landscape. They create “heat islands”, are poor at dealing with rain and snow runoff, have lights that generate light pollution and look ugly, and are unpleasant places to be in.