Blagger » At home

Eco answers

Nik — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:45:49 +0000

The more you use, the more you pay. Whether it’s electricity, water or packaging, everything we consume costs us money somewhere along the line. For anyone who grows their own food in an effort to cut down on packaging, saves rainwater to save wasting precious supplies or generates their own electricity to trim their bills – in short, a self-sufficientist – this is patently clear.

But how much does waste actually cost, and how much can you save by going green?

It’s never been obvious or easy to work out, but the New Scientist has produced a guide to ‘dumb eco-questions you were afraid to ask‘, and it answers plenty of them.

Like switching off lights. I’d always been told that it was best to leave a strip light on all evening rather than turn it on and off every time you enter or leave a room. And the magazine seems to agree, applying the theory to the energy saving bulbs we use throughout the house:

Switching the light on and off does saves energy, but there is a catch. Every time you flip the switch, the bulb takes a jolt of electricity, which shortens its life. Studies by the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, found that turning low-energy compact fluorescent bulbs on and off at frequent intervals can shorten their lifespan by as much as 75 per cent. The institute’s director of energy utilisation, Tom Reddoch, suggests leaving energy-saving bulbs on if you will be out of the room for less than 15 minutes.

It’s got advice for drivers, too. That’s less relevant for us these days as neither of us uses the car much and we do most of our shopping for fresh food by bike, but even so:

Avoid dramatic braking and acceleration and use cruise control if you’ve got it. Move through the gears as quickly as possible, changing up before you hit 2500 revs per minute (2000 rpm for a diesel). Where possible, drive at a steady 55 miles per hour (90 kilometres per hour). It is up to 20 per cent more fuel-efficient than driving at 75 mph. Check your tyre pressure once a month because underinflated tyres can raise fuel consumption by 6 per cent. Don’t carry excess baggage. Each extra 25 kilograms decreases fuel efficiency by 1 per cent. And avoid short trips – a cold engine uses twice as much fuel as a warm one.

It’s an excellent read for anyone who wants to know how to make best use of limited resources, so if you’re wondering whether a home wind turbine will ever pay its way, if washing your clothes at lower temperatures will really get them clean or what the carbon footprint of your cycle ride to work is, based on the energy consumption involved in making the food that will power your little pumping legs, check out the full article here.

Learn how to keep chickens at home

Download Blagger's first eBook, How to Keep Chickens at Home.

Chickens are the perfect addition to even a small garden. They're easy to keep and provide you with eggs. This book has all you need to know, from the team behind this web site. Find out more at blagger.co.uk/keepchickensathome

Home-made Christmas cards

Nik — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:45:10 +0000

Found this excellent site full of instructions for making pop-up cards – the kind of thing that would cost £4 or more in the shops. For anyone thinking of making their own Christmas cards, it’s got instructions for turkeys, snowflakes, snowmen and Christmas trees. All you need is a printer to print the templates, scissors to cut them out and some glue to put them together.

It’s been put together by Robert Sabuda, whose name means nothing to me, but in the US it would appear he’s a childrens’ book creator, so I guess he’s something pretty big. Either way, these are really inspirational, and although they’ll take some time to make, they could be just what we were looking for.

Only this weekend we were planning a trip out to pick up supplies and ideas for this year’s cards…

The cost of solar power

Nik — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 07:00:00 +0000

A worrying report came out this week about the financial unfeasibility of solar power. The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors’ (RICS) Building Cost Information Service has done the maths, and while installing solar panels on your roof will cost you somewhere in the region of £4,000 – £5000, it will save you about £24 a year. Even with rocketing fuel prices. That’s pretty lame.

And how many times does 24 go into 5,000? 208 and a bit, which is how many years it would take you to recoup the investment.

Compare that to cavity wall insulation, which costs about £440 to install in a terrace and could pay for itself within three years by saving £145 a year in heating bills. Can you see which option is most cost-effective?

Even a new boiler – average cost £1,720 – will save you £95 a year and so repay itself in less than two decades.

So if you’re installing solar panels to save money, then don’t. None of us will see a return in either our lifetimes or those of our kids.

And yet despite this I’d happily pay a little more for a house with panels installed. Somehow when it’s part of a mortgage and not coming straight out of your own pocket it feels a little easier to swallow.

But that’s rather missing the point, isn’t it. For true self-sufficiency, installing green technologies like solar panels and wind turbines is more about ensuring a constant, reliable supply, breezes and clouds permitting, so even at that cost, and with such a small return, it still makes sense. So long as you install whatever other devices you can to cut down on energy leaks.

The RICS guide costs £17.99 (no word on how long it’ll take to recoup that cost). More info here.

This is a bit of a blow coming on the back of the British Wind Energy Association’s report revealing that it could take 15 years of generating green electricity to offset the environmental impact of constructing a home wind turbine in the first place, never mind the financial cost of buying and installing it. Donnachadh McCarthy installed a turbine in 2005 at a cost of £2,400. This year had been its most successful to date, generating a grand total of £2-worth of electricity. If it was ever able to keep up that kind of output, it would take him 1,200 years to get his money back.

Personally I’m still holding out for Ben Storan’s cheap, lightweight wind turbine, which would make a great addition to one of my spare chimneys.

Photo by Clownfish on Flickr

Intelliplug: review

Nik — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:00:00 +0000

Standby is the self-sufficientist’s enemy. If you ever want to start generating your own electricity, you can’t afford to waste it on illuminating a standby light. That’s why we’re fans of Bye Bye Standby, the little remote control set that lets you switch off your gadgets once and for all without scrabbling around for the socket.

Now we’ve added the OneClick Intelliplug to our set-up, banishing standby in our office, as well as the lounge. It’s entirely passive, you see, so you don’t even need to think about turning off your peripherals any more.

The plug – a grey box that plugs into a regular wall socket – has three ports for plugs. You plug in your primary device into the one on the top, and your peripherals in the other two sockets.

Your device in the master socket then becomes the key to controlling all of your other add-ons.

We tested it using a Mac (it’s just as happy with a PC) and attached an external storage device, plugging the powered drive into one of the peripheral sockets and the Mac into the one on top. We could just as easily have plugged in two full extension cables of devices and they would all have been controlled by the Mac.

We switched on the Mac, and the drive duly powered up five seconds later. It was ready for use by the time the Mac had finished booting. Switching off the Mac did the same in reverse, safely powering down the drive five seconds after the Mac had switched off and the drive unmounted.

OneClick claims that this device, which costs just shy of £20 RRP (£7.64 on Amazon), can reduce your power consumption by as much as 35W an hour, and pay for itself inside of a year. It ships with a warranty that covers that period, but the makers claim it should keep on running for 15 years or more.

Is it a worthwhile addition? Absolutely. The 35W hourly saving is ambitious, and it relies on you having a lot of standby-hungry devices plugged in at once, but this remains the only way you can switch off everything on your desk with a click of the mouse. Combine it with Bye Bye Sandby and you’ll never see a standby light again.

Price £19.99
Pros A simple way to control all of your devices with a single button or mouse. Can deliver real cost savings. Available for much less than the RRP if you shop around.
Cons None

Bye Bye Standby: review

Nik — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 08:01:51 +0000

Not two months after I switched energy provider, my new supplier announced a price hike. A pretty big one, as it happens. What’s most galling about that is that one of the reasons I chose them in the first place was that they’d just gone through one increase already, which I assumed would mean any further change in their rates would be a good year off at least.

I’m on a green tariff where all of my bills go towards providing hydroelectric power, and the plan came bundled with an energy monitor that tracks every watt as it’s used. Having it beside the TV blinking away every time you boil the kettle or wash your clothes certainly helps you focus on your usage, which is where Bye Bye Standby comes in. It’s three plug adaptors and a remote control that lets you switch your appliances on and off from the comfort of an armchair.

It sounds like the height of laziness, but actually it makes good sense. If you want to actually switch off my TV you have to either unclip all of its back panels to get to its master power switch, or clamber around behind some furniture, the upshot being that you’re more likely to use standby and waste power every time you head out or up to bed.

Now I can switch it off at the plug – along with the digibox, DVD and everything else plugged into the same extension – with the press of a single button, because that extension lead is plugged into the Bye Bye Standby adaptor. At the same time I can switch off the lights by pressing red button two (or switch them on with green button two, which impresses visitors) and switch the broadband router on and off from downstairs (it’s upstairs in the study) with buttons red three and green three.

Each unit has the capacity to control up to eight plugs without changing the channel by switching between groups one and two on the front of the control, and new plugs can be bought individually or in packs to expand your set-up. Each has a simple 1-2 toggle on the side that assigns it to one group or the other.

Now, as I head to bed at night or leave the house in the morning I just press each red button in turn and know for definite that everything is switched off. The packaging promised annual savings of more than double the asking price, which may be a little optimistic in my case as I’ve always been quite good about switching things off properly, but now that it’s become a part of my life, and control of all of my sockets has been centralised in a slimline control small enough to lose down to the back of a cushion, I wouldn’t want to go back to the old way of working.

Price £20 – £25 for three-plug kit including remote (£17.28 from Amazon).
Pros Centralises the controls of every gadget in your home. Quicker than turning off everything in turn.
Cons None.
Verdict The smartest, easiest way to save energy – and money – in the home.

Technorati Tags:
energy+efficiency, energy+saving

Why self-sufficiency matters

Nik — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:56:48 +0000

A day before trumpeting profits to rival a Bond villain’s ransom, British Gas announced it was putting up its prices by 35%. That caused uproar, but it seems it was only half of the story: the 35% figure was a national average, with our region – the east – shooting up by a far more substantial 43.9%. Effective immediately.

This is despite the fact that British Gas’ profits have risen 500% to £571 million in the last 12 months, and that its parent company, Centrica, banked £1.96bn in the same period. The companies’ public image was hardly enhanced when they announced bonuses for their directors the following day, and the papers pointed out that they coincided with a fall, not a hike, in the cost of oil. That went down from $147 a barrel to a more reasonable $123.

Needless to say the TV was full of commentators and ‘experts’ telling us all to turn down the thermostat by a degree or two – as if we hadn’t already thought of that – seemingly never spotting the fact that at this time of year, when the thermostat is usually down at zero anyway, you can’t take it any lower without coughing up for air-con.

You can blame it on inflation or corporate greed – your choice – but the truth of the matter is that prices are rising, and not just in terms of fuel. I don’t often remember what I pay for groceries from one shopping trip to the next, but on a late night trolley-push around the local store last night, two products stood out as having shot up.

Malt loafs, which for as long as I can remember, have been two for £1, were tagged up at £1.12. A 12% increase. The cat biscuits that I’d bought six weeks ago at 30p a carton (I remember because the cat goes through them so fast that I picked up a palette of 10 and it cost £3) were now 68p a pop. That’s £6.80 for the same palette, or an increase of 126%.

Now there’s not much you can grow at home to feed your pet, unless you’re keeping a vegetarian rodent, and you do have to heat your home, but with prices rising these are two good reasons for moving towards self-sufficiency, and that’s excluding the fact that the shorter food miles save on petrol.

By relying less on your local store you naturally save money in real terms. More importantly, though, every year you keep on growing your own food is more profitable than the last: not only do you get better at encouraging a higher yield, but the value of your produce is higher, too, thanks to increasing global crop prices.

Self-sufficiency made easy

Nik — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:07:38 +0000

Self sufficiency doesn’t all have to be about growing your own vegetables, keeping chickens in the garden or screwing a solar panel to your roof. Sometimes it’s the smallest things that make the biggest difference.

Since switching energy providers to a green tariff, which came bundled with a free electricity usage monitor, I have become ever more aware of the amount of power I’m using, and am much better at switching off lights and banishing the standby button than I ever was before.

It soon became evident that by far the most power-hungry appliances at home are the kettle and the tumble drier. Switch on the kettle and you could increase 10-fold the amount of energy the house is using at any time to run the freezer, fridge, TV, alarm system, a few clocks and a couple of lights. Switch on the tumble drier and it’s not much different.

Unless you’re prepared to switch to a camping stove for making your tea, there’s little alternative to the kettle, but in the summer season one of the simplest, most effective self-sufficiency measures you can take is to string up a line across the garden and air your clothes the way nature intended. Banish the tumble drier and you’ll not only help save the environment; you’ll save money, too.

Plus, there’s something quite satisfying about watching your shirts blowing in the breeze.

Energy consumption monitors

Nik — Sat, 17 May 2008 07:00:00 +0000

I’ve just switched energy suppliers. It was so easy, quick and painless I was left wondering why I hadn’t done it sooner. So now I’m 100% green, having subscribed to a tariff where all of my electric comes from hydro generation.

Well, that’s the theory. In practice the electricity comes from the National Grid just like everyone else’s, and you can’t filter out just the nice bits for my sockets and shunt off all the rest down the road. But at least my bills pay for ethical energy and for more green power plants, and if everyone did the same there would be no need for any new coal or oil stations.

As a nice aside, though, the supplier actually wants you to use less energy rather than more, and so throws in a free energy monitor that tracks your usage and gives live updates on the ongoing cost. Watching it change as you switch lights on and off is proving strangely addictive.

The picture above shows the house effectively idling. I’m consuming 99 watts to run the fridge, freezer and broadband modem, with the alarm system, TV and digital box in standby (I know TVs on standby are evil, but it lacks an actual off switch, so I’ll be rearranging my plugs to make it easier to switch off at the wall).

So, just to maintain the house in its idle state costs £6.41 a month, or a little over £75 a year, plus the daily standing charge of 14p.

Every time you switch something on or off the value on the meter changes right away, and it tells you in cold hard pounds and pence how much of an incremental increase in your bill that gadget will cost you to run. The results can be quite scary.

Cooking dinner the other night, with four lights burning, the oven on at 190 degrees Celsius, and the aforementioned fridge, freezer, broadband, alarm, TV and digibox doing their stuff, consumption stood at around 300 Watts, which if kept constant would cost about £20 a month to sustain. That’s very cheap, although it does fluctuate slightly as the oven keeps itself up to temperature with occasional boosts. Switch on the kettle, though, and it jumps to 1400 Watts, or £90 a month.

Of course, you wouldn’t keep the kettle boiling constantly for the month, so it’s a slightly exaggerated finding, but it does show how wasteful it is to boil more than the absolute minimum necessary for your drink as the more you boil, the longer you boil and the more you spend.

I refuse to get fanatical about the kettle, but the novelty of watching my real-time electricity usage hasn’t yet worn off, and I do feel a little better about not only saving money, but helping save the planet, too.

Slimmer, trimmer home wind turbines

Nik — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 08:38:41 +0000

Wind turbines generate more controversy than electricity. While research suggests that some yield less power in the course of a year than it would take to illuminate a lightbulb, your decision to erect one in the garden can have neighbours up in arms. And while local authorities are becoming more amenable to the idea of small-scale renewable energy generation, it is still – technically – necessary to get planning permission before putting one up.

Hopefully things should get easier as more efficient, smaller and quieter models are rolled out. Last year’s BSI Sustainability Design Awards highlighted work in this area, with first place taken by Ben Storan’s radical vertical turbine. Storan (right), an MA graduate in Industrial Design Engineering from the Royal College of Art, developed his more efficient turbine in conjunction with Imperial College, turning traditional designs on their side to take advantage of slower rotational speed.

That’s important in built-up urban areas, which aren’t ideally suited to turbine siting as surrounding buildings impede the free flow of passing air. This new design should generate up to three times the amount of energy put out by a traditional turbine without any increase in wind speed; that’s about 1.2kW with winds of 12 metres per second.

A welcome side effect is far quieter operation, which should do much to ease neighbours’ concerns and smooth the planning application. The design is unusual and fairly attractive, but it’s still not all that small, with an overall height of 4 metres, and a span of 2.5 metres.

Interest in the project has been strong, and by his own admission the last few months have been ‘hectic’ for inventor Storan. He had a show in LA for Wired magazine, and travelled to Peru to shoot the pilot for an American TV show called Imagine This.

He bagged £3000 for taking first place in the BSI Awards, which will be used to research and realise his design, which now forms a part of his Mphil project, alongside research into the design aspects and consumer opinions and usage of domestic wind turbines, particularly in urban areas.

‘I have had a few offers for putting it into production,’ he told Blagger. ‘I am determined to put a thorough phase of testing and evaluation in first. The first prototype should be ready in the coming months.’

If all goes well, that prototype could lead to a modified version of the turbine hitting the market some time next year. It’s enough to have us holding off on investing in a traditional turbine for the next 12 months at least.

Technorati Tags:
self+sufficiency, self-sufficiency, wind+turbine, power+generation, wind+power, micro+generation

Can you save money while charging your phone?

Nik — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:04:52 +0000

We all know you should unplug your mobile the moment it’s finished charging, but if you plug it in when you go to bed and then undock it next morning as you head out to work, the chances are you’ll have left it trickling all through the night. So why not cut the current after two hours with a mechanical timer, like the kind you’d use for security to switch on and off your lights.

Why not indeed?

I’ve got a little dehumidifier chugging away in the outhouse right now, which set me thinking about power consumption. Would it be better to put it on a mechanical timer and have it switch on and off for a couple of hours at a time, or leave it running all day?

That particular point is still in debate – at least until the initial damp has gone – but it did set me thinking about doing the same thing with the mobile, iPod and other gadgets that need a regular charge. It’s proving very difficult to source any accurate power consumption figures for mobile chargers – particularly in the trickle mode they slip into once the battery is charged – but the numbers for mechanical timers are less obscure.

After various tests, Brian Cryer puts it at around 2 Watts, or two hundredths of a unit of electricity per hour (two-hundredths of a kilowatt hour). My supplier charges 9.15 pence for a kilowatt hour of electricity (including VAT at 5%), so over the course of a year a mechanical timer, left plugged in and switched on 24 hours a day for 365 days, would cost £1.60 to run. You could cut that considerably if you only switched it on when you went to bed, and remembered to switch it off – at the plug – when you picked up your phone again next morning, say seven hours later. If you did that, the annual cost would be a negligible 47p for the year.

That’s pretty good. It’s less than an eighth of a penny a day, but obviously it doesn’t include the cost of actually charging the phone.

Some phone chargers draw around 4 Watts or 5 Watts of power, so a two hour charge of your phone would around 0.07p at the rates stated above. Even if you left it plugged in for the whole year, and it never went into trickle mode it would only add about £3.20 to your overall electricity consumption.

But of course they always draw that much power. Once the batteries have a full charge, the charger itself switches into a trickle mode and dramatically cuts the consumption.

Whether this consumption would be higher than the 2 Watts drawn by a mechanical timer – thus making the cost of running the mechanical timer lower – is unclear, but given that a phone in full-strength charging mode takes only double that it seems unlikely.

So are mechanical timers a effective means of cutting your energy costs? Yes, if used the right way. Their value when it comes to switching off a fully-charged mobile phone is in doubt, but a 23 Watt dehumidifier…? Almost certainly worth the effort.

Technorati Tags:
energy+efficiency, energy+saving, mobile+phone