PureGin.org

So, tomorrow (Saturday March 27) is Earth Day, and the hour between 8:30-9:30pm has been dubbed Earth Hour. There is a campaign urging people to turn off their lights for that hour, in order to save electricity, and generate awareness of the vast amount of energy we casually waste.

Since moving into our house in Aug 2007, we've been trying pretty hard to reduce our energy consumption, in particular our use of electricity.

Our house is a detached single-family dwelling, built in 1998, with one finished floor of 2000 square feet (186 square metres) with a full partially finished basement of 2000 square feet. Since our only energy source is electricity, the main challenge is to reduce energy wasted for space heating (using conventional electric baseboard heaters throughout) and hot water (using a conventional storage type electric water heater).

The graph at the right shows our average daily consumption per two month billing cycle for the past 2.5 years or so. We've managed to cut our electricity use by just under 20% over the first year's baseline, saving a total of approximately $620 (at an average price of 7 cents per kWh).

Part of this savings in the past year is due to a relatively mild winter on the South Coast of British Columbia in 2009/2010. On the other hand, we had an extended cold snap last winter (2008/2009).

The rest of the savings I attribute to

Something I did about a month ago really opened my eyes. I was riding the wave of complacency, just like everyone... we'd been talking (for years, literally) about getting Canada Post to stop deliving junk mail. I happened to chat with our postal delivery person as he was dropping off mail for the neighbourhood, and he said it would be sufficient to tape a little note inside our mailbox: "Please, no un-addressed bulk mail". I ran home, wrote one up, and taped it inside our mailbox - it took five minutes. Unbelievably, this has reduced the amount of paper in our blue and yellow bags to almost nothing! All of these years I've been lugging these stupid ads home, cursing, chucking them into the recycling, and hauling them out to the curb every two weeks. We had FULL blue bags and half full yellow bags almost every two weeks. This amounts to a stack of paper waste about 10 inches in height, once per two weeks, or about 4 kg. Now, almost nothing. I can't believe I've been such a chump for so many years.

Using current 'baseline' solar photo voltaic (PV) electric technology, solar farms covering approximately 2.85 percent of the area of the Sahara desert could generate enough electricity to equal the energy generated worldwide in 2005 from fossil fuels.

Such a solar array would cover approximately 256,500 square kilometers (somewhat larger than Honshū, the largest island of Japan) and cost in the neighbourhood of 150 trillion US dollars to construct, assuming costs of about $500 per square metre of PV cells.

Today, the first day of Spring, marks my second commute of the week on my relatively new bike, an Ezee Forte electric model. If you've been following along you'll know that the first few rides left me less-than-impressed with the electrical system.

I finished Neal Stephenson's Anathem over the weekend - all 900+ pages including appendices.

Wow... I was enthralled.

If you've been paying attention, you'll know that we've been down to a single car for the last month or so. Last weekend, after a good deal of discussion, we bought a new vehicle: an electric bike. The goal is for this to replace one car for my 4 times per week 20km each-way commute, thus saving 80-120Kg CO2e per month over taking my 2004 Golf TDI (the numbers are from this article). So, we made the trip to Victoria to Scooter Underground.

I started thinking about the whole concept of 'print on demand' a.k.a. 'just-in-time printing' yesterday after I printed off 304 pages of Squeak By Example, an introduction to the Squeak implementation of the Smalltalk programming language. The book is available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license, and is freely available for download, though I elected to support the authors by purchasing the PDF from Lulu.com for $8.95 USD.

Going greener can be a whole lotta fun, as well as saving money and helping the environment. So I've discovered after buying a second hand 2004 Volkswagen Golf TDI.

We'd been talking about replacing our '97 Chevy Cavalier with a smaller, more fuel efficient, safer, more reliable car for about a year.  Recently rising gas prices, as well as some mechanical difficulties with the Cavalier (the latest was a leaking water pump) had been adding some urgency to the situation. 

I heard Monday via the Vancouver Linux User Group mailing list (thanks, Syv!) that the province of British Columbia has implemented a Consumer Electronics recycling program via Encorp.

Starting on Aug 1, 2007, consumers will be able to bring selected items to selected Encorp 'Return-It' centres where they will be 'Recycled'. Details of what types of items can be returned are available here