Efficiency - the Name of the Game

Our low-flow showerhead just arrived yesterday. I need to get some teflon tape so I can install it this weekend. This will reduce water use in the shower from 2.5 gallons per minute down to between 1.2 and 1.4 gallons per minute. That's a 50% reduction in water used and a 50% reduction in energy to heat shower water.

I also just ordered an external 160 GB hard drive.

"How does this save energy?", you ask.

By buying this external hard drive and attaching it to my PC at home I will be able to turn off another computer. It's a massive old server with dual power supplies. It sounds like a jet taking off when you hit the power button. This old tank draws 500W of power and it's on 24/7. It serves as the file server for our house holding our music, pictures, videos, and other files.

By turning this machine off we save a lot of energy:

(500W/ 1000 W/kW) x 24 hours/day x 30.417* days/month = 365.004 kWh/month

365.004 kWh/month x 7.09 cents/kWh = $25.88/month in savings

* 365 days/yr divided by 12 months/yr = 30.417 days/month

In other words, this external hard drive completely pays for itself in 3 months. After it pays for itself, it's like an extra $25 a month in the bank compared to what I would have spent on the electric bill.

Cohousing - A Possible Alternative?

I am on the mailing list of a local "Peace and Justice" type group. I know, I know - I don't seem like the type. One might think I'm more of the militia type.

Well I'm a bit more complicated than that, okay?

In any event, there was a link in their latest mailing to a local cohousing community. The idea was pretty intriguing. I like the community aspect invloved with sharing of meal cooking duties, a common house, and the pedestrian nature of the developments.

The one problem with the Cohousing development that we're looking into is that they may not have the commitment to renewable energy that I'm looking for. They mention that all homes will be "energy efficient" and that they'll have features like rainbarrels but I'm not sure that allowances could be made for "going the extra mile", so to speak.

They mention that all houses must be 1,800 sq feet or less and that the floorplans cannot be altered. I don't know if installing PV arrays or evacuated solar tubes for water heating would be considered a deviation from the floorplan or not.

Here's a cohousing community in Ithaca, NY if you'd like an example.

Ha! As I was typing this entry I got an email back from the cohousing community I emailed stating that solar would be allowed. Hmmm.... this is worth looking into.

I think the wife and I will have to look into this - maybe attend a meeting or two.

You Think Your Hippy Food is so Great? Think Again.

My wife often makes the argument that one of the single best things you can do for the environment is to become a vegetarian. This is because of the massive amount of energy and food needed to raise a single pound of beef, for example.

The runoff from most factory farms is also a significant source of pollution to the environment surrounding the farm. Pig farms are notoriously horrible on this count. In many developing countries in South America the rainforest is clearcut in order to make grazing land for cattle.

The conditions for the animals in these factory farms is also pretty terrible. I'm not a particularly large advocate of animal rights, but some of the conditions are just horrible. I don't believe that you should abuse animals, but I also don't think a rational person can make a moral case against eating animals except as it relates to the conditions of these factory farms.

Sounds like a pretty airtight case for vegetarianism, right? Not so fast. My wife likes to eat MorningStar brand "hippy-food" as I like to call it. They make many products like veggie burgers, chicken (not really) nuggets, and a whole host of meat-imitation products.

Why, if you're a vegetarian, do you have to eat a bunch of stuff designed to look and taste so similar to the meat you have forsaken is beyond me... but I am straying here.

All of these products share one thing: where they come from. That's right. All of these products are derived from the soy bean. Now how much processing (and thereby energy) do you think it takes to make something that looks like this...

... look like this...

Hmmm? Those beans have to be processed six ways to Sunday to make them look like a hamburger! I can't think of any way I could determine how much energy and pollution is behind one pound of this MorningStar stuff. It's a shame, too, because I bet it would still show that one pound of beef is responsible for more pollution than one pound of "hippy-beef."

I would be interested in knowing simply for comparison's sake.

Let's just make a safe assumption, since the hard data escapes me for now. The assumption would be that a pound of veggie burger is responsible for a good deal more pollution than, say, a pound of the soy bean it is derived from.

So if you're really serious about vegetarianism as an environmental concern, then you should probably give up the fake meats as well. All of those veggie burgers and chikkin nuggets that imitate the meat you scorn are doing slightly less damage than the factory farmed meats. But why go half way?

As you might have been able to guess, I am not a vegetarian. I am an omnivore, as Nature intended us. All of the strictly vegetarian branches of our evolutionary tree have died off. Since evolution makes no mistakes, we have to believe this was for a reason.

The route I have chosen goes like this:

• Consume less meat - Honestly, Americans eat too much meat anyway. Too much of anything is unhealthy. That's doubly true for red meat.
• Eat local and organic - When I do eat meat, I try to get local and organic whenever possible. It costs a bit more, true, but the taste is fantastic. The added cost will help reduce consumption and the better taste will make it hard to go back to the other stuff. Locally produced food is fresher and wasn't transported long distances to land on your plate.
• Buy from Mom and Pop - wherever possible I buy from a non-chain, locally owned company. Money spent in a locally owned establishment turns over an average of three times within the local economy. Buying from Wal-Mart often sends your money directly to their corporate headquarters with little to no turnover in the local economy.

I think of this as a holistic approach to my diet. By moderating the amount of meat I eat I am practicing healthier habits and contributing less to the environmental impact of meat. I reduce this impact even more by buying local and organic. If I buy this meat from a local butcher who sources his meat locally I am not only reducing environmental impact, but providing a boost to the local economy and taking money out of the hands of the worst environmental offenders.

It's Not All Gloom and Doom Around Here...

Some interesting reading on the BBC's website:

1. GM betting on a greener future
2. Test riding first hydrogen bike
3. Fuel cell cars to get test drive

It looks like the lumbering giant, GM, is starting to wake up to reality.

Unfortunately, Ford's new ad campaign, Bold Moves, is nothing more than that - an ad campaign. They continue to focus on trucks and muscle cars without making any real bold moves. Unless you count laying off workers as a bold move.

Why is Ford laying off yet more workers? The following exerpts from the link above pretty much sums it up:

GWEN IFILL

[...]Also, like General Motors, Ford has been losing market share to foreign automakers, Japan's Toyota in particular. This is the company's second wave of job cuts and plant closings in four years.

HARLEY SHAIKEN

The fact that Ford really did misjudge the market. But it isn't simply responding to the market. It's anticipating and creating a market, much the way that Apple did with the iPod or that Toyota did with the Prius, and then the Ford Motor Co. and GM and Chrysler are saddled with the legacy costs. That's a failure of government policy, not really a failure of Ford or the union. [...]

As far as I know, they have only one Hybrid offering - the Escape. 34 mpg hybrid and 20 mpg gas in the city. I guess 34 mpg is good for an SUV (even a small one), but this isn't exactly a bold move. Ford continues to pin it's hopes on large trucks (the F-Series) and muscle cars (like the Mustang).

A bold move would be to move away from these antiquated technologies and make a hybrid full sized truck. Why not make an electric car whose roof was solar panels in order to help with charging the batteries? If your car sits in a parking lot all day getting beaten by the sun, why not have it charge the battery completely off-grid?

You could even sell charging units to keep at home. Have a solar panel hooked to a battery that charges all day while you're at work. When you get home at night, hook your car to the charger - this draws all of the juice from the solar-charged (i.e. free) battery before pulling juice off the grid.

I'd stand in line to buy such a product.

Instead of paying some ad company to come up with a catch-phrase like "Bold Moves", why don't you actually make some? Ford, are you listening? Well, no - of course you aren't.

Green Trek - The Next Generation

One thing is for certain - our habits, as a species, need to change. We need to change and we need to train our children to think differently than we were raised to think.

When I say that our children need to think differently than we were raised to think, I mean that most of us were raised in the halcyon days of America. Most parents at the time were just beginning to become aware of the dangers of smoking and really had little to no awareness on topics such as the environment or global warming. Despite the oil crisis of the late 70's, no one thought that was indicative of shortages to come. They mainly thought this was a geopolitical issue and to a large degree they were right.

My Dad was a bit ahead of the curve in terms of environmental awareness. As long as I can remember he has been a member of the Sierra Club and he always taught us that littering was a bad thing to do. Back then this was as environmentally conscious as most people got. I'm not saying there wasn't an environmental movement or that there wasn't progress made on cleaning up many rivers, bays, etc. I'm saying it wasn't an issue that loomed large in the conscious minds of most people.

This is what it needs to become - an issue looming large in the conscious mind of society as a whole. What will make this change of thought stick as an ongoing realignment of mankind's approach to how we treat Earth is the indoctrination of our youth. Raising our children with these concerns in mind will make them second nature to the next generation of humanity.

I'm no child psychologist, but I am a father of four so I believe I have some insight into kids and how they think. Some people have accused me of being nothing more than a big kid. Well, they have cooties and can kiss my hiney.

Anyway - what I've done in my house is I've involved my kids. If they ask me what I'm reading I tell them. I try to get them interested in what it is I'm reading (right now I'm reading The Renewable Energy Handbook by William H. Kemp).

When I am working on some spreadsheet to calculate this or that concerning our family's energy consumption I make a point of making my work visible. Again, if any questions are asked I enthusiatically answer them. If you tell a kid, "Oh, nothing. What I'm doing is boring" they'll run away and never pay it any mind again.

My kids both have their own PC. They also have an X-Box 360 and TV they share. I showed them my spreadsheet and how them leaving their PCs on all day long was costing our family $17.86 a month each or $35.72 all together every month.

Since they'd both had their PCs for over a year I asked them, "Hey, each of you go get your piggy banks and give me $214.32 please. That's $17.86 a month times 12 months. Thanks!"

Of course my daughter (9) and son (12) looked at me like I was crazy.

"It doesn't cost that much!" my daughter said.

"No, you're right," I said. "You actually owe me more than that since I wasn't even taking the X-Box or TV into account."

Needless to say I didn't actually drain my kids piggy banks. It did serve to illustrate the point. They both realized that all of the allowance they had accumulated over months didn't add up to the electric bill just for their PCs. It was very easy from there to convince them to turn them off while not in use.

I placed a little picture next to the light switch in their rooms that said "STOP! Is your computer off? Is your monitor off? Turn off your light!"

After spot-checks over the last week they are doing a much better job at conserving the power consumed by their personal electronics. I have only had to come behind them and power off their PC once so far.

Our low flow showerhead should be arriving soon. When it arrives I'll see if I can get one of the kids to help me install it. Once installed I'll have to gather the family around and explain to them how they can take advantage of the "pause" feature that this showerhead offers (they can stop the flow of water while they lather up).

By getting them involved and talking to them about conservation, efficiency, and green living I am hoping to raise a green batch of kids. A good sign that they are thinking green will be if they ask you questions about conservation or energy on their own.

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

Who peed in his Wheaties?

For the first post here on Survive the Apocalypse I guess I should lay down the basic premise for this blog and maybe tell you a bit about myself and my lovely wife, with whom I will be writing this blog.

I am currently a city-dwelling young professional. Some may even call me a yuppie. They'd be wrong, but I can see where they'd get the impression. I am fairly young, I do live in a city (urban), and I work in IT (professional).

I used to blog many, many moons ago back when it was called "keeping an online journal." I would write in my journal every day back in 1999, 2000, and 2001. I was separated from my first wife and I had all of the time and angst in the world to fuel my rantings.

My lovely wife, apocalypsegal, was also an early "blogger" back before it was called blogging. We actually met through our journals.

Shortly after meeting my current (and last!) wife things were just too groovy. The list of things I was pissed off about got smaller and smaller. My need to vent and to vent every damned day diminished and then went away. I stopped posting and eventually my domain name registration lapsed.

I don't think I even have backups of my old entries anymore.

Then came the explosion of blogs and I thought, "Well, I'll never do that again. I mean - how passe can you be?"

But here I am. Here we are, my wife and I.

"Why?", you ask.

Well, I'm putting on this little dog and pony show for you for a few reasons:

1. It's free now! Thanks to blogspot I even get a decent URL for nothing!
2. I need to vent again. More on that later...
3. It's a great way to store my thoughts.
4. I can't lose this data because I misplaced a CD or a hard drive burned out.
5. This allows me to share with you, the general public, information and concerns I feel very strongly about.

So now you know why I started this blog. Now what's it about?

Simply put: Everything is going to Hell. You know it and I do, too.

The dollar isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Just this week the Canadian dollar surpassed the dollar in value. No offense to Canada, but if their currency is worth more than America's, then America has been managed very poorly.

The dollar's lack of value is indicative of many other problems. As a nation we are in debt. Mainly so we could fight a war that has nothing to do with anything but oil. Here's a little factoid that literally turns my stomach:

"Based on the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) recently determined that the Iraq war costs $720 million per day, $500,000 per minute – enough to provide homes for nearly 6,500 families, or health care for 423,529 children in just one day."

I got the above quote from one of the RSS feeds to which I subscribe. I'll credit it if I can remember where I got it.

So instead of investing in our nation we invest in bullets and bombs that can only be used once. Meanwhile bridges collapse, children go without health care, our nation's streets serve as the only home many Americans know.

Instead of enriching the entire nation we enrich a few defense contractor CEOs. We enrich Exxon and Chevron while our education system is in decline and our health care system is a nightmare.

We have money to kill, but not to grow. We have money for bombs but not for books or housing. We have money for destruction but not for dignity.

Our priorities are all wrong.

Global warming, impending oil shortages, and possible global shortages in water supplies are just some of the environmental issues that confront humanity as a whole.

As Americans the rise of China's industrial might is something that should have us much more concerned than we are. The rapid rise of America's industrial capacity precipitated our rise as a major global power. Of course it will do the same for China.

With an entire Damocles Armory hanging over the head of society, it isn't too far-fetched a notion that our way of life may change very soon. Whose life will change? I fear every one's life will take a turn for the worse. Nowhere will this be more true than in America.

By any objective measure, Americans live a gluttonous lifestyle. We are five percent of the world's population and we consume 20-25% of the world's energy. We get everything prepackaged and ready to eat from a store.

We in America are, per capita, the most polluting nation on Earth as well. How many sparkling clean SUVs with a single occupant do you see driving down any stretch of the road at any given time? I bet the answer is "a lot."

How many of us live right next door to people we don't know? I don't know most of my neighbors. Our increasing isolation is very, very bad for us as a social species. It is much easier to stand idly by as a complete stranger is mistreated. It's much easier to not be outraged when someone you don't know is laid off or has medical bills that ruin them. It's much easier to stand idly by as the authorities abuse their power when you aren't the one being abused ("First they came for them, but I was not one of them, so I said nothing...")

So I am writing this blog in order to prepare. I am preparing for a change. The good news is that what we will learn together on this journey will be beneficial for not only you, but your environment, your local economy, and yes, young patriots - probably even your nation (whichever nation that is).

There doesn't have to be an Apocalypse in order for you to reap these benefits. The purpose of this blog is to document my family's transition from gluttonous American waster-consumers into a family that lives in more harmony with their environment and their neighbors.

If none of the worst case scenarios come to pass (global climate change, world economic depression brought about by a collapse of the oil-economy, etc) it will be because people took actions like the ones we will discuss. Actions that fall into these two basic categories:

1. Reducing environmental impact
2. Increasing local involvement

Topics for future posts will range from Mad Max to Einstein (not really) to Julia Child. We will discuss preparation for emergencies, cooking healthy, renewable energy and energy efficiency (two topics that cannot be discussed separately).

As I read more books I will include them in the Required Reading section on the right hand side of the page. At this stage I have read Wilderness Survival by Tom Brown and I am just starting The Renewable Energy Handbook by William H. Kemp.