Entries from March 2010 ↓

Did you do the last Tip of the Week – preventing your entertainment center from using electricity while it is ‘off’?

If you’re like us, you don’t need your Wii to be checking it’s mail when you’re not using it (it also checks for news, weather, and posts to the Wii message board). In fact, I find that bright blue light incredibly annoying. I just found out that you can change a single setting and not only stop the annoying blue light, but save 76 kWh per year! At least it’s not a PS3 – now that’s a power hog.

Changing the internet connection setting on your Wii
• From the main ‘Wii Channel’ menu, use the Wii-mote to select the ‘Wii’ button in the bottom left corner.
• From the main Wii Menu and System Settings screen, select the ‘Wii Settings’ option (wrench).

• Use the arrow button on the right of the TV screen to go to ‘Wii System Settings 2′ and select ‘WiiConnect24′ at the bottom.
• If ‘WiiConnect24′ is on, your Wii will connect to the internet and retrieve messages, news, and weather. If ‘Standby Connection’ is also on, your Wii will retrieve this information whether or not your Wii is on. This is what you want to turn off (unless you actually want a blue flashing light demanding you turn on your Wii and look at your mail). Select ‘Standby Connection’ and then ‘Off’. Be sure to press ‘Confirm’ at the bottom of the screen.

Now it’s time to sit back and enjoy the thought that those 5 minutes equated to an ‘hourly wage‘ of $120 tax-free. Unless you’re a CEO of a multinational corporation, that’s a lot better than you make at your job.

• Cost: free
• Time: less than 5 minutes
• Annual Savings: $10 or 76 kWh
• Payback time: instantaneous

Hat tip to Shaun for realizing it was possible to reduce the Wii’s energy usage without powering it on and off all the time.

• Plant something: alfalfa for green manure in a couple spots that I plan to plant later this summer
• Harvest something: no
• Preserve something: not this week
• Waste not: finished taking down the old fence in the back yard and reused the pieces to make a nice big compost bin
• Want not: filled the new compost bin with dead leaves – I’ll need as much compost as I can get this year
• Community food systems: nope.
• Eat the food: old frozen leftovers – Shaun’s working crazy hours this week and I didn’t feel like cooking just for myself.

Kale started using two egg cartons: seeds are planted in a paper egg carton, which sits in the flat top of a plastic egg carton, which acts as a watering tray. Keep covered until seeds sprout to retain moisture.

There are infinite sets of instructions on how to start your seeds indoors. Some say you must use florescent shop lights and heating mats, while others contend that you can just put them on a South-facing windowsill. I’m being ambitious this year, and only have so much windowsill, so decided to use it mainly for relatively fast-growing cool weather plants like greens and brassicas. I’m also starting a few tomatoes this way as an experiment.

Containers
The local, pastured co-op eggs I prefer come in those paper/cardboard cartons (which are compostable, by the way). Once in a while I buy eggs at the chain store across the street, where the nearest to pastured eggs come in a clear plastic carton. By cutting a paper carton to fit inside the flat top of the plastic one, I have a set of little ‘pots’ to plant seeds in. Cut off the paper carton’s top, the lip around the egg-holes, and the tips of the peaks so the cover fits, and poke some holes in the bottom of each cup. The flat top of the plastic carton serves as a drip tray, allows bottom-watering, and keeps the paper from letting water evaporate too quickly. I use masking tape keep the tray in place on the windowsill (in case of interested cats).

Soil
Don’t use regular garden soil – it’s too dense for consistently successful seed starting. You can use sifted compost or buy a seed-starting mix, which is what I did this year. Moisten your chosen dirt-substitute, mostly fill up each egg-hole, then put the whole carton in a pan (cookie sheet, casserole dish, etc) with an inch of water.

Plant your seeds
Take the carton out of the pan when fully damp, let drain a bit, and place in the flat plastic egg carton top. Put a couple seeds in each cup and cover with a thin layer of soil – read the instructions for the specific seeds you are planting. You don’t need to water again, just wait a couple minutes and the water will wick to the top.

Label!
Be sure to label what you just planted – I’m telling you, you’ll be sorry if you don’t. I used a Sharpie pen to write on the plastic tray what I planted in each cup.

Wait
Flip the other side of the plastic egg carton on top to retain moisture and put it in the windowsill. Once the seedlings start popping up out of the soil remove the cover – it could retain too much heat on a sunny day and cook the plants. Be sure to water when the soil even starts to look dry – I add about 1/4″ every day or two. Having cut off the tips of the ‘peaks’ between the egg cups left holes just big enough for me to (carefully) pour water through into the plastic tray, so I don’t have to take the paper carton in and out.

Transplant
Eventually it will be time to transplant your little seedlings, whether to bigger pots or outside (be sure to harden off before transplanting outside). Don’t wait too long though, egg carton cups are pretty small and don’t leave room for a ton of root development.

Even though the paper egg carton is compostable, I don’t recommend planting the seedling in the ground still in the egg cup. Last year I used purchased peat pots which you are supposedly able to just plant directly in the ground, reducing transplant shock – however, the pots didn’t break down nearly as fast as was claimed. Given how much thicker the walls of egg cartons are, I’m almost sure they would restrict root growth way too much. But once you’ve transplanted everything, be sure to throw the remains of the damp dirty egg carton on your compost heap.

Earth Hour is tonight, at 8:30pm local time.

On Earth Hour hundreds of millions of people, organizations, corporations and governments around the world will come together to make a bold statement about their concern for climate change by doing something quite simple—turning off their lights for one hour. In the U.S. where we are already feeling the impacts of climate change, Earth Hour sends a clear message that Americans care about this issue and want to turn the lights out on dirty air, dangerous dependency on foreign oil and costly climate change impacts, and make the switch to cleaner air, a strong economic future and a more secure nation.

Participation is easy. By flipping off your lights on March 27th at 8:30 p.m. local time you will be making the switch to a cleaner, more secure nation and prosperous America.
- EarthHour.org

Not sure what to do for a whole hour with no lights? Check out this list of ideas from previous years.

The 90% Electricity Goal

• American average:
  11,000 kilowatt hours/ household/year
• Goal for my household:
  1,100 kWh/year
• Our 2007 consumption:
  7,201 kWh/year
• 2009 consumption:
  5,201 kWh/year
  We are using Xcel Energy’s Windsource program, so according to the project rules our usage produces 1/4 as much emissions, making our effective consumption 1,300 kilowatt hours/year – just over the goal.

Current Situation
While we’ve gone down quite a bit in our consumption, some of the difference is in our housing situation while some is due to behavioral changes. We now have a gas rather than electric stove and no central air conditioning – we didn’t even install the window AC last summer. We’ve switched to CFLs, and I used a Kill-a-Watt to see how much energy various appliances use. Based on the information, I got a smart strip to shut down the peripherals when Shaun’s computer is powered off, and I turn mine off with a power strip every night. I air dry our laundry, and turn lights off when we don’t need them. We do use an electric space heater once in a while during the winter.

The big things that can’t be shut down (at least, we’re not willing to) are the refrigerator (525 kWh/year, estimated at the Energy Star website), chest freezer (est. 357 kWh/year), entertainment center (139 kWh/year while not in use – I just fixed this), and computer server which uses a whopping 925 kWh/year (extrapolated from a few days this week measured with the Kill-a-Watt). That is 18% of our annual electricity usage, or $125 just to run the server! Actually, it was probably more – the server had been running really loud (the fan was running almost continuously) for months, until I finally took it apart last fall and vacuumed out all the dust that had collected inside. I’m quite certain that the dust had been upping it’s energy consumption considerably more before it was cleaned.

Obviously, we need to look seriously at that server.

I’m starting a new series of posts, Tip of the Week. Each post will focus on a one-time task that will reduce your energy and/or resource usage in the future.


Our entertainment center: a TV,
receiver, subwoofer, DVD player,
Wii, and old gaming consoles In terms of phantom load (small amounts of energy that are being used even when an appliance is switched off), one of the big usual suspects is the entertainment center, in our case comprising a TV, amp/reciever, subwoofer, DVD player, and many old console gaming systems. I measured their usage recently using a Kill-a-Watt: 17.29 watts total when not in use, which is most of the time for us (the following calculations are based on entertainment center usage of about 2 hours per day). This adds up to 139 kWh per year – just under $19 per year, and 2.7% of our annual electricity usage while they’re not being used.

Although $19 isn’t a lot of money, at a cost of only $21 it’s worth it to buy a Smart Strip for the entertainment center. A Smart Strip is a power strip that automatically shuts off your peripherals when the ‘control’ is turned off. In this case the TV is plugged into the ‘control’ outlet, so everything else shuts down completely (as if the power strip had been switched off) when the TV is turned off. Smart Strips also have a couple ‘always on’ outlets for things that you don’t want to be turning on and off with the control. We have a Wii which isn’t included in the calculation of kWh consumed when the entertainment center is not being used because Shaun doesn’t think it should be powering on and off often – so it is plugged into one of the ‘always on’ outlets.

• Cost: $21.12
• Time: 5 minutes to purchase online, 3 minutes to swap the Smart Strip with the old power strip
• Annual Savings: $18.89 or 139 kWh
• Payback time: 1.1 years

I spent 4.5 hours sitting outside making Sundrops this morning. Ow number one – I really should stand up every once in a while.

This afternoon I spent another 4.5 hours turning the compost pile (I’m astounded at how much everything has broken down in just one week), levering out the remainder of the plastic fence in our back yard, digging new post holes and making a nice big compost bin out of the fence pieces, and moving the compost pile into the new bin (ow numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5). I finished just as it was getting dark, or I’d have taken a picture.

My back is not very happy with me now.

• Plant something: started in egg cartons and peat pots: hardy kiwi, broccoli and tomatoes; started in AeroGarden: eggplant, swiss chard, sweet peppers, hot pepper.
• Harvest something: nada
• Preserve something: froze leftovers and chicken stock
• Waste not: made lemon soup with a lemon that was about to go bad, and invented a curry to use up the extra peanut sauce from satay beef the night before, composted cardboard and egg cartons
• Want not: um… nothing
• Community food systems: attended a Transition Twin Cities meeting, and visited a new community garden one of the members is starting this year
• Eat the food: salsa, kale, beans, yogurt, beef – we’re near the end of the quarter cow we bought with our housemates a year and a half ago

The 90% Gasoline Goal

• American average:
  500 gallons/person/year
• Goal for my 2 person household:
  100 gallons/year
• Our 2007 consumption:
  242 gallons/year

Current Situation
Shaun and I haven’t owned a vehicle since we sold our car in the middle of my original 90% Reduction series, almost three years ago. We get a ride very seldom (once every couple of months-ish) from our housemates or friends. Originally, we figured that renting a car once a month would be cheaper than owning and would allow us to do all the errands necessary to pick up bulky items or were far away. In actuality, we’ve rented a car once (I think, possibly twice).

Mostly, we’ve stopped needing to travel so far – I work from home, Shaun works 2 miles from home and walks nearly every day, we’ve stopped shopping at Costco because we no longer have to buy candy for our laundromat vending machine and we have started eating more local (and it’s farther away here in MN), we live across the street from a Home Depot and chain grocery store, and the co-op we prefer to shop at is only a mile away. I bike many places in the summer. A bus line that goes straight downtown runs right by our house, so even getting to other areas of the city isn’t too hard, including the airport (light rail from downtown). The only thing I really miss having a car for is to go garage sale-ing or pick something up I found on craigslist, and I’m certain that not having a car saves us a lot more money than garage sales and craigslist would.

Calculation
Shaun and I both have Go-To cards with the Twin Cities’ Metro Transit. These are stored money cards, so it’s not that easy to estimate distance traveled, but I’ll give it a go. We put $280 on our cards in the last year. Each ride is $1.75 or $2.25, depending on whether it’s rush hour, so I’ll estimate $2 per ride, and the automatic transfer lasts for 2.5 hours. I’m going to estimate that we make about 4 round trips to the airport per year on one transfer, meeting visiting friends and relatives, which is 27 miles round trip (4 * 27mi = 108mi for $8), and the two of us took 3 plane trips together last year, adding up to 12 one-way trips of 13.5 miles per trip (12 * 13.5 = 162mi for $24). We probably take an average of one 1.5-mile trip per week (52*1.5 = 78mi for $104). That leaves $144. For the remainder of the trips I usually manage a round trip to and from downtown on one transfer, 8 miles per ride ($144 / $2 = 72 trips * 8mi = 576mi). Our total public transit mileage is thus 924 miles per year. Public transit is deemed to get 100 mpg for the purposes of this project, so our 924 miles equates to 9.24 gallons of gas.

I estimate we get a ride with a friend on average about once a month, about 12 miles round trip, adding up to 144 miles per year. Half the time they would have been driving anyway, and the other half they kindly go out of their way for us (like taking the cat to the vet). Since the cars vary, I’ll use the American average miles per gallon for passenger cars in 2009, 22.4 mpg. That equates to 6.43 gallons of gas.

• Our 2009 consumption:
  9.24 + 6.43 = 15.67 gallons/year
  This is ridiculously lower than our 90% goal of 100 gallons.

Air Travel Not Included
The 90% Reduction Project did not include gas from air travel anywhere in the project. Terrapass’ Carbon Footprint Calculator estimates we produced 6811 lbs CO2 in our three trips together in 2009. PuraVive estimates 17.8 lbs CO2 emissions per gallon of gas, leaving our gas usage for flights at 382.6 gallons.

Thus, our true total is 398.27 gallons for the year. That’s still only 39% of the American average for transportation, but obviously the only way to reduce our gasoline impact is to reduce airplane trips. And I think my mom might be a bit upset if I refused to go home and visit her in Alaska.

As promised, this post starts the nearly-three-years-later update on the 90% Emissions Reduction Project, Riot for Austerity. The project is broken down into seven categories:

• Gasoline
• Electricity
• Garbage
• Water
• Consumer goods
• Food
• Heating & cooking energy (natural gas, wood or oil – I use natural gas for both)

The original goal of the project was to reduce emissions and/or usage in every category by 90% from the American average over the course of a year, and then keep it there. I admit, I made my original series of posts to calculate my baseline, found I was doing pretty well (although never actually reaching the 90% goal) in most (not all) categories, and then let the whole thing slide.

Now Shaun and I live in Minnesota rather than Colorado, share a duplex with friends (the duplex is larger, but we don’t heat the finished basement, and it doesn’t have the vaulted ceilings of our Colorado condo to trap the heat), still don’t have a car, have a second cat, generally eat more locally, and garden a lot more. Up til now, I haven’t been concentrating directly on the project or calculating my numbers, just generally “trying to do better,” so this will be more in the way of an updated baseline report, in large part for me to see how I currently stand, rather than how well or poorly I’ve succeeded. Once I see the new baseline I’ll start working on my specific problem categories.

On to the baseline!