A lot of people enjoy watching TV and movies at home. My family really does. Most folks have some variation of entertainment system setup at home. Some basic components that almost every entertainment system include are TV, DVD Player and/or VCR and cable box. Some larger entertainment systems include a stereo receiver, CD player, DVR (e.g. TiVo), MP3 player and more. What most people don’t realize is that each of these components draws power even when turned off and it can be a considerable amount when you combine all the components in your entertainment center.
Why do they draw power even when they are turned off? A common reason is so that you can use the remote control to turn them on.
A good device/component, in my opinion, is one that uses the least power when turned off. In the entertainment center world good is under 2W when off. Bad can be >90W (WHEN TURNED OFF) and even 20W over time adds up very quickly. With a few minutes and a power strip, I have been able to lower the vampiric load of my entertainment center by 40W, read on to find out how you can do the same and what this will save you over time. More…
How long does it take to get clean in the shower? Is it 10 minutes? Did you know that a 10 minutes shower with a non-low flow shower head can use upwards of 80 gallons of water and generate up to 4 pounds of CO2, not to mention the cost of the energy to heat the water.
By installing a low flow shower head and cutting your shower time to 5 minutes you can reduce your water usages and CO2 emitted by More…
Some 130 million bikes were produced worldwide in 2007 — more than double the number of cars rolling off assembly lines (52 million). Bike production took off in the 1970s, and after a brief dip, has been soaring since 2001.
So, why don’t you hop on and get with the cool kids. It saves gas, which saves money and reduces your CO2 emissions. It’s healthy for the body and, More…
Can’t afford a hybrid car but want to do your part against climate change? U. Chicago researchers have determined that eating 20 percent less meat is climatically equivalent to switching to a hybrid car. That’s because it’s incredibly energy-intensive to raise cows, chickens, and other animal-meat products. Those animals also require lots of land, which means forest clearing. And don’t forget about More…
Have you ever thought about how much energy it takes to get things to the store before you buy them? A lot of thought is going into that kind of thing and there is a term for it, embodied energy. Now lets apply that thinking to that morning fix so many of us have every day, our morning coffee, tea or caffeinated soda. Let’s compare drinking a pot of tea versus 24 ounces of soda every day.
I weighed a couple items around my house to get a start:
10 tea bags weighs 1 oz (30g)
15 sweetner packets (Splenda) weighs 3/4 oz (20g)
24 oz soda in plastic bottle weighs 1lb 10 1/8 oz (739g)
Using 2 tea bags and 3 bags of sweetener for a pot of tea, which is what we use in my house, and a pot a day for a year we end up with 8 lbs per year. Figuring that tea travels 1,500 miles to get to the store via a semi-truck with a 231,800 pound miles per gallon, that works out to 0.052 gallons per pot a day habit per year. Now let’s switch glasses to soda. More…
Decorations don’t have to be green to be green. Available for the past couple years at reasonable prices, LED options for holiday lighting are available alongside the standard mini-lights of the last 20 years. Unfortunately, most purchases are still mini-light strands. Using LEDs saves electricity, pure and simple. An equivalent strand of LED lights uses 80-90% less electricity than mini-lights and 99% less than the bigger (C7 or C9) lights common for many exterior decorations (those big bulb holiday lights).
If the US switched just 20% of the decoration lights this Christmas season, we would save 440 GWh of electricity, or about 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide based on the EPA national average of 1,363 lbs/MWh for electricity. That’s over More…
Of course the answer depends on a lot of factors about you, your surroundings and how you relate. I’ll share some average for the US and go into some basic ways to calculate this for you. I was quite shocked with the magnitude of the difference when I went through this exercise myself. Please don’t mistake me for saying we shouldn’t do more just because it doesn’t do as much. Every little bit helps. If you are like me, you can’t do as much as you want right now. Hopefully you can use these concepts to prioritize your actions and where best to apply your energy and resources.
For an average US household, the energy utilization is mainly around HVAC (Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning), Lighting, Cars, Refrigeration. The percentages from Wikipedia are:
32% space heating
13% water heating
12% lighting
11% air conditioning
8% refrigeration
5% electronics (includes computers)
5% wet-clean (mostly clothes dryers)
To calculate your annual cost (both environmental in terms of carbon footprint and economic in terms dollars) follow the steps below.
A house is a complex system of inter connected components. Most of us, myself included, only have gross utility usage from each source to gleam some useful information from. Even with just your gas bill (natural gas, heating oil, or propane) and electric bill you can calculate a reasonable estimate of major energy usage. If you use electricity for heating, hot water, clothes drying and cooling, then this becomes much harder and you may wish to have an expert do a home energy audit. Check with your electric company as they may offer this for free if you are really interested in conserving. Given that gas furnaces/boilers, hot water heaters and clothes dryers are much more efficient than equivalent electric models, you should consider switching if that is an option. Here is how you can calculate how much energy goes into heating, hot water More…
It’s so simple. I never knew about solar lights before, but it seems they sit in your lawn charging throughout the day, and then automatically turn on at night (or they’re always on as long as they have enough charge?). So why not use them inside the home too?
Get a few from the hardware/garden store and rig them up to hang in any window that gets sunlight in the evening. Then, come nightfall, they’re providing you with plenty of free light to last as long as you need. Apparently, however, there’s no way to turn them off, but who cares, because the electricity is free and clean and you can put them in another room or drape a piece of fabric over them when you’re ready to go to bed. It sounds like they’re pretty affordable too.
Get the whole lowdown here, at Dawn’s Frugal for Life blog.
We’re going out to live something of an indoor/outdoor existence at my girlfriend’s father’s house for the next couple months. It’s a small house, so we’re probably going to set up a big tent in the yard to sleep in and spend a lot of our awake time on the porch or elsewhere on the property. I’m going to get me a few of these lights on the way out there and try them out. Why ever pay for lighting again?
Ooooh, that little green light really drives
me crazy! And yeah, I own a Kawasaki
DVD/CD player. So what?
I finally got home to my apartment tonight. For various and sundry reasons, my 10 day trip had extended to nearly 2 months, and so the apartment had been closed up for almost all that time (thanks to my Mom for saving my plants and Mike for saving my overstressed mailbox).
When I arrived home, I was delighted to find that I’m brilliant. Before leaving in February, I had switched off the power strip that feeds my television and stereo. This is particularly important because my stupid stereo sits on standby when it’s not on. I’ve heard some unbelievable statistics about the amount of U.S. energy wasted on standby electronics, but since it’s late and I’m sick, I’ll search for those specifics another day.
For now, suffice it to say, the simple flip of a switch saved me a bunch of money and the Earth a bunch of energy. In the future I’m going to power down every night — not just before trips.
I really needed some healthy yummy juice yesterday, so I bought a bottle (at the local food co-op in Mount Rainier, of course - Glut represent!). This morning I really needed some healthy yummy water, so I poured some from the tap (through a Brita filter of course because this is Washington DC and I have no interest in spending the rest of my week here in the bathroom), and into yesterday’s juice bottle. I carried it around with me all day — to a conference, to the park, even to a coffeeshop — refilling it in water fountains when necessary. What are the advantages of this?
(1) tap water is free. bottled water is not free.
(2) No extra bottle means 1 less plastic bottle produced, 1 less bottle of water shipped across the country, 1 less plastic bottle sitting in a landfill somewhere. If I use this bottle all week, that’s 7 less bottles. If I get a permanent water bottle, like a Nalgene, that means hundreds fewer bottles produced, shipped, and sent to landfills every year — just because of me. That feels good.
(3) I get a hint of flavor in my water.
(4) I get to carry my “Naked” bottle around longer.
Do you know that human beings spend $100 billion dollars on bottled water every year, but for just $15 billion a year everyone on the planet could have safe drinking water and proper sanitation? It’s true. Did you ever stop to think that, at $1.50-$2.50 per liter ($6-10 per gallon), bottled water costs twice what gasoline costs in the United States? Get the whole low-down on the implications of buying bottled water from this excellent OneWorld article from last year.
A lot of people enjoy watching TV and movies at home. My family really does. Most folks have some variation of entertainment system setup at home. Some basic components that almost every entertainment system include are TV, DVD Player and/or VCR and cable box. Some larger entertainment systems include a stereo receiver, CD player, DVR (e.g. TiVo), MP3 player and more. What most people don’t realize is that each of these components draws power even when turned off and it can be a considerable amount when you combine all the components in your entertainment center. 
How long does it take to get clean in the shower? Is it 10 minutes? Did you know that a 10 minutes shower with a non-low flow shower head can use upwards of 80 gallons of water and generate up to 4 pounds of CO2, not to mention the cost of the energy to heat the water.
Bikes are on the rise around the world, according to 
Can’t afford a hybrid car but want to do your part against climate change? U. Chicago researchers have determined that eating 20 percent less meat is climatically equivalent to switching to a hybrid car. That’s because it’s incredibly energy-intensive to raise cows, chickens, and other animal-meat products. Those animals also require lots of land, which means forest clearing. And don’t forget about 
Have you ever thought about how much energy it takes to get things to the store before you buy them? A lot of thought is going into that kind of thing and there is a term for it, embodied energy. Now lets apply that thinking to that morning fix so many of us have every day, our morning coffee, tea or caffeinated soda. Let’s compare drinking a pot of tea versus 24 ounces of soda every day. 
Decorations don’t have to be green to be green. Available for the past couple years at reasonable prices, LED options for holiday lighting are available alongside the standard mini-lights of the last 20 years. Unfortunately, most purchases are still mini-light strands. Using LEDs saves electricity, pure and simple. An equivalent strand of LED lights uses 80-90% less electricity than mini-lights and 99% less than the bigger (C7 or C9) lights common for many exterior decorations (those big bulb holiday lights).
Of course the answer depends on a lot of factors about you, your surroundings and how you relate. I’ll share some average for the US and go into some basic ways to calculate this for you. I was quite shocked with the magnitude of the difference when I went through this exercise myself. Please don’t mistake me for saying we shouldn’t do more just because it doesn’t do as much. Every little bit helps. If you are like me, you can’t do as much as you want right now. Hopefully you can use these concepts to prioritize your actions and where best to apply your energy and resources.
It’s so simple. I never knew about solar lights before, but it seems they sit in your lawn charging throughout the day, and then automatically turn on at night (or they’re always on as long as they have enough charge?). So why not use them inside the home too?
Actually it was a juice bottle first.
