h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Afternoon all,

Sir Nicholas Stern's report will give us all serious food for thought'

What will Posters do to reduce their energy consumption? - and I mean DO , not just *think about*

My first steps

1 Don't use *standby* facilities on electrical gadgets
2 Switch off lights when leaving the room
3 Use lower temperature washes for clothes
4 Dont the office lifts - walk up to floor 5 good cardio vascular excercise.
5 Walk to work if it isn't persisting it down.

Ideas for more saving

1 Remove stanby features - see No 1 above
2 Turn off alternate stretches of street lighting ( or alternate lights ) after 11.30pm
3 Remove motorway lighting - except at junctions

Anyone ant sensible - or looney -ideas we could adopt?

Novo

Remove motorway lighting? I can think of a couple of places (much of the English side of the M4, in particular) that could really do with having lighting in the first place!

Anyway... one good way of reducing comsumption is to have hot water and central heating on a timer. A few people I know just have leave them on all the time (and as a result their houses are like saunas and using the hot tap is an extreme sport).

My suggestion would be removing all female access to thermostatic controls on household central heating.

I've done my bit. It's been more than ten years since I used a hairdryer.

"Rebates for baldies"

Make local, seasonal fruit and veg cheaper, and non-seasonal air-freighted fruit and veg dearer.

Teach kids at school how to cook the aforementioned seasonal food properly so that it tastes good.

Add VAT to air fuel.

Introduce free/heavily subsidised school buses (if these have to be paid for they should be free for low income families) for all primary schools and possibly secondary schools too.

Oh and for my own part, the attempts to reduce my food miles for the summer/autumn were scuppered by the hot weather combined with the hosepipe ban, coupled with the distance between the water butt/tap and the vegetable beds. Mind you, when the plants eventually recovered they went mad - am still getting courgetes now! This weather is bonkers.

Will be reducing landfill by not using disposable nappies. Already recycle or compost everything we can.

Carrier bag tax - that was something else I think we should introduce.

I'm against a carrier bag tax - it'll affect everyones food bill - just charge people for carrier bags if they want them.

We re-use the carrier bags we get from the supermarket when we go to our local greengrocer. And we also use them as binliners in the kitchen. This means we have to have a rather small under-the-sink garbage bin and change it more frequently, but at least the carrier bags get re-used.

We also recycle plastic and glass bottles/containers, though this means having to make special trips to the recycling bins - and they don't have a lot of them here in the centre of town. But it also means we get out for a bit of a walk.

I used to have a timer on our electric water heater, but then I was told it actually took more energy to reheat the whole thing after it had gone cold than it takes to just keep 'topping up the heat' during the day. Is this true? In any case, we also lowered the thermostat so the water isn't as hot as before, but it's still fine for our use. Have also mastered the five-minute shower, which not only saves on water but also electricity.

As for saving water, one very simple thing to remember is not to leave the tap running while you're brushing your teeth or shaving.

az

we should clamp down on this needless wasting of postings on hootoo too

That is what I meant by bag tax, you wouldn't pay it if you didn't take the bags... I'm not good at reusing bags for shopping, but having to pay for new ones would help me remember to put some back in the car. We also use them instead of binliners.

>>"I used to have a timer on our electric water heater, but then I was told it actually took more energy to reheat the whole thing after it had gone cold than it takes to just keep 'topping up the heat' during the day. Is this true?"

No, it's not true.
If you think of the heat escaping from the tank, the cooler the tank is, the slower the rate of heat loss.
If a tank is kept at a constant X degrees, given a constant temperature outside its insulation, it will lose heat at a constant rate. If the heating is turned off and the tank starts to cool down, the rate of heat loss will also start to drop. Even when the heater is turned back on, even though the rate of heat loss will start to increase as the tank heats up, it will still be lower than the heat loss from a constant-temperature tank right up to the point where the tank heats back up to X degrees.

Since the overall heat loss is less if a tank isn't kept constantly hot, it uses less energy to turn the tank on and off manually (or via a timeswitch, if your usage patterns are predictable).

Probably not supposed to let this get out, but I've reason to suspect that the long-range policy of the current US govt. as it applies to reducing energy consumption is as follows: you pump as much CO2 into the atmosphere as possible, and then after a bit of time passes none of us will need to worry about running furnaces during the winter. That should save a bit of energy! Rather clever, wouldn't you agree?

We have timers on hot water & heating circulation; 3 m2 of panels on the roof for sun-heating of water (not for the heating, though), computers are never on standby though TVs are .

The car's probably too big - though certainly not to US standards - we do try to compensate by driving it with some sense. Roughly 12 km/l or 29 miles/US gall...

Most of the major electrical utilities - oven, freezer, fridge, washing machine - are pretty new and energy class A. That actually happened because most of them were getting old(er) and one year we suddenly had a 10-15% upswing in our electricity consumption. Replacing some of them got it back down

Oh, okay. I'll put the timer back on, Potholer. It used to always shut off around 9pm and start up again at 6am so we'd have hot water to shower with in the morning. Thanks!

az

You want to be careful with those low temperature washes - they don't kill the germs as effectively. I normally do 50C for that reason.

Been looking at solar panels, and wind turbines for generating our own energy. Not too impressed with solar technology so far in terms of cost and longevity, quite impressed with the turbines but remain worried about the noise and planning issues. They are both a biggish outlay and we've got other calls on our money just now - one of which is to replace the boiler in our house - it is at least 15 years old and probably not terribly efficient. We're replacing it with a condensing one so that should consume less power. All the other appliances are AA rated.

Our water and heating is always on a timer - although on cold winter weekends it takes me until I have become thoroughly chilled to remember that the house is getting steadly colder after 8.30 am.

Every radiator in the house has a thermostat as well as the central one so individual rooms can be controlled - the ones we don't use much are on very low.

Still haven't had to put the heating on this autumn though. The BBC is predicting the year's first frost on thursday night so might have to consider putting it on in the morning to make getting up that bit more bearable..

Protect your rain forests: Give money to conservancy efforts. Stop using any product that contains tropical hardwoods. Boycott teak and mahogany. Use sustainable fibers, like bamboo and hemp. Boycott bananas. Do not eat argentine beef. Buy and consume only shade grown organic coffee.

Reassess your need to take a shower every day of your life.

Remove and replace all your incandescent light bulbs with compact flourescents.

Turn down the thermostat in the winter, put on a sweater instead. Cuddle with your lover. In the summer, lie in the shade and listen to the birds instead of turning your air conditioner on.

Stop consuming produce that is out of season in your area. If the apple was grown in N. Zealand and you live in the northern hemisphere, huge quantities of fuel were consumed to get it to your table. ditto produce from Chile, Mexico.

Hang your clothes in the sun to dry.

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And perhaps another energy-saving point to make is to simply put on a sweater - or even two - before putting on the heat. I tend to sit around 'casa az' in winter wearing a couple of sweaters and a wool shawl ... we don't have central heating here. And we also have six balconies with tall balcony doors with ten window panes in them *and* they don't close properly. So I prefer to bundle up than spend extra on heating.

Meanwhile, I also rent out the apartment next door and I'm amazed at some tenants who walk around barefoot and in short-sleeved t-shirts all winter and CRANK UP THE HEAT.

az

With regard to the timers, my brother-in-law is a senior engineer at British Gas and he insists that keeping the heating on low all the time is cheaper than on/off, on/off. We kept it on last winter as a result of his nagging and our gas bill was down about 20%. On a larger scale, it helps regulate the flow of gas in an area as they don't have to keep big reservoirs of gas to cope with surges in demand.

As some here may remember, I looked into the wind turbine thingy recently. The problem seems to be that every dashed council has a different policy regarding planning permission, making it a lengthy & expensive business.

It's possible that for a complex system (gas boiler, thermostats, etc) the system may be more efficient running at a particular power level than cycling on and off, maybe even to the extent it counteracts the unavoidable thermal losses incurred by keeping a house at a fixed temperature rather than letting it cool down periodically, though that would depend pretty crucially on how much time the house spent significantly cooler than its 'normal' temperature, as well as the system design.
There may be human factors involved, such that people running heating in a manual on/off system tend to run the system hotter at its peaks to compensate for their feeling colder when it wasn't running. Running at a constant level just warm enough to not feel cold might result in the average rate of heat loss being lower than in an on/off system merely by having the average temperature lower

However, for an electric water heater, it really is a simple system of heat input = electricity input - the conversion of electricity to heat could be considered as 100% efficient whatever operating pattern was used.
If there's a thermostat to limit the maximum water temperature, and that thermostat isn't altered, running the system periodically will reduce heat loss (and necessary energy input) by reducing the average temperature.