Five Percent: Conserve Energy

As I have become aware of my energy use, I have grown more interested in understanding the details. I have used four methods to measure my electrical use:

1. (actually) reading the electrical bill,
2. using a Kill-A-Watt meter to measure usage of things we plug in,
3. installing a PowerCost Monitor to display total house usage right in our kitchen, and
4. installing a TED 5000 monitor that measures and records our usage in great detail

Each of these methods is effective, and each has resulted in incremental changes. For us, the incremental changes have added up: we now use less than half of the electricity we used to. Everyone can do at least the first of these — I hope I’ll show you why it makes sense to go a step further. (more…)

Warren Buffett wrote an op-ed in the Times today — he continues to be one of the few money guys I look at and think, “What a smart man he seems to be.”

His editorial piece, titled Greenback Emissions is about fiscal restraint, or the lack thereof, expressed as inflation — the inevitable outcome of deficit spending. His argument is not that we should stop spending (on the contrary), only that we must be wary … cognizant of the what will happen next. Where many proscribe actions, Buffett instead warns our Congress of the likely future outcome.

What struck me as interesting is that Buffett bracketed his editorial with a parallel to the challenge facing Congress with the pending climate legislation. To be fair, this article was not “about” climate change. But the opening and closing phrases were. (more…)

Philips “Halogena” bulbs are not CFLs — they are incandescent bulbs that use less electricity than standard bulbs, and they work exactly like the bulbs they replace. They claim to last about 20% longer, also. Halogena bulbs cost more, about $3 more, per bulb in my case.

I could see no difference in performance compared to incandescent: they start instantly, have nice bright light at full power, nice warm light as they dim, and they dim continuously with no buzzing, the bulb looks the same and fits.

I would have preferred to use CFL bulbs: compared to standard incandescent Halogena bulbs use about 1/3 less electricity; CFLs use 4 to five times less. CFLs also last a great deal longer, even than Halogena’s modest 500 hour improvement. So Halogena are an incremental improvement.

But as per the mission of this blog: saving energy and conservation is a matter of a lot of small steps that add up to big, big savings. (more…)

Yesterday I installed two awnings over our south-facing bedroom windows — they look good, let you see out, are adjustable, and the SunSetter brand seems to be very high quality.

Keeping your house cool in the summer (with minimal, or no air conditioning) boils down to three things:

1. Don’t Add Heat from the Inside — cook on the grill, turn on the bathroom exhaust fan, keep the lights off
2. Don’t Let Hot Air from Outside In — shut windows, doors, and seal the drafts and leaks that let hot air in
3. Don’t Let Convective or Radiant Heat from the Sun In — insulation, low-E glass, blinds down … and outside shades

We have had exterior shades on some of our windows for several years now and they work great. They’re nothing more than big rolling window shades, but it’s key that they are outside, not in. Normal inside window blinds are good — they don’t let the sun that has already come in, get further than it has, and can reflect some of the heat back. But even in that pocket of air between the shade and the window, you’re allowing the sun to heat up the air in your house.

Exterior shades or awnings, however, do the same thing as window shades, but the heat never gets inside the house in the first place. We use both, and it has really made a difference. (more…)

After our recent energy audit found drafts in a number of places in our house, and even though the damper was closed, one of the biggest was the chimney — the auditor recommended a “chimney balloon“. It’s a good, simple product, and I can tell that it works beautifully. The maker claims that you can save almost twice it’s cost annually: a good way to reduce heating bills.

The chimney balloon is an inflatable bag, available in various sizes to fit inside your chimney. A tube and valve on the bottom allows you to inflate it so that it conforms to even the roughest, oddest shaped chimney interiors. The inflating tube is detachable, so there’s nothing visible when installed. The balloon is made of a tough, durable plastic. It can be easily removed as needed (but don’t forget to before lighting a fire!) and just as easily reinstalled. The cost is under $50, and their web site has a lot of great and helpful information on how to choose the right size.

I can tell that the chimney balloon works because it has solved an annoying problem for us already this summer (more…)

There are a lot of tips out there about how to use less energy with your refrigerator — the ones I have seen aren’t wrong, but I think they can be misleading. I would never argue that improving efficiency is a bad thing, but it’s important to keep the big picture in mind.

According to the US Energy Information Agency (EIA), refrigeration accounts for only 5% of household energy use.

So, this being the real picture, my blog is all about how the little changes we make can indeed add up. And I encourage people to do whatever changes they can — there are plenty out there, to be sure!

So with the big picture in mind, here are some of the factors to think about relating to refrigeration.

The Big Picture (of Refrigeration)

You may have read that adding jugs of water to take up space and act as a “buffer” is a good idea, and it is (unless you do what I saw a friend do).

There are several reasons why adding water bottles to the fridge (or extra ice to the freezer) make it more efficient. First, solids and liquids are better at storing heat energy than air because they are more dense, so they act as a “buffer”. Additional items in the fridge also mean that when the door opens, the vortex of warm outside air rushing in is disrupted — the things that are already cold stay put, especially if the jugs are in the front.

But there are some questions to consider before loading up on water jugs. First, the fridge has to work to get those jugs of water from whatever temperature they are at to the cooler temperature inside. I saw a friend who filled a jug of water to put in the fridge, but happened to have the water faucet on the “middle” setting — he ended up putting warm water in. Whoops. And how full is the right fullness — if you take the water out every time you shop, then put it in a few days later, it’s hard to say that there’s a net benefit. (more…)

To make a longer story short: our utility, NationalGrid is currently offering rebates for energy efficiency improvements. I will save $1,889, or 75% of the cost of fixing the insulation in our house. Other credits are available. Work must be done by July 31st. Update: as of August, the program has been extended. Here’s the special NationalGrid web site which provides the details.

After our energy audit, I started thinking about how I would get the things I needed done. I really didn’t know who should do the work, but I got a lead from the man who did our audit. His reference turned out to be a company that was defunct (or something), however I found this through searching the name he provided. The site I came across was called Service Magic, and they provide a referral service for contractors. I explained what I wanted, and they referred me to HomeWorks Energy, an insulation contractor in the Boston area. I called them, and Scott, the owner, told me that not only could he do the work, but that there was a great deal for NationalGrid gas customers doing insulating project using approved contractors in Massachusetts until the end of July — 75% off, up to $2,000.

(This kind of stuff never happens in real life, does it?) (more…)

We recently had an energy audit for our house and learned a lot, including:

• The most of the corners of the house were never insulated the first time
• Our bulkhead door leaks like a sieve (maybe that’s why I can see light through it :-)
• The attic door and whole house fan let in a lot of air
• The chimney damper is pretty useless in terms of insulating
• Air pours into our basement through the sill and old windows
• Most of our windows still need to have caulking around the edges — air is getting in
• All the leaks result in a complete air exchange about once every 70 minutes in winter

How the Audit Worked

There were two parts: a “blower door test” and an infrared camera inspection (the actual reports are linked below). (more…)

It’s pretty clear that LED is indeed the lighting of the future — CFL is an important, yet transitional technology. But LED is not ready for prime time — still too expensive, and still not bright enough, and still not suitable for many applications … yet.

But LED makers are doing everything they can to get people to buy, according to an article in the Green Inc. blog of the New York Times. Consider this point, made about a newly announced LED bulb:

…for starters, the advertised light output of the Pharox is about 300 “lumens” — the metric used for measuring the light coming off a bulb. That places it somewhere between a 25-watt and 40-watt incandescent. A 60-watt incandescent emits up to 900 lumens.

The company explained that the light output is comparable to a 60-watt bulb, depending on where one uses the bulb and for what purpose. “There are 60-watt soft tone/flame bulbs that generate less light than a Pharox 6-watt,” the company said.

Please, let’s be realistic: when we’re talking about comparing light bulbs that look like “regular” bulbs, as the Pharox does, I think it’s appropriate to compare their output to the same bulbs. (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…)