January 2009 Archives

What Do You Think?

By Rachel VanCott on January 28, 2009 12:45 PM | 2 Comments

New to the blog? Start at the beginning and read about my two-week attempt to understand and reduce my energy consumption.

This is the first time we've tried a blog, and we'd love to hear what you thought of it. Send feedback through our normal channels, or just comment on this entry let us know what did and didn't work for you.

If you want to be notified by email when we start our next blog, let me know through our feedback form and I'll drop you a line to let you know when it's up. (Your email address will not be given to anyone else nor used for any other purpose.)

Two Weeks Down, a Lifetime Ahead

By Rachel VanCott on January 27, 2009 10:23 PM | No Comments

It was easy to take the stairs to the sixth floor of the building this morning. I'd love to say that my legs have grown accustomed to the climb, but it'd be more accurate to say that I was too busy thinking about what I'd say in this post to notice I was out of breath.

Over the past week, the changes that I made cut my home electricity use by 0.95 kWh/day (sixteen percent), and my gas use by 0.5 therms/day (about 14.6 kWh, or nine percent of my daily average).

I can't say what I'd save over the course of a year, since energy use and energy saving strategies vary as the seasons change. But I'm surprised by how much I was able to reduce with relatively little effort.

I thought about ending with a post about all the power that we take for granted, the costs we incur just by living in a country with lit streets and plowed roads. But I'm feeling more upbeat than I thought I would be. So we'll end on that note, with the understanding that there's work to be done, in public and private.

My week has been a drop in the bucket, and after today no one else will see if I unplug my computer when I leave my desk or if I fling open my windows to heat the whole of New England.

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Simple Questions

By Rachel VanCott on January 27, 2009 10:02 AM | No Comments

I like to go to colloquia. For those of you who don't live within the ivory tower, that means I like to attend university talks in which researchers describe their work and field questions. At best, I see a human light up as she describes the tiny part of the world that she's interrogated for days, months, or even years of her waking life. At worst, the talk goes over my head and I learn more technical terms and methods.

I haven't found the time to attend as many talks since I left school. Even when I do make it out, I find that my appreciation for the event has shifted. Instead of watching the speaker and absorbing slides and graphs, I find myself looking around at the audience. Most of the attendees are researchers but a few are laymen, like me. I wonder what the other non-experts take away from the evening. I wonder if they also get lost in the jargon, and if they have questions that sound too simple to ask, like I do.

It was nearly a year ago that I heard someone pipe up with one of those humble questions that all of us should dare to ask. I was at a research talk on the use of biofuels as an alternative energy source. The talk was at MIT and the man who stood, half shouting from the audience to be heard, was older and still wearing his tan overcoat though we'd been in the warm lecture hall for more than an hour. I can't remember his exact words, but he said something like this:

"I know this is off topic, but there are a lot of smart people in this room, so I just wanted to ask... Why don't we use the energy from gyms to power stuff? It seems like such a waste."

That's where the memory fades. I'd like to say that they answered his question and pointed to health clubs that do just that and that they mentioned the considerable efforts that made stationary bike generators a power option for people in developing countries, but I don't remember.

As far as I know, the major obstacle to harnessing human energy is the same one that plagues plans to harness wind and wave power. The potential for energy generation is there, but the infrastructure that could let us take advantage of it isn't in place yet. We can build great fields of wind turbines, but if we can't get the power back to the grid, it doesn't help.

Of course, there's always the option to do it yourself, at a one-person scale. But I don't mean to discuss the practicality of using a gym as a generator. My mind is on the interaction between the public and science. Science and engineering, in my experience, are driven in part by stupid questions--No, no, I don't mean stupid questions. Simple questions. Like: Why does this work the way it does? Could this be better or more efficient? Could we make things easier for humans or easier on the environment?

Scientists ask these simple questions in complicated words that make the question easier to act upon. That's intimidating. I ask in simple words that make me sound like a child. But I feel that now is a time to ask those questions of science.

Not because scientists have been negligent. I fully believe that minds more suited to the task than mine have already devised solutions for some of our energy woes. Much of the technology that we need already exists. I don't know the half of it, and that's the trouble.

A new science building was erected on campus, right before I left college. It was a pretty building, but it didn't have any green qualities. When I asked why, I was told that cost was an issue and that the building committee hadn't been aware of all the options. The last part of that worries me. We, the average people, need to be familiar with the solutions already available, and there's no quicker way of learning about this world than asking brave, simple questions.

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Escalators, Elevators, or Stairs? Oh my!

By Rachel VanCott on January 26, 2009 1:41 PM | 4 Comments

I've been trapped in passcard protected stairwells, and for a few heart-pounding minutes in a slow elevator, but I've never been betrayed by an escalator... for obvious reasons.

Photo Credit: A-Digit/istockphoto

I like riding the escalator. I like watching the steps fold flat and feeling the wind in my hair. Besides, nothing beats an escalator for visibility. Elevators are hidden behind doors, and stairs tucked away within fireproof stairwells. But the escalator? It's a different animal. People build around the escalator. It's the centerpiece of the mall, visible from a distance.

But when it comes to energy use, the escalator is shamefully bad.

A case study from one environmentally-minded motor control manufacturer--The Power Efficiency Corporation--suggested that an escalator operates at a rate of about four to six kilowatts. Multiply that by every hour of every day that the escalators run and you've quite a sum.

From what I can see, the biggest trouble is that escalators don't care if you take the stairs. Unlike elevators, which only come when they're called, escalators run constantly.

Elevators are better, but the characteristics that make them more efficient, like on-demand service to varying heights, also make it difficult to generalize about the energy use. So I cheated and set a rule of thumb according to what I can reasonably expect of myself. I'll take the stairs to the sixth floor (where I work) but the elevator to my friend's apartment (on the tenth floor of his building).

Recent efforts to create variable-speed escalators and efficient elevators that use regenerative breaking give me hope that one day soon I'll get to be guilt-free and lazy again. Until then, I'll work on my calf muscles.

Edit: I messed up on the kilowatt, kilowatt-hour notation up above. Fixed now. Thanks to qovert for catching it.

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Energy Sapping Screen Savers

By Rachel VanCott on January 26, 2009 12:04 PM | No Comments

I meant to include this with the post on power settings
.
Your screen saver may be costing you energy. From EnergyStar:

Screen savers generally do not save energy. In fact, certain graphics-intensive screen savers can cause the computer to burn twice as much energy, and may actually prevent a computer from entering sleep mode.

Screen savers were originally developed to prevent the permanent etching of patterns on older monochrome monitors. Modern display screens do not suffer as much from this problem, but screen savers are still used for entertainment.

If you want to use your screen saver in conjunction with monitor power management, set the screen saver "wait time" to less than the period of time after which the monitor enters sleep mode. If your screen saver appears but your monitor never enters sleep mode, your screen saver may be the culprit: try disabling it.

Your Mug and The Environment

By Rachel VanCott on January 24, 2009 11:56 AM | 4 Comments

On Thursday, I posted a link to a "guerrilla" sticker campaign that's drawing attention to the ways we absentmindedly waste paper products. As the day wore on I couldn't stop thinking about another common source of waste in the office: the disposable coffee cup.

I used to think that ceramic mugs were automatically ecofriendly, but they're not. The study that I found suggested that you need to reuse a ceramic mug about 500 times to hit the "break even point"--the point where the energy used to make the ceramic mug, divided by the number of uses, equals the energy used to make a single styrofoam cup.

The most recent work that I could find on the issue was a study that compares the energy used to make ceramic, glass, paper and polystyrene (commonly called "styrofoam") cups, written by chemist and professor Martin Hawking. The paper was published in the journal of Environmental Management in 1994, which sounds like a scientific lifetime ago, but my little sister (who studies paper science and engineering at college) said that the field is slow moving and that the numbers could still be relatively accurate. Let me know if you find a newer study or review article.

The study concluded that polystyrene cups take the least energy to make. In fact, it takes more energy to wash your mug than it takes to make a styrofoam cup, according to Hawking's paper. But there's little doubt that the petroleum-based food containers have a bad reputation. Nobody seems to have a particularly cost-effective way of recycling styrofoam, so most of the cups go straight into a landfill. EPA estimates suggest that Americans throw away nearly 25,000,000,000 styrofoam cups each year. So I understand why the food containers have been banned in a number of U.S. Cities, and I why get dirty looks from hipsters when I get my tall mocha double-cupped at the coffee shop.

In the end, the ceramic mug comes out as the most eco-friendly choice, but only if you keep using it and maybe even use it more than once between washing. (I'd suggest rinsing between uses. Otherwise, it sounds a wee bit gross.)

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A Carbon Count on Orange Juice

By Rachel VanCott on January 23, 2009 11:27 AM | 3 Comments

This article from yesterday's New York Times corroborates the claim I made about paying more attention to what you eat, rather than how far it travels to get to you.

But I never guessed that oranges would show up on the most wanted list.

From the NYTimes:

The biggest single source of greenhouse gas emissions turned out to be simply growing oranges, not transportation or production.

credit: JoeBiafore/istockphoto

Power Settings and Power Savings

By Rachel VanCott on January 22, 2009 12:49 PM | 4 Comments

If you use a computer at work (like I do), double-check your power settings. On a Mac, you can do so by selecting "system preferences" from the apple icon menu at the top left. On a PC, go into the control panel. If you're running Linux I presume you already know what you're doing (and it varies from distro to distro. Call upon your local open source forum for help.)

Setting your computer to standby after it's been idle for a few minutes will save energy when you're away from your desk and, as an added benefit, it may startle you out of a daydream if you're zoning out at your desk.

The energy savings are impressive. By setting my computer to "sleep" after five minutes of being idle, and putting it to sleep before leaving for the night, I used about 30 percent less energy during the day (from 0.45 kWh to 0.32 kWh) and halved my computer's energy use during the night (from 0.08kWh to 0.04 kWh).

I know, I know, why should my computer use any power at all at night? Well, I don't turn off the computer at night because I hate waiting for the system to boot in the morning. It's embarrassing to admit, but I started the habit back when I had an older computer that took a significant amount of time to start from being off. Now that I have a faster computer, I'll nix the old habit (starting now). (The Department of Energy suggests that you should turn off your computer if you're going to leave it for two hours, but turning it off even if you're only leaving for an hour is probably a good idea.)

In fact, you might want to unplug it altogether. Most computers, like many other appliances, use power to stay in a "ready" mode, even when they aren't on. This is what people are talking about when they refer to a "phantom load." The amount of power used by your computer when it's off but plugged in is small. We're talking watts, not kilowatts.

The folks over at the Lawrence Berkley National Lab drew up this chart of the phantom load (expressed in Watts) used by some common appliances:

"Count" is the number of appliances of each type that they tested. Click for more

I've seen a few studies and articles that talk about re-engineering household electronics to use less than one watt while in standby mode, but in the meantime pulling the plug on your idle appliances is the only way to reduce the waste.

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These Come From Trees

By Rachel VanCott on January 22, 2009 11:41 AM | No Comments

This is a bit off-topic, but it's neat enough to share. I encountered one of these stickers in the bathroom of my local grocery store a few days ago:

Here at NOVA, we just had motion-sensitive, single-sheet, paper towel dispensers installed in all of the bathrooms. So it takes considerable time and effort to use more than one paper towel. But maybe your workplace could go a little greener with the help of these stickers.

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Transportation

By Rachel VanCott on January 21, 2009 2:45 PM | 1 Comment

photo credit: step2626/istockphoto.com

Show of hands, who hasn't been on a bus (or bike) since middle school?

Everyone knows you should ride the bus, bike, or rollerblade to work to "save the environment." But that's easier said than done. Buses, like cabs, are never nearby when you need them, cycling leaves one at the mercy of Mother Nature, and rollerblading takes coordination.

Yesterday I mentioned that my method of transportation is about as good as I can make it. I travel to and from work by bike when I can, and by bus when the weather is too bad. I get cold in the winter, and overheat in the summer. My jacket is studded with blinking LEDs and I have what seems like constant helmet hair, but it's worth it. Here are a few of the reasons why.

Energy Conservation Traveling by bike is a marvelously efficient way to go. A cyclist burns about 35 kilocalories (this is the "calorie" you see on nutrition labels) per mile. To put that in perspective, see how other modes of transportation measure up: The subway runs at about 800 kcals/mile, the bus at 900 kcals/mile and a car at 1800 kcals/mile.

Gridlock/air pollution When I first started biking to work, I was surprised to learn that biking is slightly faster than driving, at least in Boston. Bikes don't get snared in traffic jams, and don't contribute smog.

Camaraderie Nothing brings you closer to another person than shared misery, and nothing provides more common misery than the weather. Is it too cold? Too rainy? Too hot? When you cycle to work, you know firsthand. Cyclists never run out of things to say about the weather. Join our ranks.

I realize that I'm speaking from a place of privilege. I can afford to advocate cycling and public transportation. I live in a city where the buses and trains run every 10 minutes during rush hour and on the half hour during the day. Many of our streets have bike paths (sadly, during the winter, "bike path" seems to be just another word for snowdrift), and my neighborhood was recently named the best walking city in America.

Not so long ago, I lived in upstate New York. There, the bus was unreliable and nothing was close enough to walk to. Anyone who didn't own a car was asking for a preponderance of boring Saturday nights.

I also realize that even in a city like mine, there are other considerations that keep people car-bound. If I had a dependent to worry about, or lived more than a few miles from work, I'd be sorely tempted back into car ownership.

I'm not sure I'd have the guts to do what this cyclist does.

For those who can't change their ways entirely, keep these common tips in mind: Carpool when you can, and try to run your errands in one go to maximize path efficiency. If you work flexible hours, shift your schedule to avoid rush hours Slow down to reduce the drag on your vehicle and maximize fuel efficiency, inflate your tires properly, and watch out for cyclists.

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Watch The Big Energy Gamble Online

By Rachel VanCott on January 21, 2009 11:09 AM | 3 Comments

You can now watch The Big Energy Gamble on our website, in case you missed it last night.
Check it out.

Halfway Through

By Rachel VanCott on January 20, 2009 6:04 PM | 8 Comments

It's official: I don't use a lot of power. Hang on, I need to qualify that before I get into trouble. What I mean to say is that my household does not use a lot of power compared to other households in New England. Compared to a rural Rwandan, I'm an incredible energy hog.

The average New England household uses 115.3 million BTUs (33,700 kWh) per year.
I estimate* that my household uses 86.5 million BTUs (25,300 kWh) a year.

*This is probably an overestimation because I approximated my energy use by taking the average of the past five months multiplying it by twelve. So the sample contains a disproportionate amount of power-sucking winter months.

Okay, so I'm not really that glib about it. That graph might make a neat conversation piece at the next neighborhood potluck, but I'm not competing against the average household. I'm competing against myself.

This brings me to the point of today's post. The first half of my trek into learning about energy use and conservation is complete. I wasn't able to track the power use of every appliance in my home and workplace, but I did get a look at some of the numbers and I'm eager to embark on week two: the conservation phase.

I'm tackling this week head on--I've decided to try a whole bunch of energy-saving tips at once. That means it'll be hard for me to tell which measures save the most energy, but it's pretty likely that I'll see a result. Tonight I'm going to.

•Lower my hot-water heater temp. by 10ºF
On their website, the DOE suggests that doing this can save three to five percent of your energy cost. Right now we keep the heater set at 125ºF. So I took a thermometer into the shower with me this morning to see if I'm maxing out the heat at any point. I measured the water at 105ºF, and I'd guess that I wash dishes at the same (or slightly warmer) temperature. So I don't think it'll kill me to lower the water heater from 125º to 115º. We'll see if my roommates notice the difference.

•Weatherproof my windows with plastic sheeting
I'm a renter, which means that my house is poorly insulated, the windows let cold air in, and I'm not in a position to do much about it. But I know how to install plastic sheeting. It doesn't offer the kind of comfort you'd get from an insulated storm window, but it will block breezes. Here's a quick way to test and see if your own windows could benefit from a similar treatment: Hold a lit stick of incense near the sill. If the smoke quickly blows away, you probably have a leaky window. I didn't need to pull out the incense to see how leaky my own windows are. On windy nights, the curtains move.

•Switch out the last of my incandescent lightbulbs for CFLs
I still have some reservations about the mercury in Compact Florescent Lights, but it looks like the lights are the most inefficient things in my room, so I'm making the change. Hopefully by the time I need to replace the bulbs retailers will have in-store recycling programs, just like they do for batteries and paint.

•Lower the thermostat
The Energy Star website suggests that lowering the thermostat by five to eight degrees before leaving home for a few hours will save energy (and money). My roommates are on board for this one, but we're rarely all home-or all away from home-at the same time, so I'm not sure how much this will help.

Over the week I'll try to:
•Take shorter showers
•Turn out lights when I leave a room
•Wash clothes in cold water
•Use a toaster oven instead of an oven where applicable
•Cover pots while boiling water or cooking, and match my pot to the burner

These are simple, commonsense, commonplace changes. None will cost much money or cause major inconvenience. It's just a matter of breaking old habits and building new.

My plan to conserve energy at work isn't anywhere near as elaborate. I'll take the stairs instead of the elevator (even though I haven't figured how much energy that'll save, if any), and I'll be trying a few tricks to decrease the amount of energy used by my computer. In terms of transportation, I don't have much room to improve. More on that tomorrow. Don't forget to tune it to PBS at 8 pm tonight and check out the show.

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New Administration, New Energy Plan

By Rachel VanCott on January 20, 2009 10:21 AM | No Comments

Go ahead, spend the day glued to your news outlet of choice and luxuriate in the wall-to-wall coverage of the inauguration and inauguration-related festivities. But when the clock strikes eight*, switch it over the PBS and check out The Big Energy Gamble.

In the meantime, refresh your knowledge of the President's energy plan and check out the audio highlights from NOVA's interview with Obama's Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu.

*Check your local listing to make sure the show starts at 8 on your local PBS station.

Edit: As of 12 noon, I changed "President-elect" to "President."

Easy Eating Green

By Rachel VanCott on January 18, 2009 11:50 AM | 1 Comment

Everyone was mad for locally produced and grown products during the summer and fall, when farmers markets were at their most inviting, and the produce section of my grocery store is still picketed with a few little signs that tout the birthplace of various fruits. But the New England winter has knocked local produce off the radar for the time being. That's alright with me.

In a perfect world, who wouldn't buy pesticide free, lovingly raised, organic, local food if it was available, tasty, and cheap? Instead, we have to pick our way through high prices, confusing advertising, and our long-indulged taste for foods that aren't in season. (Strawberries in January, anyone?)

So you have to decide what matters most. Which is better, locally grown or organic? Should I eat less animal products or buy a brand that assures me that the animals are well treated? How am I supposed to know?

I've seen evidence for the claim that what you eat is more important than how it gets to you.

According to the authors of this paper from the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, "[greenhouse gas] emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase." (Italics are mine.) It's no surprise that it takes a lot of energy to raise and transport red meat. But I've never seen anyone compare the impact of buying local to the impact of eating less red meat.

I'm a vegetarian. I've been one for about twelve years. But if the authors of this paper are correct, you don't have to be a vegetarian to decrease your food footprint. Simply shifting your diet so that you eat less red meat and dairy products (about one day's worth of calories less) makes more of a difference than buying all locally grown food.

(As far as I'm aware, the jury's still out on the environmental impact of lab-grown meat.)

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has this neat calculator that gives you an easy way of estimating the impact that diet changes could have on your energy use.

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The Results From Thursday

By Rachel VanCott on January 16, 2009 10:30 PM | No Comments

On Thursday night I went home and unplugged everything in my room.

Aside from lamps, which I'll deal with later, I came up with a surprisingly tiny haul--one clock radio, two battery chargers, a cell phone charger, and two laptops.

I threw everything into a trash bag and headed off to my friends' house. We tested everything again using a more expensive (and presumably more reliable) ammeter. The new readings mostly agree with what I was getting from the Kill-a-watt, so I'll be using that from now on. We're still unable to determine the cause of the impossible 42-watt-reading from Wednesday night, but it looks like things are back on track.

Here's how the power use in my bedroom breaks down, in terms of the wattage used by each appliance. (I used the information printed on light bulbs for the lamp watt estimates.)

With the new numbers I was able to estimate that my room consumes about half a kilowatt-hour per day. According to my electric bill, we use about 6.5 kWh each day at my house. I'd guess that most of the rest comes from the fridge and lighting throughout the rest of the house, since we heat the apartment and cook with gas.

I didn't realize it would take so much time and energy (no pun intended) to measure the power draw of appliances. And now that I've done it, I'm disappointed to find that they don't even account for a tenth of my electricity use. I need to keep looking for a place where energy-conservation can have an impact that seems more significant.

I think my expectation of the energy savings associated with small electronics was artificially high because of the number of news stories I've read about the merit of pulling the plug on my wasteful, vampiric, power-sucking electronics, and switching out my incandescent light bulbs for compact florescents or maybe even LEDs. Both changes are worth making and actions like that have to add up.

But sometimes the little things feel like... well, little things. That's why it's heartening to see top-down solutions, like California's legislation on energy efficiency, that compliment the actions that everyone can take to reduce energy use.

What about you? Have you made any small or big changes in your energy use lately?

Tentative Success

By Rachel VanCott on January 16, 2009 12:11 PM | 2 Comments

Here's the setup from last night. More on that adventure as soon as I make some sense out of the results.

In Which Things Get Complicated

By Rachel VanCott on January 15, 2009 1:57 PM | 4 Comments

Last night, Boston was cold. It's the kind of weather that's really only good for dogsled racing while safely bundled in blankets, being Rana sylvatica, or staying indoors with a cup of tea. So I spent last night engaged in the latter, happily recording current measurements until a friend glanced at the numbers and pointed out that the readings for the power use on my laptop seemed awfully high.

I have one of those ultra portable laptops that uses an efficient solid-state hard drive, and isn't much bigger than a hardcover book.

My measurements (taken with the ammeter, just like yesterday's toaster reading) came out to a current of 1.1 amps. According to the formula I used yesterday (Volts x Amps= Watts), the laptop was using 132 Watts. But my friend pointed out that the AC/DC adaptor for the laptop can't draw more than 36 watts! (It says so on the back.)

I wasn't sure what was going on, so I decided to try to get a reading with my backup tool--the kill-a-watt meter pictured with me in the sidebar. The kill-a-watt is just another power meter. It's more...how do I put this... user-friendly than the ammeter. It converts current and voltage into watts and even tracks power use over time and calculates kilowatt-hours for you.

The kill-a-watt gave a much more reasonable reading--0.42 amps. But that's still more current than the laptop can handle. And the Watts readout didn't equal the Volts times Amps. This makes me very nervous.*

Here's the bottom line:
I'm going to need some help to figure this out. So tonight I'm packing my small appliances into a sack and heading to meet some friends who have more sensitive tools over at MIT. Wish me luck.

*This whole affair makes me nervous about yesterday's breakfast measurements. So I tried the measurement again this morning, using both the ammeter and the kill-a-watt in turn to see if they'd disagree again. This time, they agreed. I also went to a few external sources to check my numbers against the manufacturer's, and the values I got for the toaster seem right. It looks like the measurement problem only shows up for devices that draw a small amount of power. How small? I'm not sure.

I know I promised a post on green computing today, but I'm afraid that's on hold until I figure this out.

Breakfast by the Numbers

By Rachel VanCott on January 14, 2009 2:22 PM | No Comments

Making breakfast has become a full-scale production. Now I need tools, a modified extension cord, and my wits about me, all before coffee.

Here's what I found when I tried to calculate the power that went into cooking my breakfast at work this morning:
I used about 0.03562 kWh to toast an English muffin, and another 0.0091 kWh to brew my coffee (PBS blend).

And here's how I measured it:

The multimeter that I'm using has a clamp-on ammeter, which measures the strength of a flow of electrons (better known as electrical current).

When you press down on a toaster lever, electrons travel from the wall socket, along a wire, through the filament in the toaster (heating the muffin), and along a second wire, back to the socket. To read the current, I had to place the ammeter's jaws around one of the wires.

But my toaster cord, like yours (feel free to go check), has the two wires stuck together as a single cord, and I couldn't really splice the cord on the toaster at work. So I cut apart an extension cord and plugged the toaster into that instead.

*(Electrocution alert: A number of people walked by my desk, wide-eyed, as I split the extension cord. I suspect they thought it was plugged in. It wasn't. I don't want to die. Don't you do that either. And if you're playing along at home and you hit a wire, toss the cord and get a new one. I ruined one extension cord and feel little to no shame.)*

The ammeter measurement on the toaster came to 6.25 amps. I multiplied this by the voltage (120 volts is standard for a wall socket in North America) to get the watts reading: 750 watts.

Toasting took 171 seconds.

So I used 35.62 watt-hours (0.03562 kilowatt-hours) to brown an English muffin.

I calculated the numbers for the coffee the same way.

On a related note, you have to get up pretty early if you want to measure and chart the power used by all your household appliances before making it in to work. In other words, I haven't quite finished the diagram I wrote about making last post.

Next time: The disappointing tale of how much power my laptop uses, even when it's on standby, and thoughts on "green computing". Check out the story our designer just sent me.

"What Do You Need the Stopwatch For?"

By Rachel VanCott on January 13, 2009 6:38 PM | 1 Comment

-My sister, in reference to the first post

So far, I've spent a lot of time dreaming up plans for monitoring power use. But before I dive into particulars, I want to draw a bit of the big picture.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. residents used a little less than 100,000 kilowatt-hours per person in 2007.

That much energy could power almost 1,000,000 100-watt lightbulbs for an hour.

Qwasyx/istockphoto.com

Here's another way to think of it. We'd have to burn 8 gallons of gasoline, per person, per day to generate that much energy.

The DOE site mentioned that energy consumption data was collected by the EIA--The Energy Information Administration, but I wasn't able to dig up the numbers and method behind those figures. So I'm not sure if the above information includes all aspects of a person's energy use, or just what they use at home. (Another DOE page suggested that over a quarter of the average person's energy use comes from transportation.)

For this project, I decided to divide my energy use into three main sectors: home, work and transportation.

At Home
In general, about half of home power use goes toward heating and cooling a living space. Lighting takes the next big slice out of the pie, then refrigeration, water heaters, various small appliances, and so on down the line.

I'm curious to see what the most power hungry part of my home will be. I'll check out the energy used by small and large appliances and keep an eye on our gas and electricity meter.

I spent some time trying to decide if hot water use was relevant enough. The government convinced me that it's worth looking into. So I'll be taking that into account as well.

At Work
As you might expect, my employer is pretty environmentally conscious. We have a rooftop garden, low-flow toilets, and the lights in the office are governed by motion-sensors. (As I was writing this, they flipped off. I guess everyone was being extraordinarily still. A bit of jumping around was needed.)

In the interest of fairness, I plan to ignore all the good measures taken by WGBH and focus in on my prodigal personal space. I'll be monitoring the energy used by my computer and various other electronics (basically anything that wouldn't be running if not for my button pushing.) This includes the toaster, microwave, coffee maker, and, of course, the elevators.

Transportation
This section is the least defined for now. In kinder weather I commute by bike, but recent snowstorms have driven me to the bus, subway and the occasional ride from car-owning friends.

This one needs a bit more thought and will get its own post.

I'll update a bit more as I start to get readings on different appliances around the workplace and at home. Next post, I'll say a bit more about how I'm getting those numbers and introduce you to my new friend--the multimeter.

The stopwatch, by the way, along with a recently acquired bucket, is for measuring hot-water use. I'm not looking forward to week two (the conservation phase of the experiment) on that one.

Resolve and Reduce

By Rachel VanCott on January 7, 2009 11:29 AM | No Comments

We're entering the attrition phase of this year's resolution season. According to professor and clinical psychologist John Norcross, about a quarter of New Year's resolutions won't make it past the first week. In six months, over half will be abandoned. But while we're riding this reckless "high" of self-improvement, let's talk energy use. Better yet, let's talk energy conservation. I'm willing to bet that "reduce energy use" topped more than a few resolution lists this year, right up there with "lose 10 pounds," "be nicer," and "finally finish Guns, Germs, and Steel."

I'm not above self-help, particularly if it'll aid the environment. But a vow like "reduce energy use" is so vague that it hardly seems achievable. As Norcross says, "If you can't measure it, it's not a very good resolution."

So here's the plan. I've challenged myself to a two-week test. Record (week one) and reduce (week two) my energy use. I'm armed with a pair of household power meters, a thermometer, stopwatch, calculator, lots of little notebooks for data gathering, and the naive insistence that this is a good idea. It's not a full-fledged resolution, but with a little luck, I'll learn a lot about my place in our energy ecology and at least a bit about sustainable changes that could decrease my impact on our environment.

Of course, the whole affair is timed to complement our broadcast of The Big Energy Gamble. Check back here starting Tuesday, January 13, a week before the show's premiere, to follow my blogged exploits, hear some of the latest news in energy conservation, and pick up some tips that might work for you.

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This page is an archive of entries from January 2009 listed from newest to oldest.

Check back daily and follow my attempt to measure and reduce my energy use.

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