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.

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

Last week we highlighted five clockwork gadgets that were perfect for anyone chasing electrical self-sufficiency. Trouble is, while they’re all practical, none of them is particularly entertaining. Even the mobile phone charger needs an adaptor before it can talk to your iPod.

That’s why the Hymini caught our eye. It’s a micro wind-power generator, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, that will charge any 5V gadget - a spec that covers a very broad gamut. Not only does it sound good in theory: it looks great, too. Here’s a grab from the maker’s site.

How does it work? Well, it has an internal battery, which can be charged using a conventional wall socket, a solar panel, a USB port in your computer or the integral turbine. Once fully charged, it can be plugged into whichever gadget you need to power, which then runs off its battery.

The turbine’s fans glow green when charging, and can top up the internal cell on a breeze of just 9mph. You’d easily achieve this while walking into a barely-noticable 4mph headwind, but if you use the optional adaptor to attach it to your bike - the creme de la creme of self-sufficient transport - you’re pretty much guaranteed a healthy charge.

Of course, it’s not a cure-all fix. 20 minutes of wind charging gives you 30 minutes of iPod playback, and then only if you’ve been stood out in a 19mph wind, but small, personal technologies like this could well be the future. Miniaturised turbines could be built into cars (perhaps behind the radiator) to charge the internal battery or, if engineered to maximum efficiency and installed in great enough numbers, to contribute to powering a hybrid vehicle entirely. The motion of the car would generate a wind to turn the blades, and the blades in turn would generate the power to keep the car in motion.

More exciting, though, would be the possibility of building micro generators of this sort in to new homes, doing away with the need for unattractive turbines in the back yard.

That’s still a long way off, and if it ever arrives, such technology is likely to be neither quite so small, nor quite so attractive. For the time being, though, we have the Hymini which, quite refreshingly, is a snip at $49 (£25). The bike adaptor is a bargain $8.99 (£4.59) through the online store.

Technorati Tags:
electricity+generation, energy+efficiency, home+generation, turbine, wind+power, wind+turbine

Some time ago I wrote on here about Pedalites, the self-powered lights for the pedals on your bike. I ordered a set and promised to report back once they’d arrived, been fitted and tried out. That time is now.

They’re about the same size as my old pedals, but much chunkier and a little heavier. They don’t look so good, being made of plastic with large bulges for the power packs, but they’re by no means eyesores.

Now as they’re more expensive than an average set of pedals they’re supposed to be difficult to steal, so the first thing you see on opening the box is an allen key that you use to screw them in place. Regular pedals can be unscrewed from the crank using nothing more complex than an adjustable spanner.

This turned out to be more difficult than expected, as you have to hold the pedal horizontally while turning the screwhead with the other. While one went in with relative ease - probably because of using the dominant hand - the other refused to line up, and it took ten minutes of careful and frustrating effort to get it in without sheering the thread on the crank.

It was worth the effort, though, as once in place, the pedals felt safe and sturdy, and the dimples on the upper surface gave good grip.

The Pedalites people warn that the first few times you use them you may notice some extra resistance but that this would slacken off over time. We didn’t. It felt just like we were using our old, regular pedals, and despite an oncoming headwind needed apply no extra effort.

It was difficult to judge the amount of light given out until we parked the bike in the shed, at which point each flash lit up its interior to an impressive degree. It should certainly have been enough to be spotted by an oncoming driver.

Of course, Pedalites are no substitute for regular front and rear lights on a bike, but when combined with a fluorescent jacket and good LED bulbs they should contribute to your safety on the roads in the dark winter extremities of the day.

The price - £34.99 plus postage - is fair when you consider the technology incolved and compare it to regular lights (although Halfords is currently having a half-price in-store lighting sale that’s worth checking out), and so the Pedalites earn themselves a four-star Blagger rating. They’d have got five out of five if installing them hadn’t left us worried about that thread on our crank.

Price £34.99
URL pedalite.com
Pros No running costs; fix and forget convenience.
Cons Fixing was a little awkward.
Verdict A simple way to improve your visibility and safety when cycling in the dark, but one which should only be used in conjunction with conventional bike lighting.

Technorati Tags:
cycling, pedalites, pedalite

Mac-using tree-huggers can download the very cool, and free OS X Planet, to keep an eye on what’s going on around the world.

Even if you don’t believe that changing global weather patterns are influenced by human activities, there’s something quite hypnotic and addictive about having this running on your Mac desktop, where it displays a constantly updating image of the position of day and night on our planet, cloud patterns (updated, by default, every three hours), volcanic eruptions, storms and even satellites and the International Space Station.

The space station moves remarkably quickly. In the five minutes between updates (my choice of refresh - you can pick shorter or longer) it went from west of Ireland and somewhere close to Munich. Five minutes after that it was over Iran.

That picture below shows it running on the second monitor connected to my Mac. As it’s technically just an ever-updating desktop background (’wallpaper’ in Windows parlance’ it doesn’t interfere with your applications, which is why the iChat window you can see running in the bottom left hand corner works entirely unimpeded.

Whether you’re green, or out for software on a budget of zero, it’s a top download for Mac users. Find it here.