Win an eco-​​eye energy monitor and save energy in your home

THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED
Win an energy monitor!

We’d like lots more people to save energy, so we’re giving away ten eco-​​eye mini energy mon­it­ors – the handy little gad­gets we’ve been using on the Low Carbon House­holds pro­ject, which let you see just how much elec­tri­city your home is using, in real time.

Fit­ting them is easy (they clip on to your power supply cable near the fuse­box) and the res­ults are guar­an­teed to raise eye­brows from every­one in your household.

To be in with a chance of win­ning, simply take a look around the energy sec­tion of the site and leave a com­ment on any post in that cat­egory before 12 midday on 28 Octo­ber (making sure you’ve given us a valid email address – which will not be pub­lished on the site).We will then enter you into our free prize draw.

Then we’ll select the win­ners at random – and if you’re one of them we’ll send you your very own eco-​​eye mini.

That’s it. No catch [see our full terms and con­di­tions]. Although if you’d care to let us know how you get on with your new gadget, we’d love to hear from you.

Light­ning image by

Flickr user idarknight

Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​10-​​20 23:14:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Cemeteries, Death, Energy, Flickr, Image Galleries, Outdoors, Recreation, Urban Exploration
Posted in Energy | View Comments

Hacked road signs — end of the world in 400 yards

I’m not sure that there’s yet been an inva­sion of Nazi zom­bies, but should one ever happen there’s a fair chance the author­it­ies wouldn’t want to shout about it. Or warn approach­ing motorists.

All the same, it’s hard not to laugh at a recent craze that has seen tem­por­ary road warn­ing signs in the US hacked to read some­thing other than con­sidered safety mes­sages about roadworks.

The mes­sages, repor­ted by the blog Jalopnik, range from the matter of fact (THIS SIGN HAS BEEN HACKED), through the cau­tion­ary (ZOMBIES AHEAD! and RAPTORS AHEAD, CAUTION!) to the rather heart­break­ing (NOBODY HAS EVER /​ LOVED YOU).

Instruc­tions for alter­ing the signs’ mes­sages were pub­lished in Janu­ary on a web­site ded­ic­ated to hack­ing vari­ous hard­ware and soft­ware. In most cases, the site claims, the sign con­trols aren’t pro­tec­ted by a lock or any­thing other than the default pass­word.

But while their altered mes­sages are clearly a little irre­spons­ible, the signs them­selves are yet another example of tech­no­logy making people’s lives easier. In the past, warn­ing motor­ists of impend­ing doom took a can of paint and some dedication:

IMAGES by Flickr users under­bit­e­man and shinythings

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​02-​​05 18:20:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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Life without baths: two weeks into Paul’s energy saving challenge

Guest blog­ger Paul Pritchard is UK head of cor­por­ate respons­ib­il­ity for MORE TH>N’s parent com­pany, RSA. He agreed to give up some­thing he loves as part of our energy-​​saving pro­ject, and share the highs and lows with us on Living. You can read the first instal­ment here – below is the second splash.

Over two weeks now and I am pretty con­fid­ent I am going to make it.

I have had a couple of waver­ing moments – both at the week­end and promp­ted by Char­lotte and Olivia taking baths them­selves (I under­stand why food dieters are so keen to remove chocol­ate and other tempta­tions from the house).

It did prompt a debate (more of a whine really) that it was prob­ably OK to go into a bath that had already been used by someone else. After all, the aim of this is to save energy and the bath has already been run… how­ever it was unar­gu­ably still a bath and I had prom­ised I wouldn’t.

I have also star­ted timing Olivia in the shower and won­der­ing (with just a tiny hint of malice) how long in the (elec­tric) shower cor­res­ponds to a (shal­low, gas heated) bath – carbon wise. If I left the warm water in the bath it would surely mean I used less heat­ing in the house (in winter anyway).

Does any­body know of a time plug for baths which lets the water out only when all the heat has gone into the room (say when the water cools to 20 degrees). Sounds like the sort of idea someone should have had while sit­ting in a bath.

A lit­er­ary plug

I have also been trying to enlist sup­port in the form of quotes from the great and the good. Not sure I have found any­thing quite suit­able but I liked the fol­low­ing from Wil­liam S Burroughs

‘I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of heroin addic­tion. I did abso­lutely nothing.’

Haven’t quite got to that state yet at least but it fits my mental pic­ture of the author.

Then I found some­thing by Sylvia Plath – I cant say I know much about her but it’s prob­ably summed up well by the source of the quote – thinkex​ist​.com ‘(her) works are pre­oc­cu­pied with ali­en­a­tion, death and self-​​destruction.’

So what did she have to say on baths?

“There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.”

Mmmm bit of a mis­match there, it’s just a bit mundane… but maybe it shows the power of the bath? Although there could have been fewer inspired words from the sui­cidal poet if she had bathed more fre­quently she might have just been a little bit happier?

Tap pic­ture by Flickr user The Giant Vermin

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​10-​​23 13:13:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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Fiat 500 eco:Drive system is a neat (if nerdy) way to green your driving habits

There are plenty of car man­u­fac­tur­ers boast­ing about the eco-​​credentials of their latest models these days. But I came across one this week­end which genu­inely impressed me.

The Fiat 500 is a funky little town car – it echoes the cute style queues of earlier Fiats with the same number back in the 1960s and early 70s.

All well and good. It’s cer­tainly a nice look­ing creation.

But what I think is a genu­inely smart innov­a­tion is the eco:Drive system that comes with latest models.

eco:Drive helps you under­stand the impact of your driv­ing style on fuel con­sump­tion and CO2 emis­sions. You just plug a USB stick into the port on the car’s dash­board and eco:Drive records detailed inform­a­tion about the vehicle and how it is driven onto the USB stick.

Then down­load the free eco:Drive soft­ware from Fiat’s web­site and install on your com­puter. Plug the USB stick into your com­puter and the eco:Drive soft­ware ana­lyses the data on it and con­verts it into useful facts and fig­ures. It gives you your ‘eco:Drive index’ – a mark out of 100 show­ing how effi­ciently you’ve been driv­ing based on your accel­er­a­tion, decel­er­a­tion, gear changes and speed. It then makes recom­mend­a­tions about how you can improve the effi­ciency of your driving.

It even provides inform­a­tion on how much money this could save you. And for the ser­i­ously obsess­ive it lets you set your­self tar­gets and see if you can meet them.

Fiat sug­gests you could reduce your fuel bills by up to 15%. That’s a big saving!

The soft­ware will evolve and improve with feed­back from users – auto­mat­ic­ally updat­ing as time goes on too.

A genu­inely bril­liant idea. My one cri­ti­cism is that it feels very blokey indeed – even a tad nerdy. At the risk of sound­ing sexist, I wonder if girl-​​drivers – who tend to be the more eco-​​friendly of the sexes when it comes to driv­ing and are prob­ably more likely to buy a small funky car like the Fiat 500 – would ever bother to use it?

IMAGES: by Flickr user

ral­phbijker and Fiat

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​12-​​02 04:50:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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Saving energy: the second hand challenge

Dog in jumper image by Flickr user tps12

So, Simon’s been living without his fridge, Tamsin H has given up her wash­ing machine and Lee, poor soul, is going without cent­ral heat­ing until mid-​​November. Brrrr. Not want­ing to miss out, I’ve been wrack­ing my brain to see what energy saving chal­lenge I could come up with. Ideally it should be one that seems impress­ive, without impos­ing any actual hardship.

Inspir­a­tion came while check­ing out the 10:10 cli­mate change cam­paign web­site which chal­lenges all UK house­holds to cut 10% of their energy emis­sions in 2010. They’ve pro­duced a print­able list of ten simple things every­one can do to cut their emis­sions, and number six was making sure you never buy any­thing new. They reason that less stuff made equals less emis­sions and there­fore less cli­mate damage.

It struck a ser­i­ously big chord. My home is crammed to the rafters with mis­cel­laneous stuff, from boxes of make-​​up I’ve never used to moun­tains of clothes I’ve never worn. And sadly, with the ease of Amazon’s pesky one-​​click order­ing, more of this stuff just seems to appear each week. I knew things were get­ting out of hand when I star­ted to know the deliv­ery drivers by name.

It had to be new

Children’s toys and books are the worst. Not want­ing my 17-​​month-​​old to miss out, I feel like I’m depriving him if I don’t buy some­thing brand new and made of lurid plastic at least once a month. And in my bid to build up a nice lib­rary of books for the little fellow I’ve real­ised that not once has it crossed my mind that I may be able to buy them second hand.

Now obvi­ously, with so much stuff hanging around, the sens­ible thing would be to just stop buying things until I’ve used up everything I own. But with a tod­dler around there’s always things you need – they grow out of clothes and shoes so quickly (every ten weeks, accord­ing to the Clark’s saleswoman).

So I’ve decided that my energy saving chal­lenge will be to buy abso­lutely noth­ing new in the next two months (apart from food and gro­cer­ies, I’m not up for scav­en­ging through bins quite yet). Instead, I’ll be find­ing new out­fits out of the clothes I already own, using up make-​​up and toi­letries and if I do need to buy some­thing, it’ll have to be second hand.

Weight: lift­ing

Weirdly, now I’ve made the decision, I feel so much lighter, as if the weight of con­sumer­ism has been lifted off my shoulders. Ima­gine! No longer do I have to fret about having the latest fash­ions, or have to trawl the high street. I hate shop­ping anyway, so having my options nar­rowed to just a few musty second hand shops or eBay is a bonus. And thanks to Jo-ann’s excel­lent posts on second hand clothes shop­ping and eth­ical fash­ion, I needn’t miss out.

Anyway, I’ve been doing my chal­lenge for a couple of weeks, and it’s prov­ing slightly more tricky than I first thought. The hard­est part has been trying to find a birth­day present for my sister-​​in-​​law. She’s a cash-​​strapped mum like me, and asked for some per­fume which she really needs.

Even though a request on Twit­ter brought back some won­der­fully cre­at­ive solu­tions (like buying vin­tage per­fume bottles which she could fill with whatever scent she likes) at the end of the day, she really just wanted some per­fume. So sadly, that’s what she got (although tech­nic­ally I got my hus­band to buy it for her, so wasn’t strictly a fail).

Anyway, find out how I get on in my next post. I need to buy my son a few ‘new’ jump­ers. Any suggestions?

Second hand clothes store image by Flickr user net_​efekt – visit Oxfam Online’s second hand clothes store.

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​10-​​26 20:51:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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Using vinegar to deice your car windscreen

The last few weeks have really given us the oppor­tun­ity to test out our car dei­cing tech­niques.

One that we neg­lected to men­tion was this one, cour­tesy of Auto­trader. It’s billed as stop-​​gap if you run out of ‘proper’ deicer.

Mix up a ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ solu­tion of house­hold vin­egar and water, place in a old plastic bottle with a hole cut in its lid and squeeze lib­er­ally across your car win­dows. Then simply scrape off the res­ult­ing sludge with an ice scraper or (not-​​to-​​be-​​used-​​again-​​for transactional-​​purposes) credit card.

Having tried brown malt vin­egar over the last couple of weeks, we have to say it does leave the glass shiny, albeit with the odd whiff remin­is­cent of fish and chips.

Though def­in­itely no need to add salt.

For more hints and tips for coping with the cold, see Living’s advice on winter driv­ing.

IMAGE image by Flickr user malias

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2007-​​12-​​21 20:02:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Flickr, Glass, Outdoors, Recreation, Salt, Urban Exploration, Vinegar, Water
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