Torn - or - Attack of the Wiki Links

I'm very torn between two tacks, if you will. The first tack I could take is:

Get the hell out!!

The ship is going down. Society is irretrievably broken and there's nothing one person can do about it. Humanity is blindly charging headlong towards a cliff it made by strip-mining. You keep screaming that there's a cliff ahead, but no one listens. Worse still, they act like you're a bit cooky.

You become part of the office rounds that managers take the newbies on... "And on your left is the office survival nut. Shhh! Don't disturb him! He may engage you in a talk about green energy or universal healthcare!"

In the Get the hell out!! scenario, you pity the blinded fools but you don't lose any sleep over their fate. The best you can do is try not to share their fate.

The second tack?

Hey man! Hope springs eternal, brah!!

Like some hackey-sack kicking, dreadlock-sporting, hippykin child of the suburbs you try to get involved and help fix the problem. Get involved with local politics, support candidates that will promote a green agenda. Ride a bike to work or organize a carpool or - gasp! - take public transportation.

Work on making your house as green as possible - CF bulbs, low-flow showerheads, low-flow toilets, insulate the hot water heater, the whole nine yards. Use canvas shopping bags, buy local and organic food whenever possible. Farmer's Market? Yes, please. Community Supported Agriculture? Sign me up. Buy a hybrid car if you must have a car at all.

The Good News?

The good news is that no matter what tack we take the actions needed are much the same. The only difference really is that with the Get the hell out!! tack you are moving to the country and getting off the grid. With the Hey man! Hope springs eternal, brah!! tack you aren't going anywhere.

We could always strike a tack somewhere in between - Get the hell out of the eternal spring of hope, brah!!! - or something like that. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Get off the grid but stay involved.

I think that's the way I'd like to go.

Step 1: Efficiency

The easiest thing you can do to reduce your impact on the environment is to reduce the amount of energy you use in your home. To be able to do this, you need to know a few terms and some simple equations. These equations will allow you to figure out where the culprits are in your home.

The Terms

1. The Water Pipe Analogy - Think of a wire carrying electricity like it was a pipe carrying water.
2. Voltage - measured in Volts (V). Every appliance you plug into the wall uses either 120V or 240V. 120 in America and 240 in most places in Europe. Voltage is like the pressure in the pipe.
3. Current - measured in Amps (I or A). Think of this as the rate that water flows through the pipe.
4. Resistance - measured in Ohms (R). This is like the width of the pipe. It measures how much resistance to the flow of electricity there is in a component or system.
5. Power - Measured in Watts (W). This a measure of the "juice" required by an appliance. Think of this as the amount of water that flows through a pipe.

Each appliance will usually list the power it consumes in watts. If not, you can determine the wattage used by reading the voltage (V) and current (Amps - A) off the label on the back. Simply multiply volts by amps to get watts.

Okay, so what does this all mean? Well, let's talk about it in the same terms that your electrical company does. They bill you by the kiloWatt-hour. A kiloWatt-hour is a thousand Watts of power provided over an hour. Essentially it is power (W) times time (H).

How about an example? You have a 65 Watt incandescent light bulb that you keep on 24 hours a day, all month long. Here's how we figure out how many kiloWatt-hours (kWh) this uses over the month:

(65W/1000) x 24 Hours/day x 30 days/month = kWh/month

Note: the 65W/1000 portion of the equation above gives us kiloWatts. A kiloWatt is a thousand Watts.

Okay, so in our case we get 46.8 kWh/month. On your electric bill it should tell you how much the electric company charges you per kWh. In many cases this is seasonal. In September my utility charges 7.09 cents a kWh. So how much did this light bulb cost to run all month long? That's easy:

46.8 kWh X 7.09 cents/kWh = 331.81 cents or about $3.32 a month.

Now go around your house and count up the number of light bulbs you have. A lot, right? Admittedly, not all of them are on 24 hours a day, but I bet some are. You can calculate the cost of your lights very accurately by making a list of every light in the house, along with an estimation of how many hours of the day they are in use. Then run them all through the equations above.

Does that sound like too much work? Yeah, I kinda figured it might be. Fortunately for you, I have taken the time to create a spreadsheet that will calculate your entire home's energy usage. All you have to do is load up this spreadsheet on a laptop and walk around the house collecting information. Plug in the numbers and voila! You have a pretty darned accurate estimate of how much power your home consumes in a month!

Email me for a copy of the spreadsheet @ apocolypseblog@gmail.com. And yes, I know apocolypse is misspelled. I didn't want to have to go through all of the trouble of fixing it. It will even tell you how much money you save by making changes.

Changes

Simply put - change out all electrical appliances and other items with energy efficient substitutes. That sounds expensive, but consider this:

According to the US Department of Energy, every dollar spent on energy efficiency will save three to five dollars in generating equipment. ¹

This applies to any sort of off-grid system you may be thinking of (solar, wind) or the coal powered plant the utility might be building. This doesn't even begin to account for savings you will reap in reduced electrical costs over the life of the appliance.

An easy way to start on the path to energy efficiency is to replace your incandescent bulbs with compact flourescent (CF) bulbs. The average bulb lasts 10 times as long as an incandescent bulb. This means that the "expensive" CF bulb at $2.50 a piece is actually less expensive than the incandescent bulb sold at 40 cents since you'll have to buy 10 of them for every one CF bulb.

Okay, so just in the cost of bulbs we have saved $1.50 by buying the CF bulb. Now imagine we replace the 65W bulb in the equation above with a CF bulb. Here's how the equation looks with a CF bulb that will supply equivalent light:

(15W/1000) x 24 hrs/day x 30 days/month = 10.8 kWh/month

Wow! The incandescent bulb used 46.8 kWh/month versus 10.8 kWh for the CF bulb. How much money did this save us?

10.8 kWh X 7.09 cents/kWh = 77 cents

Since the incandescent bulb costed us $3.32 a month and the CF costed 77 cents, we have already saved $2.55 in electricity a month by changing one high-use bulb! Now how many light bulbs did you have in your house? The money adds up quickly.

Another simple and cheap upgrade is to upgrade to a low-flow showerhead. If you live in the city, this will save you money on your water bill and electric bill (less water used equals less water to heat). I recently bought this one.

If you live on a well, then the low-flow showerhead still helps you out with the lowered amount of water you are heating to take showers. If you are in an area prone to droughts, this showerhead might be the difference between the well running dry or not.

We will talk about efficiency more in the future. If you really want to learn about how to make your home more efficient, I highly suggest The Renewable Energy Handbook by William H. Kemp.

1 The Renewable Energy Handbook by William H. Kemp