Blagger » Technology

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.

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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

The wind-powered iPod

Nik — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:16:44 +0000

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

Pedalites: The Review

Nik — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 23:56:01 +0000

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

The view from space

Nik — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 07:20:54 +0000

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.

Money for mobiles

Nik — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 07:27:14 +0000

Like 10m other Brits did last year, I’ve just upgraded my phone. Partly it was because I wanted a new handset, but primarily it was because Orange was offering a better deal than Vodafone, and it would save me money to switch.

In the end I stayed where I was, as they matched the deal, but as they also gave me a snazzy new Sony Ericsson it means I now have a redundant mobile sitting around at home.

Mobiles are very harmful to the environment if you simply chuck them out, as the battery needs to be property disposed of, and the etched components recycled in an appropriate manner. So, I was pleased to see that when they sent me my new handset, the box packers had also slipped in a postage-paid return envelope, so I could send back my old one. Once they got their hands on it, they’d forward it on to the Third World where it’ll enjoy a useful second life in the sun.

Admirable, yet not entirely enticing, as hanging onto it gives me a fallback should the new one go wrong, get lost or be stolen.

Then I came across envirophone. It pays you to take your phone off your hands, covers all the postage, makes a donation to charity and then recycles the phone, either by sending it on to needier countries, or disposing of it in the proper way.

For my old Sony Ericsson K750i, they’ll pay me £47 in cold, hard cash or, if I prefer, send me £54.05 to spend in Argos, which will come in handy with a house move on the horizon.

Suddenly, hanging on to that old mobile ‘just in case’ doesn’t seem nearly so tempting, while for anyone pondering a paid-for upgrade, where their next mobile won’t be free, a service like this could effectively offset the full cost of a far better handset than the one they already have, depending on the contract they have in mind.

Ethical shopping

Nik — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 07:37:07 +0000

Every now and then you stumble upon a “why didn’t I think of that” idea. Today it’s the Ethical Superstore.

With so many fair trade and carbon-offset products on sale these days, there’s only one excuse for not buying ethical products. What reason is that? The fact it can sometimes be frustratingly difficult to find them in your local shops.

Well, not any more. The Ethical Superstore sells gifts, gadgets and groceries from over 50 countries, but only if they are eco-friendly or fair trade. The range of products is impressive indeed, spanning the full gamut from wine to DAB digital radios, and books to bubble bath.

It’s British-based, so you get UK pricing, and you can even optionally offset the carbon cost of delivery for a totally green shopping experience.

Not all of the products get an unconditional recommendation. The Solio charger, which promises to top-up your iPod or phone battery using the power of the sun was wholly under-whelming when we tested it in the office, and the wind-up digital radio runs for only 3 – 5 minutes after 60 seconds of winding, so unless you switched to FM (missing the point) you’d have three or four interruptions in a single episode of The Archers.

On the whole, though, the choice of products is impressive, and we’ll be adding the Ethical Superstore to our personal list of regular online destinations.

We’re also pinning Nigel’s Eco Store to that shopping list, as it delivers earth-friendly products direct to your door from its home base in Brighton.

Again, the range on offer is impressive, taking in everything from recycled tea light holders at £5.35 to cardboard furniture, custom-made at well over £1000. That latter category includes a groovy set of rocking chairs made from re-claimed cinema seats.

As I plan on pulling out the electric and gas fires when I finally move into the house, though, and replacing them with solid-fuel fireplaces, what really caught my eye was the Logmaker. As the site explains, this £24.95 item,

The Logmaker quickly and easily turns your household and garden waste into free fuel for your open fire, wood burning stove, chiminea, barbecue or camp fire.

Produce compact newspaper encased ‘logs’ in minutes and burn them straight away. (The ‘logs’ will burn for between 10 minutes and 1 hour depending on the contents.)

The Logmaker enables you to recycle up to 30% of your burnable household waste, and so is an eco and environmentally friendly way of producing logs for your fire.

Green tunes

Nik — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 07:57:51 +0000

Going green forces you to audit your life, for while there are some obvious things you can do to make a difference – walk rather than drive, recycle your papers, turn down the thermostat and so on – it’s the little things that you often miss out on.

And so I’ve been thinking a lot about music.

I don’t listen to CDs any more. Most of my aural stimulation comes courtesy of the BBC (Radio 4, Radio 2 or my local station for the travel news), but even when I do want to listen to something I’ve bought the CDs never get a look-in. Why? Because they’re neatly packed away in a box in the loft, and haven’t been out for months. In some cases years, if they’re particularly old.

That’s because they’ve all been ripped to an iTunes server, which gives me access to every track on every CD from any machine on my network. I switch it off when it’s not in use, of course, and it’s hosted on an old, salvaged machine that would otherwise have ended up in landfill until I picked it off the tip pile at work. But despite these two ticks in my favour, I’m still not sure how ‘green’ a solution this is.

The server gobbles up far more power than a regular CD player, and by buying all those CDs, which are now never used, I’ve contributed enormously to the pile of industrial by-products that would undoubtedly have been pumped out at the very same time.

At least I’m not turfing them out and doubling the waste.

In the earliest days of CD production there was no alternative but today, with the iTunes Store, eMusic and the like offering a far wider and more convenient buying choice than the high street, there’s no excuse to buy music on physical media any more.

This is also one area where it’s actually cheaper to go green, as iTunes albums top out at £7.99, compared to almost twice that much in some shops. The trouble, though, is I just don’t like buying my music that way. I want a physical CD. As backup.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) ties purchased music to the buyer, so unless I want to put them on an iPod or burn them to CD (again, wasteful) only my computer or four others on the same network can play the tracks I buy from iTunes. So what happens if (unlikely, I know) the DRM-controlling-authority, in this case Apple, either goes out of business or changes the terms of use for that music?

If it does, I might find myself with an expensive pile of utterly useless data, and those three BBC stations I listen to each day may end up being my only choice of entertainment rather than simply my preferred choice.

A dilemma, eh?

It’s the little things, as I say, that can make going green tricky.

The true cost of upgrading your computer

Nik — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 07:57:37 +0000

I’ve always believed technology can do a lot to enable a greener lifestyle. Companies like Intel are forever developing more efficient, cooler chips, allowing our computers to run without consuming so much power. Software developers like the teams behind open-source OpenOffice and various flavours of Linux are helping us to securely and efficiently use old machines for longer than ever before. The ability to video-conference using nothing more than a £20 web-cam and free instant messaging software is helping cut down on travel as we do more of our work and have more of our meetings online, rather than in person.

So it’s a shame that every update of something like Windows makes people rush out and simultaneously upgrade their computers. The Guardian estimates that 85% of computers currently in use will be unable to run Windows Vista fully without being upgraded. This means, says Siân Berry Green Party, Female Principal Speaker, that

there will be thousands of tonnes of dumped monitors, video cards and whole computers that are perfectly capable of running Vista – except for the fact they lack the paranoid lock down mechanisms Vista forces you to use. That’s an offensive cost to the environment.

Future archaeologists will be able to identify a ‘Vista Upgrade Layer’ when they go through our landfill sites.

Of course, we’ve come to expect a hardware upgrade cycle with every new release of Windows, now in its 17th incarnation. The blame this time around, though, can’t be lain entirely at Microsoft’s door. Yes, Vista requires greater processing, memory and storage power than ever before, but largely this is because of the demands made by the Hollywood studios that Vista spends a lot of its time protecting their copyrighted, and highly lucrative content. They insist that Vista must support certain interfaces, which in turn uphold digital rights measures. The only way that it can do this is to continually scan its ports, set-up and connected peripherals to make sure that nothing has changed that could compromise the security of any media streams it’s decoding. It is for this reason – to the exclusion of several others – that it requires many hardware upgrades.

It is also for this reason that users of many alternative operating systems, including Linux and Mac OS X, are often locked out of enjoying up-to-date content on their computers. Channel 4′s on-demand service, 4OD, doesn’t yet support the Mac, and the BBC is currently running an online consultation asking whether its future plans for an online on-demand service should include provision for non-Microsoft-based hardware.

The answer, of course, if a resounding yes. If anyone should be supporting as diverse a range of platforms as possible, it should be the BBC. However, without the agreement of the content owners, it will never be able to provide such content to computers running any OS other than Vista as no other platform supports the full range of digital rights controls that they require.

You could blame the studios here, but I am more inclined to blame Microsoft. It could have made a big difference by insisting that some less power-hungry form of DRM be implemented, saving us the requirement to wastefully upgrade our PCs in order to run Vista. Let’s not forget – Microsoft is an incredibly powerful organisation. It could have made a difference.

Apple’s Fairplay, on the other hand, controls rights on the world’s most successful online music service (iTunes), and this will run quite happily on systems eight years old or more. The same cannot be said for Vista. Yet Apple is no better than Microsoft, as it has so far refused to license Fairplay at all.

As a results, PC users who are not minded to replace their machines wholesale have little choice but to at least throw out some components as they swap them for newer, compliant items. The environmental cost will far outweigh the financial, making the UK asking £219 asking-price for Vista Home Premium edition (it’s only £115 in the US) look massively underrated.

How much should we really be paying if we also want to offset the carbon burden, I wonder?

Calling for free

Nik — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 07:57:58 +0000

I’ve previously been a bit sceptical about Skype, but in recent weeks have found myself using it more and more. Of course, it helps if you have someone you want to talk to on a frequent basis, as in the past my fairly well-stocked buddy list has remained open but unused most of the time. Now, though, with a rapidly-expanding range of first-class hardware supporting the platform it’s getting easier to use it as a primary means of talking to your friends. For free.

For a couple of months now, I’ve been using the excellent VoIP Voice CyberphoneK, which has finally come to the Mac platform. With a full keypad you can use it for calling regular phones worldwide at local rates, although as I also have a SIP-based VoIP phone for that, my SkypeOut credit remains largely unused and the buttons unpressed.

I know it means that you have to have your PC (or Mac) turned on to chat to your friends, but I do, currently, prefer the cable-connected handsets, as they don’t suffer the processor lag of the true wifi alternatives, which may look good but, in my experience, don’t yet live up to their promises.

Most importantly, though, and the reason why I think I may start raving about Skype – at long last – is the signal quality. I have been enormously impressed by the smooth sounds Skype’s engineers are managing to squeeze out of quite limited bandwidth. It is this, combined with a good range of low-cost handsets, that could make Skype one of the easiest, fastest-to-pay-back money saving moves any home can make.

Especially if you have plenty of friends also on Skype.

Skype can be downloaded for free, for use on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, from www.skype.com.