New Energy Watch

Bust Your Energy Burglars

Those little red and green and blue lights that glow in the dark after you’ve thrown the switches on the way to bed? Those are the signs of electricity burglars working while you’re asleep or away. They’re on the TV, the computer, the printer, the microwave, the DVD player, the stereo – you name it. They show that an appliance is in stand-by or “sleep” mode, not fully on, but not fully off, either. Some of these burglars steal a lot of electricity, anywhere from 2 to 20 watts, day in, day out, year in, year out. For instance, an older TV “standing by” in an unused room at 6 watts would run about 1 kilowatt hour every week, or 52 kilowatt-hours a year, just sitting there.

Standby power levels recommended by the government’s EnergyStar program range from 1 to 3 watts, but when you have a dozen such recommended burglars in the house, it can still add up to real waste and money. Appliances whose electronic clocks are vital to their function need to be left on, but others should be plugged into power strips with switches that fully break the circuit when you turn it off.  If you have a computer, monitor, printer, and scanner all plugged into a single power strip, you can manage them all at once.

 

Light Chooser from EnvironmentalDefense.org

Here's an excellent click-by-click locator for energy-saving, long-life bulbs/lamps for pretty much all applications -- inside, outside, ceiling fans, dimmable, etc. It's available on the website of Environmental Defense.org.

Energy-Saving Light Bulb Chooser

Product Review: PowerCost Monitor from Blueline Innovations

Here’s the PowerCost Monitor from Blueline Innovations in St. John’s Newfoundland. It shows you, at glance, how many kilowatts are being used in your house at any given moment. With the push of a button, it also shows you how much money you’re spending on electricity at the same moment. The numbers produced by the monitor can be very sobering if you’re paying about 19.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, as we are. (That doesn’t include the premium we pay for the 100-percent Connecticut Clean Energy Option.)

There are two components to the system -- the wireless monitor (2 AA batteries) that sits on your counter, and a sensor (2 AA batteries) that you fit to your electric meter. The sensor works on either electromechanical meters with spinning wheels, or electronic meters with digital read-outs. The Blueline website makes matters pretty clear, but you need to know which kind of meter you have. If you have any questions, give Blueline a call.

Our meter, for example, is electromechanical, but the electric company installed a circuit board that lets the meter-reader get numbers from the street. The circuit board obscures the front of the wheel. When we called Blueline, the tech on duty suggested that we try to jury-rig the sensor so that it could pick up the wheel movement from the side of the dome. We did this, with the aid of a couple of big rubber bands and plastic wire ties, then synchronized the sensor and meter, confirmed the signal, entered our electric rate into the monitor, and started getting readings immediately.

We’ve run the PowerCost Monitor for about six weeks, and have checked it against a full-month electric bill. It’s very accurate, and is easy to understand and operate. There are only four buttons, two used to choose displays for money being spent or kilowatts being used, one to clear the monitor and start again from zero, and one to sync the monitor and sensor during set-up.

Here’s why it’s a good thing: You walk past the meter and notice that it’s showing 1.2 kilowatts. You can hear the refrigerator compressor running, and you know you have a tower computer and big screen running in the other room. You have two CFLs on, one over the kitchen sink and one over the dining room table, but they only account for 30 watts together. So you wander around and find that your daughter has left two 60-watt incandescent lights on in her room, and there’s a 100-watt incandescent on for no particular reason in the front hall. You turn off those three lights and go check the monitor. Bingo, you’re down to one kilowatt. Those lights would have run all day with no one home. They would have used about 2.2 kWh, costing about 40 cents. If you’re that heedless every day, it adds up to $146 per year, not to mention the sap on the grid, the pollution, the global warming, and all that.

The PowerCost monitor is a good tool for letting you know what you’re burning and what you’re spending throughout the day. It costs about $150 U.S. Come to think of it, at the rate we’re going, this thing is well on its way to paying for itself.

~ Doug Logan, New Energy Watch

Ditch the dishwasher dry cycle

This is a great tip from the Greening Committee of St. Thomas's Day School in New Haven, CT:

By not using the dry cycle in your dishwasher, you save both energy and cash. Save 15-50% of dishwasher energy usage and as much as $25 per year on your electricity bill.

If you run your dishwasher in the evening, the dishes will air-dry by the morning. Ditto if you run the
dishwasher in the morning and empty it in the afternoon.

If you find they are still unacceptably wet, open the dishwasher door slightly after the cycle is finished or prop the door ajar by pulling the top rack out just a tad.

If you have to empty the dishwasher immediately after running it, put a dish towel on your countertop adjacent to the dishwasher. Place wet items on the towel to sop up any remaining water before putting dishes away.

If 10,000 people do not use their dishwashers' drying cycle, in one year the CO2 averted will have the effect of planting 3,343 trees. Think about that!

To add one more item to that, a folding wooden dish rack sitting atop that towel or on drain sheet is hard to beat as a drying tool for a few dishes at a time. It seems almost absurd to have to point that out. People have been using such dish racks for centuries, and many of us still do. But there are also plenty of people who think nothing of running a full dishwasher cycle to deal with a few items from the breakfast table. Those items could be cleaned easily with a drop of dish soap and a quart or two of water, and left in the rack to dry.

~ Doug Logan, New Energy Watch

Wattage calculator

Here's an excellent wattage calculator from  www.generatorsales.com. It gives you an easy way to figure out how much electricity you're using in your house,  so that you'll know how big a genset to buy as a backup. But the list will also be useful in figuring out ways to conserve energy.

GELcore solid-state LED lighting

GELcore, a subsidiary of General Electric, makes LED-based traffic lights, rail signals, display lighting, and -- most important for this forum -- lighting systems for signage and architecture. Their Tetra product line (CL, XL, BT, Contour, etc.) is intended to replace neon and fluorescent fixtures in both commercial and residential settings. These lighting systems are advertised to be rugged, weather- and UV-resistant, long-lived, and, of course, miserly on power, offering up energy savings between 40 and 80 percent over neon lights and fluorescents.

If you have a business that uses old, flickery, power-hungry lighting tech for  advertising on the street, you might want to check out the GELcore line. We have no storefront ourselves, but we could see some linear Contour strips (shown in photo) in warm white running around the kitchen...

See this GELcore page for information on the Tetra line.
For information on where to buy these products, click here.

~ Doug Logan, New Energy Watch

12-volt lamps

When you adopt the "let's get small" mentality, you may find that you can bridge a lot of equipment and system gaps by using simple DC 12-volt solutions. We always have three or four deep-cycle batteries lying around, ready to be slung into projects, and keep them charged with a small 15-watt solar panel from ICP.

For example, let's say that you have no AC sockets on the side of a room where you need a light. You don't need the light all the time, and you don't want to bother with the expense of a permanent installation. But you also don't want a wire running across the floor or all the way around the edge of the room, over doors, etc.

We solved such a problem with a 12-volt deep-cycle battery (about $80) and a Gruva light from Ikea ($10) Like a lot of Ikea lights, the Gruva is a 12-volt lamp that uses a transformer to change over to AC power. So we snipped the transformer off (don't get the urge to do this when the lamp is plugged in), bared the ends of the wires, ran them around the back of the bureau that couldn't been seen into without a light, rigged the light on the wall, attached the wires to the battery, and hid the battery in a wooden box beneath a clothes-storage hamper. It works well and doesn't look bad. We charge the battery two or three times a year.

The bulb in the Gruva is a G4 halogen, very hot and wasteful. But we only use it for about 30 seconds a day, so we're not guilt-ridden. If this were a light we needed a lot, we'd use a 12-volt cold cathode fluorescent (CCF) lamp like those made my Taylorbrite (about $56 from Defender Industries).

The photos show the Gruva lamp on the wall and the battery hiding place at the bottom of the stack.

~ Doug Logan, New Energy Watch

Lamps, lights, and on-off mythologies

Incandescent lights are notorious energy hogs, especially when they're left running unnecessarily. They use a lot of power to produce relatively little light, and make heat in the bargain. We should replace as many of them as we can with compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) , which use 75-80 percent less power and last up to 13 times longer (according to Westinghouse), create very little heat, and provide a warm light -- not as warm as incandescents, but better than LEDs.

We have a small house that doesn't get much direct sunlight any time of year. We run CFLs in places that are used constantly -- over the kitchen sink, over the dining room / homework / project / sit-around table, and at the bottom of the stairwell. We've found that they don't work as well in places where you need a bright light right away, for instance in the entryway, where we need to be able to see into the coat closet as we're rushing out, and don't have time to wait for a CFL to warm up. In this case we use a regular 100-watt incandescent, but only run it for 30 seconds or so.

So, is it bad to run a light for only a short period? 

Common wisdom says that you shouldn't turn incandescent lights on and off all the time, because the thermal cycling weakens their filaments prematurely. While this is inevitably true, the damage is not very significant in the context of the cost and normal lifespan of the bulb. The reduced energy cost when the bulb is off trumps the cost of any small percentage of bulb longevity lost.

What about CFLs -- do we shorten their lives by turning them an and off too often? The answer is yes, they do need to be allowed to warm up. If you turn them off and on repeatedly before they can warm up properly, they're going to expire faster than they normally would. If you won't need a CFL for more than 15-20 minutes, turn it off. If you'll be back sooner, leave it on.

Here's what looks to me like the absolutely skinny on this mythology from Lighting Design Lab.

GE Consumer and Industrial Lighting, also has a good FAQ file on compact fluorescent (CFL) technology.

What's your experience, pro and con, with CFLs versus incandescents and other types of lighting?

~ Doug Logan, New Energy Watch