People have no bloody idea about saving energy People who make an effort to be eco-friendly - for instance by recycling glass bottles, turning off lights and unplugging cellphone chargers - have no idea what they're on about, according to a new survey. Those who don't bother are more likely to know what actually saves energy and what doesn't. This revelation comes in a new …
I found a solution to that - I fitted a fiendishly complicated programmable thermostat, then disabled the front panel "+" button. That's kept them under control, for now at least ("Them" - wife, two daughters, mother-in-law. Truly I live in a living hell on earth(*)....)
GJC
(*) Actually, they aren't that bad. Really. Sometimes.
The problem with a half knowledge like yours Lewis, is you are as much in ignorance as those you are criticising.
It is absolutely correct that on an individual basis the saving of turning off lights or unplugging chargers is small, but multiply up the saving on a national or global basis and, well, you get the picture. Every kWh is equal you know.
Also, as a previous poster pointed out, it's not all about the carbon, but the overall environmental footprint.
I've given up believing these kinds of reports.
The last time I looked into one in detail, it was claiming that disposable nappies were less energy intensive across their lifecycle than cloth. But in the detail, you discovered that they were comparing cloth nappies being boil washed and ironed(!) every time and only ever used for a single baby. Utter tosh.
...reading an article in National Geographic about yuppie parents in California in the eighties running through a fad of switching from disposable to washable nappies. They may have saved energy but the Colorado river ran dry. That story has stayed with me ever since; these are complex issues and fag-packet calculations and assumptions do nobody any good.
Ours is currently set to 15 degrees for a couple of hours a day, and 8 degrees for the rest of the time, so the central heating only comes on to stop everything in the house freezing. I've fitted wood-burning stoves in the two main living rooms, if the family are cold enough they can light a fire.
GJC
Generalize much, Lewis?
In fact, various observations are common sense: generally, glass stuff is heavier per unit volume packaged and thus requires more energy to transport as well as to recycle (as opposed to re-use, which is probably not viable for aluminium packaging). But all that means is that people need to think more about such matters, as well as be given higher quality information in order to be able to judge for themselves. From the survey, people did seem to know that trains and boats used less energy to move cargo around than planes (but not trucks), so it isn't as if everyone preferring rail freight is some kind of red-green killjoy who won't surrender to the superiority of air transport.
So, yes, better education and information so that people can think for themselves and make better choices than the narrow-minded but apparently fashionable "sod it, just landfill everything and kiss up to our fossil fuel/nuclear overlords, 1960s techno-utopia style". Sadly, in the realm of the Britards, individuals aren't supposed to demand anything other than to be complicit consumers: the convenient subject of the excuse for whatever corporate wrongdoing happens to be the order of the day.
....at glass recycling. A lot of it is just an expensive way to just delay inevitable landfill ahoy.
The only thing I've done is to keep my shower in the morning to three minutes. In dong this I get to wash everywhere and get out. Saves me time and also knocked £100 off the water bill and a decent reduction on the gas bill. Thats just one person doing it. Now apply that simple idea to a family of four.
Does it help the environment? Who cares I just want to save money.
Just used a kitchen timer set to three minutes for a week or two. You then get a routine and after that you dont need the timer, you just know how long it takes.
Not stressful. Helps get you focused rather than moping about in the shower. Also means longer in bed as I don't take so long to get ready in the morning.
Stand watching a clock for three minutes. Its actually quite long enough to wash your bits.
Otherwise you are just giving money to 'the man'.
By just getting in, washing, getting out? Would naturally take about 3 mins? I'm not one for just standing there gormlessly getting repeatedly wet for 10+ minutes. That's quite a long time. Why do people do that? (Other than hangover mornings.).
That way you can have more time for lingering over your cornflakes, staring cold eyed and tight lipped at the kitchen calendar with all those ringed dates of trifling engagements and reminders of your futile merry go round existence. Silently bracing yourself for the strength to grasp the front door handle and step into another day. The weed spattered pavement, the potholed road. Your desk. The people. All those people.
This post has been deleted by its author
"line-drying clothes saves more energy than changing the washer’s settings (the reverse is true)"
This statement is pointless and cannot possibly be true.
Controlling a washing machine cycle so that it heats the water to only 30° rather than 40° can potentially reduce the amount of energy consumed by the cycle. If the water inlet temperature were 20° then half as much energy would be needed to heat the water in a particular cycle.
However, a tumble dryer uses more than five times the amount of energy to dry a single load than a washing machine uses to wash that load.
This is based on actual measurements I have taken. A typical 40° wash in my not-particularly-efficient washing machine uses 0.5kWh of electricity. My brand-new 'A' rated tumble dryer uses 2.8kWh to dry a load in 90 minutes.
Ergo, the choice to run a washing machine at a lower temperature can not save more energy than the choice to dry washing on the line over using the tumble dryer. Changing the temperature of the wash could save about 0.25kWh (about 3 pence) - not using the tumble dryer would definitely save 2.8kWh (about 30p), in my example.
I like the notion that 'modern' TVs use 1W on standby, but here we are talking about the very best of breed - which use circa 0.3-1W.
How many Britons have the very latest TV?
Making misleading statements is not the best way to clarify matters. Does the Energy Saving Trust really confuse us all? No specific examples are given.
-----------------------
It would be nice if government ensured that energy companies provided energy monitors to all homes using above average energy this year, rather than allowing 10 years for some super-tool that provides remote monitoring via smart meters for all - many do not use the internet so will gain no benefit from these, and there are still concerns about security/hacking ... and the cost is many times higher.
It would also be nice if government did a few more things:
1. zero rate all home insulation products for VAT. Permanently.
2. provide a fixed price after subsidy for loft insulation, e.g. per cubic metre of insulating material, on an annual basis, maybe on July 4th each year. This to ensure that no one delays improving their home insulation whilst hoping for a new special discount, except, perhaps, during the late spring and early summer when heating is not a priority.
3. awarded prizes annually for the best new low energy technology in a variety of categories, similar to the French competition for low fuel consumption car; e.g. light bulbs providing most natural indoor light for lowest energy, or lowest environmental cost; light bulbs providing best street lighting for lowest environmental cost; light bulb providing best tested longevity and energy rating - submissions allowed for competition 2 and 3 years ahead of prize year!
4. make planning inspectors test new window installations with thermal imaging cameras to check that insulation around the window is thorough (no Friday jobs accepted) - something that home owners not present during fitting, or not savvy, cannot check themselves. Require remedial work by contractor if substandard. Penalty to contractor if not complying.
5. Make accessible, in all stores, statistics for all new appliances, providing information such as:
Washing machines: energy consumed during wash at 30, 40, 50, 60 C
6. back to thermal imaging: provide free thermal imaging of houses as a matter of course every within next 2 years - the better that people can recognise where they can improve insulation and reduce energy consumption. People will tend to compare to neighbours and may be motivated to improve as a result of their home being far worse than a neighbour.
... beer, see? I do take my medicine!
Steal lessons from de.gov:
1) Mandate a building regs escalator that in 5 years requires PassivHaus standards for all new builds (and over time regulates improving heat efficiency of rental properties - we did it for electrical standards before)
2) Mandate that Elec Cos provide a feed-in tariff. This should start off significantly *above* the consumption tariff, and reduce over time, so that early adopters benefit. This alone is responsible for kickstarting the German microgeneration engineering industry to be a world leader.
Mind you, the other thing we could do is start a war so we can go back to WWII levels of self-sufficiency. What, we did already? Two, you say?
Consider how we used to do things in this country (in the 1950s for example). Bottles would be *reused* not recycled (think milk bottles, although the same occurred for beer bottles etc.) You would walk to the local grocers, make an order then someone on a *push bike* would deliver it to your door. Of course the produce would generally be in brown paper bags instead of plastic.
As for jake's comment about so -called eco light bulbs, how true. Why haven't we switched to modern LED light bulbs? Anyone who's used a modern bike light recently will know what I'm talking about. They are really very bright and appear pleasingly efficient.
Maybe my tin foil hat is on too tight Lewis, but are you in the pay of Big Oil or just simply a nasty piece of work? Sure, politicians talk drivel and plenty of interest groups have more than their fair share of nutters - this is not news. This is no excuse for wilful ignorance and bone-headed propaganda.
Time was The Register had some thoughtful and intelligent articles (hey, even The Inquirer used to!)
I'm an ex-ITer now with a short-term climate challenge job, and I'm so sad, I still need my daily fix of El Reg. Having said that, two things about this issue really do bother me - one is that many "green living" attempts are really just middle-class lifestyle choice issues, and the other is that we really are in trouble if we think we can continue to enjoy the lives cheaply available energy has given us. It's this last that I find frustrating with some El Reg coverage of the issue, apparrently poo-po'ing any alternative option to the status quo. While jourtnals like El Reg need to be there to winkle out the inevitable snakeoil that accompanies the issue, as anybody who's been in IT for longer than say 15 years will know, as another industry heavy in snake oil, some things are worth trying, and we should be experimenting, failing and trying again until we do find the right way forward. Just like IT, it's not going to be a silver bullet. Just like IT, systems are complex, and people are involved. And perhaps just like IT, a broken system needs a good disaster to focus people's minds that Something Needs To Be Done.
2p worth.
should (IMHO) think more about how to remove themselves from the dependency of Energy companies providing expensive and environmentally damaging energy into your home and focusing more on becoming as self reliant as possible.
If you are in a house then have a look at getting different forms of energy input devices, (combinations of solar panels, Geothermal etc), to assist in reducing your dependency on energy from suppliers. Flats (like mine) can implement small wind turbines, even small solar panels to assist.
I know the tech is still fairly expensive and certainly won't remove you from being dependent on an energy company but the same argument about turning of lights and reducing your consumption by small percentages can be applied to this approach. For example reduce your dependency by say 17% pa with these methods and you save year on year anyway without impacting your current lifestyle...
I take slight issue with the tone of this article - I know Lewis like winding us greenies up, but he seems to be saying that it's better to not do anything at all than to be ill informed.
What should we do - sit here and wait for the government to tell us what to recycle? We know how that tends to pan out...
I want to know who decided 'energy saving' light bulbs are a good idea. As far as I am aware they have a rather high environmental impact in manufacturing and are difficult to recycle as they contain some rather nasty chemicals. While they may use less electricity and are more efficient in terms of heat loss; this is not necessarily a good thing. The old inefficient incandescent light bulbs do a rather good job of topping up the ambient temperature in a room. If your home is reasonably well insulted this makes quite a bit of a difference. From a little bit of testing (using the temperature monitors in the server room over the course of two months) I have discovered that the efficient light bulbs create a net loss as the heating has to go up to counter the loss of a few degrees of ambient temperature.
All that heat from light bulbs is wasted energy. I expect most of the time you don't even need to heat the room because it's not cold to start with. And if it were, then central heating systems are expressly designed to heat the room.
Aside from that some CFLs do contain a microscopic amount of mercury. But then again, so do fossil fuels. So is the amount of mercury in a CFL bulb less than the amount saved by not burning so much coal? What about all the other nasty emissions in coal that are saved by less burning?
Anyway the most pragmatic reason to use CFLs is to save money. It costs 1/8th the money to light a room which may well account for a couple of quid savings on the bill in any month per bulb. Even better use LEDs which are cheaper again.
The heat isn't wasted if you can turn your central heating down as a result! And besides those enrgy saving bulbs only last half the life of ordinary ones so you need to manufacture twice as many, therefore factor in environmental/carbon cost of raw materials, toxic checmicals, cost to make, cost to transport, hell even the cost of me going out and buying more and the cost of recycling the old ones.
I fitted the house out with CFLs when we moved in in 1997. Most of them are still going, although they are getting noticeably dimmer now, but after 13 years that's acceptable.
I'm now experimenting with LED replacements, with good results. They're still a bit pricey, though, so there's some work to do yet. But it amazes me that I can light our medium-sized library with 12w of power, down to 4w when we're watching TV and so don't need full brightness.
GJC
I agree, I first started fitting mine in 1990 (those jam jar sized ones), and only one has failed so far (after about 10 years of daily use).
I too am investigating LEDs; mainly cos they are easier to run off 12V so keep going in a power cut. Yes, they are a bit pricey but like all semiconductor tech to do with energy efficiency/renewables (photovoltaics, invertor parts) I expect the price will come down with mass production efficiencies.
> All that heat from light bulbs is wasted energy.
WRONG. Or only in summer, or only in a warmer country than the UK.
In the UK, our houses need some degree of heating for at least 8 months of the year. Also, the hours of darkness are much longer during the part of the year when heating is required.
A filament light bulb burning near the ceiling is not the most efficient way of generating that heat, but it does convect around the room, and if we're talking flats, downstairs' lighting inefficiency becomes upstairs' heating.
A back-of-envelope calculation suggests that in the UK, something like 3/4 of the energy no longer emitted by filament light-bulbs, will be emitted by heaters and central heating instead.
Energy-saving light-bulbs are at their best in tropical places where not only is waste heat from light bulbs wasted all year round, but causes air-conditioners to waste yet more energy pumping the waste heat to the outside.
"a modern TV on standby uses less than a watt of power. You would need to unplug it or switch it off for a year to save as much energy as it takes to have one-and-a-half baths." bitches the extremely lazily-written and ill-informed article (but then, given it is written by an ignorant journo, what can we expect? What's that, ignorant journo, you don't lik ebeing name-called? Tough, it's a technique I have learned from you, so deal with it).
But where was I?
Oh yes.
"a modern TV on standby uses less than a watt of power. You would need to unplug it or switch it off for a year to save as much energy as it takes to have one-and-a-half baths." claims the article, suggesting it is pointless to unplug (or, in civilised countries, merely switch-off the TV at the mains).
OK, suppose you have the TV unplugged for a thurd of the time (you know, when you are asleep - that still gives you 16 hours of glorious TV-on time per day). You save enough energy to power half a bath. Not much? Really? You do realise you are not the only person in teh world. Now take that half-a-bath-a-year saving and multiply that over 10 million households.
My goodness but that's a lot of baths for free now, isn't it! That's over 9,000 free baths PER DAY. A significant saving.
But hey, it's just easier to try to be smug and to slag off anyone who thinks differently when you are an ignorant journo, isn't it?
What really irks me about standby, is how utterly pointlessly stupidly wasteful is the engineering. It is easy to build an appliance that will stand by monitoring for a remote controller or for a button-press on a milliwatt. With a bit of work that could probably be pushed down to tens of microwatts.
You'd need a small rechargeable battery or a large capacitor, a relay or triac to disconnect the mains properly, and a mains press-switch as a starter for the times when the battery or capacitor had run flat after a long period of non-use. Add some low-power CMOS electronics for the rest. Alternatively use a small solar panel and charge the battery/capacitor off ambient light.
Why don't they do it? Competitive disadvantage. Doing it right costs a pound or two more, and so the crappiest approach wins more customers. It really makes me want to spew.
Our law-makers should make illegal any appliance which stands by on more than a milliwatt. (Standby displays should be passive LCD, so no wasteful back-lighting needed. By all means add a brighter backlit display which is on when the device is on, if that's useful).
I used to work for a company which manufactured, inter alia, electronic ignition controls for gas boilers. Thus allowing the burner to be ignited by a spark when the controls called for heat, obviating the need for a pilot burner (which can easily use up to 250 watts; or about 3.7 m³ of gas per week).
A boiler with electronic ignition was slightly cheaper to build than one with the same firebox but a permanent pilot burner, since the electronics actually cost less than the fancy thermocouple-operated gas valve; you could use a simple mains solenoid valve instead. Flame sensing was done electronically, using the spark electrode; flames actually conduct electricity. (This should not surprise you. Fire is a chemical reaction, and chemical reactions contain charged particles in motion.)
In a range including permanent-pilot and electronic-ignition versions of otherwise the same appliance, guess which one sold for less?
And the way the regulations have been tightened means that you can't even replace a hopelessly inefficient boiler with a middling one, so people will end up putting up with wasteful appliances till they die.
By the way, the old Glow-Worm combi was probably the worst energy-waster. It used to have to run the fan on low power all the time, just to keep the pilot from going out.
Ludicrous comparisons to enable bitter points-scoring and absurd generalisations.
Why the fuck does it matter that people don't know how much energy is saved by line drying in comparison to how much energy is saved by turning the temperature down on a washing machine? And how about giving us some DATA is that bald accusation? Because I can prove that line drying compared to tumble drying saves more energy than turning down the temperature on my washing machine by 1 degree.
Lazy, angry, self-indulgent journalism. If I wanted that I could go to the Daily Mail.
Something wrong with your calculation there. 342 is way too low.. maybe for 1 person in a flat.
My TV when powered on (<1 year old so clams to be 'eco') uses 250 watts on its own. TVs tend to be on most evenings, so that's a fair chunk. AV amp is another 100 if I use it. That's >342 before you've even taken into account normal power usage.
Even keeping most things off (not because I'm eco but because I'm a cheapskate) when not in use baseline power usage for the 2 of us is a shade under 400w and evening usage 700w-1kw depending on whether the wife switches her desktop PC on or not.
For a family add in the costs of xboxes and ps3s in standby (if I switch on the extension with the xbox+ps3+wii on consumption jumps 120w without even powering any of them on).
If you take 500w as a more realistic average, and take into account that nobody uses incandescents any more, the statement should be "Even switching off a single 5w unused lamp saves about 1% of that average ongoing consumption."
Doesn't sound so impressive now...
It seems to be all over the place in terms of its comparisons and conclusions.
Why compare washing machine settings to line drying? It's like saying "which saves more energy, line drying or using a fan over rather than a conventional one" . And when the person says "line drying", they're called an idiot that knows nothing about being "eco-friendly". Most people who line dry will probably have seen the detergent ads going on about the benefits of washing at 30 degrees, and so will most likely be doing both if such things concern them. So what if they don't know exactly which one saves more energy? They're not mutually exclusive.
Also, the main "eco" reason to recycle glass is not to save energy, it's to reduce filling landfill with a substance that doesn't break down in any easy way. Being "eco-friendly" isn't just about CO2 emissions.
I spent a month in a brewery in Mozambique, when they reused beer bottles.
The bottle washing machine used water that had cooled the fermentation vats, so the only extra energy needed was to run the pumps that sprayed jets of water and detergent into the bottles, and a bit of extra heat to produce the steam for the sterilisation at the end of the line (after ordinary washing).
Of course, the biggest energy use was in producing and bottling the beer, compared to traditional beers made in a dustbin by someone's grandmother.
I am very far from being an eco tosser, but as someone who appreciates the countryside, I believe in not filling it up with our rubbish. But at least as far as bottles go, recycling is not the answer.
Glass may not be as carbon friendly in manufacture as cans, but glass can be reused, as it used to be, and not just for milk. I remember as a child in the seventies taking squash and lemonade bottles back to the shop to reclaim the deposits - it was my main source of income for years. Now if you have a glass botlle that's used say 20 times before it reaches the end of its useful life, that is a lot better than using an aluminium can, which cannot be reused.
On the power side, the US use 120v, not our 230. So what difference does that make to cutting bills by those methods over here?
I can't find a link now, but I read recently that the US could reduce its power generation requirements by something like 8-10% by switching their domestic voltage from 110/115 to 220/230 because of reduced losses in power transmission and step down. Less power is lost stepping down to 220V than to 110V, and 220V power also suffers less transmission loss than 110V.
This post has been deleted by its author
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
