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No Impact Week Day 5

January 6, 2011 by souncivilized 4 Comments

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The Kill A Watt
The Kill A Watt

It’s almost embarrassing to say, but up until last year it was not uncommon that we would have the TV on every day until bed time.  My wife hated it, but it’s just what I did.  What seemed normal last year seems strange and wasteful now.  We got rid of cable last last year, it was just not worth the monthly price.  We also decided we needed every spare hour back in our lives, and of course as a Bonus we save the electricity from a 55″ flat panel.  We do watch a couple of times a week, mainly documentaries from Netflix or Paul Wheaton’s YouTube channel on Permaculture.  Every once in a Blue Moon I’ll hook up the digital antenna so I can watch the Cowboys lose, and a little of that goes a long way.

I don’t miss CSI, Lost, Monk, Iron Chef, Man vs. Food, No Reservations, Trading Spaces, Heroes, Discovery Channel, History Channel, NASA, Unsolved Mysteries, Unsolved History, Poirot and Sherlock Holmes reruns on PBS, Deadliest Catch, Law and Order, Law and Order CI, Law and Order SVU, X Files reruns, American Chopper, Biker Buildoff and Myth Busters.  I don’t miss them at all.

With the Day 5 challenge, and reading ahead to Day 6, I’m learning much more than I expected about my water and electricity footprint outside our house, to support our basic lifestyle, and it’s really hitting home.  Personally I still go back to the premise that helping people live more sustainably has so many direct benefits to their lives and their so-called Quality of Life that it’s the best place to start.  I think this will be more true if the economy continues to falter.  I like saving money, eating better, and doing fun things with people I love.  I know there’s a bigger picture but there’s also a smaller picture, my life, and it’s great to get people excited about their own lives too.  It helps paint a picture of the kind of better lives and communities we can build together.

…….

Colin wrote about not having a TV and for entertainment doing things like taking Isabella to the garden to see fireflies and the profound moment that she looked up and said, “I’m so happy Daddy,” note that there was no philosophical discussion of energy consumption.  It’s just simply a better way to live.  Not only are people being robbed of their lives by watching non-stop-TV-marathon, but hey, we’re being robbed of their lives too. Maybe the next Einstein is chowing down on a bag of gummy bears and an energy drink fixated on Cartoon Channel from Friday dusk until Monday morning, and we’ll never meet that person.  We all know why we got here, better content drives more viewers, drives advertising, drives product revenue, etc.

Side note, a friend recommended watching a BBC documentary on Youtube, A Century of the Self.  It’s a very long documentary, but take a look at this 10 minute segment to see how women were manipulated into smoking (“Liberty Torches”?  Really?).  Learn how later after the war, surplus manufacturing was geared to consumer products and powerful investors started propaganda machines to make you buy things.  Actually the man at the center was Freud’s nephew using his Uncle’s theories of the Primitive Urges that drive us.  He is now known as the Father of the PR industry.  The film seems to document the moment we shifted into consumerism, from a ‘needs’ to a ‘desires’ culture.  From buying quality items you need (necessities promoted in functional terms like durability), to building an emotional connection about things you buy, making you feel like a movie star (I am powerful if I smoke, I am sexy in this car).  Just so you’re aware, the businessmen who created this paradigm shift regularly referred to people like you and me as the Ignorant Masses.  I’m not trying to demonize anyone but it’s hard to find the redeeming aspects of these changes for the ordinary folk like you and me.  60 years later we can see the shocking road this has lead us down, in this incredible minute and a half video from CampaignForRealBeauty.com, with the powerful closing message, “Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.”  That’s why I think it is warranted to focus on the smaller picture as a starting point.  Just like on an airplane in an emergency, put on your own oxygen mask first, or you won’t be able to help anyone else.

So that brings me back to today and my goal to reduce energy consumption in my 7-day-paradigm-shifting-eco-rama-marathon.

Here’s what we’ve done so far before this week

  • Full LED lighting in the kitchen with an expensive dimmer switch.  The problem is that it flickers, and between the electrician, electric company and fixture vendor, everyone says it’s not their issue.  Since our kitchen is now lit solely with 8 LED cans, this is an annoying problem, especially given the cost.
  • CFL’s in all other rooms except one incandescent in the bedroom where we read because the CFL’s give me a reading headache.
  • Dropped the thermostat to 68, all winter, and OFF during most of the day.
  • Energy Star appliances and new, low energy heater for the house
  • Got rid of the big water heater and went with a gas powered wall mount, on-demand system that hangs on the outside of the house.  Bonus, got about 16 square feet of the house back.
  • Insulated all walls except our bedroom.  Just haven’t gotten to it yet, and now it’s totally noticeable that the house draft comes from our room.
  • Replaced all windows with double pane, new, energy efficient
  • Added plantation shutters to all the windows – keeps out thermal energy during the summer and allows a lot of light to come in most of the day

What I’m realizing we haven’t figured out yet

Water filtration system for water quality. We had to go with a powered unit due to water pressure and it runs almost constantly.  I will look at gravity fed units but I don’t know anything about this.

Whole house air circulation for dust control. We live by the freeway and have two large dogs, a cat, and a bird (all adopted).  Our neighborhood used to be an orchard, and not sure how that contributes but our neighbors assert it as a factor, all this adds up to a lot of dust.  We can control it by leaving the forced air fan On Longer and catching it in the filter.  It’s using a lot of energy but I can’t deal with the dust.

And what we’re doing this week

I bought a Kill A Watt (yes, new) to get a better understand of what each Thing is using, and measure the ghost power issue.  I found that each of our 4 wireless phones from the land-line that we RARELY use is constantly drawing 3.3 watts, and MY HEAVENS THE COFFEE MAKER USES 900 WATTS!  WTH?  Unused clock radio, 4 watts, white noise window fan to help me sleep is 50.5 watts.  For ghost power I’ve got plug strips in the areas we identified like stereo equipment.  Looks like the TV stays between 120 and 130 watts while we’re watching it.

In a perfect world Elliptical Machines should produce power and mine doesn’t.  Turns out that some do.  Here is a study on harnessing human power from fitness facilities.  I have added the following two projects to my To Do list, using some old solar panels (from cheap yard lights) to make a cell phone charger, and hooking an alternator to an exercise bike to produce ‘workout power‘.

Power to the people!

Filed Under: No Impact Tagged With: energy conservation, energy consumption, No Impact, sustainable living, videos

Comments

  1. Tom Raftery says

    February 24, 2011 at 1:00 am

    Hey Brad,

    Love to know how you found the Kill-a-Watt.

    I used a Current Cost meter for a while – it was nice, gathered energy use for the whole home and uploaded it to Google PowerMeter (when I configured it to). The downside of it though was that it meant I had to have my computer running 24×7 to get 24×7 energy data!!!

    I uploaded a series of videos to YouTube on vampire draw from various devices around the house which I measured with an individual power outlet meter like the Kill-a-Watt. The biggest surprise was the mobile phone chargers taking only 0.1W (I tested 6 diff types from 4 manufacturers). Swapping out one 50W halogen spot and replacing it with a 3.6W LED saves as much energy as unplugging >450 phone chargers! The phone charger thing is a distraction at best.

    In other news, the LEDs I installed cause a flicker in our main room as well – this was when I had fittings which took multiple 3.6W GU10 LEDs. I found the flicker went away when I removed one of the LEDs and replaced it with a 9w GU10 CFL! In our case the flicker happened when the lights were turned off so it may not be the same for you.

    Reply
    • Brad says

      February 24, 2011 at 10:39 am

      Hi Tom –

      Kill-a-Watt found on Amazon.com. It was < $20 for my model and very easy/functional. Oddly enough, I'm in the same utility area as Google HQ, but my external smartmeter is not an option on the Google system yet - looking forward to that. Please forward the youtube links - I'm assuming they're Creative Commons like your other work (Social Sustainability!). Interesting news about the cell phone chargers. I was shocked about some of items that were actually using power, rather than what I was hearing might be. I may still build the solar cell phone charger just to geek out in front of my neighbors. The coffee maker was a surprise, and easily reduced by using a thermos and shutting off the power after brewing. We also do a lot of raw and dehydrated food - so this summer will be building a solar dehydrator that my wife found on line since setting the oven to 'dehydrate' is a real power draw. That's an interesting result with your LED/CFL kit. Unfortunately the LEDs we have are hardwired to meet Code in our kitchen. We went with this over CFL because of a slight power saving, dramatically longer life on the device, and better light quality. I'm going to have to do some research on how to fix the flicker. Someone emailed me recently that the LEDs are more susceptible to power fluctuation so I may need some kind of line conditioner. Your result seems to support that? --- to other readers --- Tom's blog can be found here, and is a great read/resource. http://tomraftery.com/2011/01/31/social-sustainability-and-the-importance-of-sharing/

      Reply
  2. Ferhat says

    March 22, 2014 at 3:55 pm

    Most light bulbs have the amount of light in leumns and the power consumption in watts listed on the package. If you want to find the actual power being used, measure the current (amps) ammeter and the voltage, voltmeter multiply them together to find the power (watts) or use a watt meter and measure the light in leumns or foot-candles. If you don’t have a light meter you could use a camera with a light meter indication (many digital cameras have this feature)A standard North American 100 watt incandescent light bulb emits 1500–1700 leumns, while a standard European 230 V model emits 1200–1400 lm. A 100 watt high-pressure sodium vapor lamp emits around 15,000 leumns. The number of leumns produced per watt of power consumed is the wall-plug luminous efficacy of the source.Good luck with your project!

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Fun with the SmartMeter | Highly Uncivilized says:
    January 13, 2011 at 8:31 pm

    […] the bad news.  We are using only 12% less than a home of similar size in our area.  Back on Day 5 of No Impact Week I talked about some of our big projects and areas that we’re still working on.  After […]

    Reply

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