Socks away! End of the central heating challenge

As part of our series of energy chal­lenges, guest blog­ger Lee Col­gate agreed to give up cent­ral heat­ing at a time when most of us are turn­ing it on.

In his last post, Lee told us all about the hard­ships endured while avoid­ing frost­bite on hol­i­day in Spain. In this, his final post, he updates us on central-​​heating-​​free life in Novem­ber, back in Blighty.

Well, it’s finally over. Just in time and thank god. We take so many things for gran­ted these days, but still I under­es­tim­ated what it would be like to actu­ally live without cent­ral heat­ing at the back end of the year in the UK.

As you may have read, we ran away to Spain for a couple of weeks, a little way into the chal­lenge. Some very clever edit­ing by the tal­en­ted Living team (I ranted about orange women wear­ing yellow on cut price air­lines; I don’t know why; wait, yes I do – read on) on that par­tic­u­lar report man­aged to con­ceal the fact that I was slightly the worse for alco­holic wear at the time of writ­ing. It won’t have hidden in any way what­so­ever that I was feel­ing deeply smug and having a thor­oughly lovely time.

Post-​​smugness reality

To fulfil the chal­lenge and make the whole thing worth­while, we com­mit­ted to leav­ing the heat­ing off into Novem­ber on our return. To be honest, the weather at the begin­ning of the chal­lenge really wasn’t that severe, but it had all taken a turn for the worse by the time we got back. And, you know, it was actu­ally not all that nice with the heat­ing off. Who’d have thought?

<!– The two of us didn’t actu­ally suffer all that much. I bought Colin a pair of the rather fetch­ing socks I was sport­ing in the photo that accom­pan­ied my first post. In a dif­fer­ent colour, obvi­ously. It’s not like we have match­ing anor­aks or any­thing like that. We wore rather more than is cus­tom­ary when indoors (or indeed out­doors in, ooooh, let’s say Fin­land) and added more if it got colder.

But our poor cat had a slightly harder time of it. Our floor­ing, apart from the bed­room and living room, is basic­ally a lino­leum bon­anza, the sofa is leather and the…no, I can’t think of another word right now…poofs are (deep breath) ‘leather-​​look’. Not at all cosy for the poor little mite, who con­sequently fol­lowed us round like a puppy and launched him­self into the nearest lap as soon as we sat down. Bless ‘im.

After a few days of our being back, present in the house, not dead (I’m fairly cer­tain corpses don’t do much to raise the ambi­ent tem­per­at­ure, at least not for long) and doing the usual things like cook­ing, iron­ing, shower­ing, etc. the tem­per­at­ure indoors actu­ally settled down to a fairly con­stant 19 degrees.

What never went away, though, and this was the most uncom­fort­able thing, was the damp. Without any strong loc­al­ised heat sources get­ting much hotter than the ambi­ent tem­per­at­ure it was almost, and allow me to exag­ger­ate here for a minute to get my point across, like living in a cave. It’s not that there was damp run­ning down the walls, it was just very uncom­fort­able and you could almost ima­gine things were going mouldy all around you. Given that we don’t have a tumble dryer, there was the added com­plic­a­tion with laun­dry that almost led to things going mouldy all over you. But we don’t need to dwell on that. Why on Earth the TV has to go on about pess­ar­ies while I’m eating every even­ing I’ll never under­stand, so I’ll spare you.

Turn­ing up the heat

We have turned the heat­ing back on now, with the kind per­mis­sion of our Living mas­ters, and hal­le­lu­jah! I’m just get­ting over a rather nasty cold I picked up while doing a half mara­thon in the weather-​​warning weather a couple of week­ends back and I’m sure the lack of heat­ing in the house didn’t help much in the early part of my recov­ery. It’s only set to 20, as opposed to our usual 21. I guess that’s partly because we got along OK(ish) for a while at 19 and partly because we’ve got so used to wear­ing out­door clothes indoors that we just don’t need it any higher. Walk­ing on the car­pets no longer feels like walk­ing on a bed of moss. Our clothes are dry again. And the cat’s happy.

Paper­less quarterly billing means we won’t really have an idea of any sav­ings we might have made until some time in Decem­ber, but if it’s at all inter­est­ing when we see the res­ults, I’ll be cer­tain to come back and com­ment here to let you know.

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• It’s the little things: set­ting the ther­mo­stat (sfgate​.com)

Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​11-​​18 09:19:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Central heating, Earth, Energy, Frostbite, Living room, Room temperature, Spain, Television
Posted in Energy | View Comments

Energy saving project: confessions of an overnight energy geekLow Carbon Households

Some snip­pets of con­ver­sa­tion from our house late yes­ter­day evening:

“Look what hap­pens when I switch on the kettle!”

“Right, I’m going to try turn­ing off the lights in the kitchen!”

“Oh my god, did you see what just happened when the wash­ing machine came on?”

I know – it’s sad but true. With less time and energy than is con­tained in one kilowatt-​​hour, we had trans­formed into elec­tri­city meas­ure­ment geeks.

I’d just got back from the launch of the Low Carbon House­holds pro­ject, which is being run by Lewes Dis­trict Coun­cil. Fellow Living con­ti­b­utor Jeremy and I will be mon­it­or­ing our home elec­tri­city use for a year, as will more than 30 other house­holds in the district.

An eco-​​eye out

We’ve all been equipped with an eco-​​eye mini, a neat little device that reveals what’s going on behind the scenes.

The idea of mon­it­or­ing energy use may not push everyone’s button, but when you get one of these bad boys clamped onto your supply you can’t help but get involved with it.

It’s very simple. You plug the sensor into the mains or insert a couple of bat­ter­ies (they came sup­plied with proper ones, Dur­a­cell AAs – when does that ever happen?). Then you lock it on to one of the wires going into your fuse­box – no cut­ting or rewir­ing required.

Next you put bat­ter­ies in the sep­ar­ate mon­itor screen, and set the time and the cost per unit of elec­tri­city (accord­ing to your last bill). And that’s it. You’re record­ing real-​​time use of power in kilowatt-​​hours, and can see how much your cur­rent use would cost over a week, month or year – as well as the likely CO2 emissions.

Within seconds, you’re won­der­ing why the level is so low, or so high, and why it’s chan­ging all the time. It’s a bit of a jolt.

We’d been told at the meet­ing by Cli­mate South East’s Mat­thew Bird that the kettle would be a shocker, and he was right. Making a cup of tea sent our low, mid-​​evening read­ing shoot­ing up five-​​fold. You quickly real­ise why the National Grid struggles to cope with the surge in demand during half-​​time in cup finals.

And…?

So, this is all very well. But will it actu­ally change the way we behave?

Well, the early signs are: yes. Our kettle doesn’t have a water gauge, so it’s easy to over­fill. I did exactly that this morn­ing, and felt so unable to waste the hot water that I made a full cafetiere (which could be reheated later, for rather less power, in the microwave) and a Ther­mos flask of tea for my train jour­ney later in the day.

I’ve eased off the monitor-​​watching a bit this even­ing, but it’s sat there, watch­ing, wait­ing, and ready to reveal the true energy impact the next time we hoover, or dry the kids’ hair or leave the TV on standby.

And as they say, know­ledge is power.

Anyone else out there got an eco-​​eye mini or sim­ilar smart meter plugged in to their home? Let us know your exper­i­ences of whether it’s help­ing you to save energy.

IMAGES by me

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• You must get a home energy assess­ment. It will save you a ton of money. (slate​.com)

Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​03-​​04 11:08:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Business, Electricity, Electricity meter, Energy, Kilowatt hour, National Grid, Television, Washing machine
Posted in Energy | View Comments

Does Blackle save any power?How to REALLY cut your computer screen’s energy use

We’ve writ­ten about Blackle so many times that I’m run­ning out of cheap puns to use in my head­lines, but it’s clearly still rel­ev­ant: Charlie’s been seeing reg­u­lar dis­cus­sion of it via his Twit­ter­web, or whatever it is he gets up to these days.

For anyone who’s just joined us, Blackle provides a Google search, but it has a black back­ground rather than the usual white screen. The site addresses the idea that it takes less energy to dis­play a black screen than a white one, and that Google is one of the web’s most vis­ited sites. So it fol­lows that if enough people access the search engine through Blackle’s black screen, the energy sav­ings should be significant.

Well, I’m not con­vinced. As we’ve writ­ten before, nearly all modern com­puter dis­plays use LCD tech­no­logy, which uses the twist­ing and untwist­ing of liquid crys­tals to block light or allow it to pass. The back­light, which oper­ates at a con­stant bright­ness regard­less of what’s on the screen, is the most power-​​hungry part, typ­ic­ally using some­where around 10–20 watts. It takes a much smal­ler amount of power to twist the crys­tals, but doing so actu­ally causes light to be blocked, mean­ing that a dark LCD might use frac­tion­ally more power than a light one. In prac­tice, we can’t tell any dif­fer­ence using our power meter, which dis­plays con­sump­tion to the nearest watt.

Of course, older mon­it­ors used a cath­ode ray tube (CRT) like that of a con­ven­tional TV. These work by firing a stream of excited elec­trons at a spe­cial phos­phor coat­ing, which glows when the elec­trons hit it. A bright screen needs more elec­trons, which requires more energy, so there’s no doubt that a dark CRT saves a bit of power. But while we haven’t got one to test, I’m not sure that the sav­ings would be huge: much of the power a CRT uses goes to heat­ing up the elec­tron gun and cre­at­ing the mag­netic fields needed to steer the beam of elec­trons – only a por­tion is used to accel­er­ate elec­trons at the phosphor.

Blackle’s FAQ does tackle the change in mon­itor tech­no­lo­gies, point­ing out that plasma screens – which are very vaguely sim­ilar to LCDs in that they con­tain phos­phors and (mul­tiple) almost-​​electron guns – use more power to dis­play brighter images. It also says that organic light-​​emitting diode (OLED) screens, which don’t have a back­light, will use less power when dis­play­ing darker images.

I’ve no doubt that they’re right on both counts, and when we get the chance we’ll run some more tests to see just how much power Blackle can save with these sorts of screens, but there are better ways to make your mon­itor use less power. Before you worry about the colour of your desktop or the web pages you visit, con­sider turn­ing down the bright­ness of your screen and making sure that it’s set to power down when you’re away from your com­puter (see below).

That’ll make a small but appre­ciable dif­fer­ence, whatever type of mon­itor you use. Well, every pixel helps.

If your mon­itor doesn’t already go blank when you leave your PC alone for a few minutes, right-​​click your desktop and choose Prop­er­ties, then click the Screen Saver tab. Click the Power button, and use the drop-​​down boxes to set a suit­able time after which your screen will go dark – try 10 minutes and see how you get on.

The screen should come back to life if you move your mouse. Very occa­sion­ally the screen on some com­puters will remain dark – if this hap­pens to you you’ll need to reset your com­puter, retrace the steps above and change the time period back to “never”.

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​08-​​25 12:28:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Blackle, Blackle.com, Cathode ray tube, Computer monitor, CRT, Google, Liquid crystal display, Television
Posted in Lifestyle | View Comments