Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
What’s your biggest drain on the environment? Showering, Air Conditioning, Heating, or Lighting?
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…
My dad taught me something when I was about 10 or 12 that stuck with me, and he probably doesn’t even remember doing it. We got out of the car in the driveway one windy afternoon and he walked around in front of our house picking up all the bits of trash strewn about — a Dunkin Donuts cup, some dirty bits of newspaper, maybe a candy wrapper or something like that.
