Science Horizons

We have added many new green products to reduce energy in our homes. But have we forgotten about many of the small energy consumers in our home that are wasting energy every day? I am talking about those small little black power supplied plugged in all around our home.

Whenever we buy any green products, audio/video components, PC Speakers, or cell phones to name a few a small (usually black) power supply is inside the box. This power supply provides power to the device or is used to recharge the products batteries. If you look around the house you will most likely find a couple plugged in to the wall waiting to be plugged into a product.

Don’t forget that every TV/Video Game/Computer comes equipped with a standby/power down mode to reduce energy use and comply with new standards for green products. So that device can waiting around for you to grab the remote and push the ON/OFF button.

In every business in this country that has an office and a computer one of these little power supplies is connected to a wall socket, so when everyone goes home tonight that faithful little power supply is using small amounts of electricity.

So when you go home tonight under every desk is likely to be a power supply consuming power all night. If we look at a normal office space we will most likely find 3-5 of these little power supplies plugged in right now. If you multiple the number of supplies in your office space by the number of offices (counting every cubical) in the business you will have a large number of power supplies using electricity ever night.

They can’t use that much energy!

Many of the energy companies who love green products have stated on their websites or in their literature that 15% of your electric bill is paying for equipment that is sitting in standby mode or those small power supplies.

To better understand the problems think of it this way. Any equipment in standby mode or using an external power supply is designed to use a step-down transformer. The transformer converts the standard 120 volt from the electrical socket to a much lower voltage that is used by the device it is connected to. This transformer is nothing more that hundreds of feet of small copper wire connect to the power plug. So whenever the unit is plugged in it is drawing power.

In order for a TV/stereo/DVD to respond to the ON/OFF button on the remote it must have some power supplied to the unit that senses this action. This sense unit requires electricity to operate and is where the other end of the transformer is connected. So in order for it to work it must be supplied power 24/7 to operate.

What do I do to prevent all this power consummation?

It is not that hard. One of the simplest ways is to use more green products or a device that has been around for years, a power strip with an on/off switch. Remember the thin power consoles with switches that sat under power hungry monitors? This was a solution a little ahead of its time.

Power strips were designed with a mechanical switch to disconnect the appliance from the power source (the wall plug). Do this and no power is transferred or used until the switch is turned on. Walla, no power consumption.

I know it seems inconvenient, first you have to find a power strip with a switch, then disconnect everything and plug it back into the power strip. Now every time you want to watch TV you have to walk over and flip the switch on. In a week or so it will become a habit and most likely you won’t think about it anymore.

Does this really work?

I pass my electric meter daily and see it spinning away even though I am using many new green products. I have also noticed my neighbors meter rotating about 1-2 rotations per minute when there is nobody home.

I bought 4 power strips with ON/OFF switches. I plugged in all my green products, audio/video equipment, then did the same in the area I do recharging, the computer area and some odd electrical equipment.

After turning off the power strips I checked the power meter, instead of the 1-2 times a minute I had dropped to one rotation every 2 minutes. That is a vast improvement and money I don’t have to pay the utility company.

With everything there is an initial cost. Mine was around $20 dollars for these new green products, look around for the strips on sales. Maybe you can get them cheaper, try it you may find you save some money and reduce your carbon footprint at the same time.

Michael

Michael Edwards Environment alternative energy, carbon footprint, carbon offset, energy conservation, Environment, Environmental, go green, go green how to, going green, going green how to, green how to, greenhouse, Home, how to go green

One of the most difficult deliberations when you decide to implement energy saving light bulbs in your house is price. Since each energy saving light bulb will cost you approximately $5 each, it is reasonable to stop for a moment and question yourself what your Return On Revenue (ROI) will be.

I came across a very smart tool to help you decide if installing energy efficient light bulbs in your home is financially viable for you. This calculator I found over at the GE Lightning site and it is called the Smart-CFL Savings Calculator. It is reasonably based on 4-hours of bulb usage @ 10c/kWh.

Occupationally small changes can save you lots of money. By swapping out 4, 100 Watt regular bulbs and installing energy efficient light bulbs instead, you will be saving $42.22 per year.

I took stock of how many 100 and 60-Watt bulbs I have in my home. 25 x 60-Watt bulbs and 40 x 100-Watt bulbs. Based on the GE Calculator (and my own), replacing all of them with energy efficient light bulbs will cost me $325, considering one bulb runs about $5 each. Most interestingly the yearly electricity cost saving will be $625 per year.

Calculating the Return-On-Revenue: ROI= [(Payback - Investment)/Investment)]*100 [(625-325) / 625)] * 100 48%

After doing the calculations it became clear to me that upgrading to energy saving light bulbs will be a financially smart move. In our first year we will see a ROI of 48% – not bad indeed.

If you replace 1 x 100-Watt regular bulb with 1 x 26-Watt energy saving light bulb, at 10c/KwH you will be saving $10.66 per year per bulb you replace. With the rise of energy cost globally, it sure is a great consideration.

Justin Luyt Blogging blog, Blogging, electricity, energy, energy conservation, house, money, money saving, Outdoors, saving energy, saving money

Try a few of these energy saving tips using new green products to put cash back in your pocket unless of course you are trying to do your part to keep your electric company’s revenues up.

Throw out all the incandescent bulbs

CFL is an abbreviation for a Compact Fluorescent Lamp, which is a fluorescent light bulb with the same form factor as a traditional incandescent bulb (meaning it will fit in most places where you now have plain old light bulbs installed).

CFLs produce light differently than incandescent bulbs. In an incandescent bulb, electricity runs through a wire filament and heats the filament until it starts to glow. In a CFL, an electric current is driven through a tube containing argon and a small amount of mercury vapor. This generates invisible ultraviolet light that excites a fluorescent coating (called phosphor) on the inside of the tube, which then emits visible light.

You have heard this before, but unless you are only going to turn on that incandescent bulb a couple of times a year, you are wasting money (no matter how cheap the bulb is). Green products help you save money. One of the new Energy Star compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL) saves around 75% over an equivalent incandescent bulb. In one year, that could add up to a $30 savings – per bulb!

CFLs have been out several years now. Along with the bulb style, you can now choose the shade of white light you like. This can really enhance the mood of a room, home office or family room. The CFL colors vary from a warm yellow to daylight blue. If you prefer the look (color) of incandescent bulbs, choose a warm light.

The bluish CFLs may have a negative effect on light sensitive people. If friends or family are light sensitive, a warmer color CFL might be better.

Look on the package for a number that ends in K. This stands for Kelvin or the “temperature” of the bulb. A Kelvin rating of 2700K-3000K is a warm/yellow bulb. A Cool White bulb has a rating of 3500K-4100K. A rating of 5000K-6500K is a Daylight blue bulb.

To replace a 40 watt incandescent bulb, use a 9-13 watt CFL bulb; for a 60 watt incandescent bulb use a 13-15 watt; for a 75 watt incandescent bulb use an 18-25 watt CFL; and for a 100 watt incandescent bulb, use a 23-30 watt CFL.

Please do not forget to recycle all compact fluorescent bulbs. In some states, the law forbids the disposal of any bulbs containing mercury in the regular solid waste trash. There are about five milligrams of mercury in one CFL bulb, or about 1/5 the of mercury found in a normal wrist-watch battery.

To dispose of an old CFL, visit a retailer like ACE Hardware, Orchard, Home Depot or IKEA. Many of them will recycle these bulbs for you.

A host of new green products for outdoors, poolside, garden, and sidewalk lighting are moving to light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs. The new LED bulbs are 90% more efficient than an incandescent bulb. I would recommend using an Energy Star compliant system; you will usually have a longer time between bulb replacements. However, stock up on replacement bulbs – the manufacturers seem to change the design every couple of years, and then it becomes hard to find replacement parts.

Next time will look at some more green products that can further reduce your carbon footprint and save you still more money.

Michael

Michael Edwards Government alternative energy, energy, energy conservation, Environmental, general, Government, green planet, Home, international, renewable energy, solar energy, solar panels, solar power, Technologies

At Green Products, we have come across a product from Cool Earth: Solar Balloons. Cool Earth was created with the mandate of producing electricity using solar power, specifically solar cells. Solar power is not a new concept, but how the sunlight is collected and concentrated is truly unique.

The current installed solar plants use flat-panels. Each panel is heavy, large, easily damaged, and costly to repair. This means the cost to produce a watt of electricity is 5-7 times greater than using natural gas and is not a feasible alternative to fossil fuels. This is no longer true with the Cool Earth solar balloon system.

One side of the balloon is made from reflective silver Mylar plastic. The other half is transparent to allow in sunlight. The silver material is parabolic-shaped to concentrate the sunlight on to a single point to achieve maximum light concentration. This is why high performance solar cells are used.

With the new design comes and the ability to increase sunlight concentration and reduce expensive solar cell material by 300 to 400 times. This cost reduction will bring the price down to a mere one dollar per watt. To give that some context: a typical flat-panel PV(photovoltaic) system on a residential rooftop is about seven to eight dollars per watt.

Each balloon is eight feet in diameter and can withstand over 100 mile per hour winds. The balloons are linked together in series, with the initial installation able to produce 10 megawatts, enough to power 3,500 homes during the day.

One of the areas under consideration is the need to add more peaking power plants, also known as peaker plants. A peaker plant is operational only when demand for electricity is at the greatest, like during the hot summer months. This green product could be used to eliminate rolling brown outages that we have encountered in the past few years.

Some of the more interesting aspects of this solar power station are how simple the design is and how multiples are pulled together to produce a solar power plant. Check it out.

Michael

Michael Flum Family Air Pollution, alternative energy, energy, energy conservation, energy savings, Environmental, Family, general, global warming, green planet, renewable energy, solar energy, solar panels, solar power

One of the first notable figures to appeal for the conservation of energy was former US President Jimmy Carter during the American oil crisis of the late seventies. His advice was for all Americans to turn their thermostats down in order to preserve heating fuel.

It may have been more than thirty years since this was said, but it is still very relevant today. The concept is simple, the less energy used by the populace, the more will be conserved overall. Turning your thermostat to a closer temperature to that outside can make a massive difference.

Heating larger rooms is usually the most expensive part of the energy bill for most households. A step as simple as turning the thermostat down by around one degree can make around a two percent difference in your overall heating bill.

Your boiler will have to keep a set difference between the outside tempertature and the inside temperatue. This can sometimes be a big difference, particularly in the winter months, and if at any time this can be reduced, it should be, even by one or two degrees because this will mean that the heating system has to be on for less time, therefore saving more energy.

Of course the main downfall of turning your thermostat down is that it can get less warm than youd like it to be throughout the house. Well, theres a simple solution to that. In the wise words of former-President Jimmy Carter, put a sweater on!

To start with these changes in temperature may feel uncomfortable, but after some time wearing sweaters and thick socks at home will become normal and your body will adapt to the changing temperature.

Of course, these principles are the same the other way around. During the summer months, it can be tempting to have your air conditioning on quite high to keep your house cool from the sweltering heat outside, but the same concepts should apply for this as they do in the winter, but turn the temperature the opposite way.

So, the concept is; try to keep the temperature in your house as close to the temperature outside as possible, and if you adjust your clothes to the temperature, you can make an even bigger difference.

Samson Rhubarb Environment a, appliances, c, consumer electronics, e, electrical, Electronics, energy, energy conservation, energy saving, Environment, Environmental, h, heating, Home, home and garden, home improvement, home;improvement, house and home, o, other, r

Using the water’s power is an age-old phenomenon. Over the years it has been employed for irrigation and working a variety of machines, including water-wheels. But today, it is used more importantly as a alternative energy source.

Nowadays hydro-power is generated in 3 different ways: hydroelectric power, tidal power, and wave power.

Hydroelectric Power:

Hydro-electric dams produced up to 90% of the world’s alternative energy, so it plays a vital role. Here, dams release water through huge turbines, which are spun by the force of the water.

What makes hydro-electric dams so popular is that they have two very important roles – to store and distribute water to various cities, and generate thousands of megawatts of electricity at the same time.

However, many governments have come under scrutiny for using hydro-electric dams. These dams tend to flood a lot of land where thriving communities live. They can affect various plants and animals in the region, and cut-off the water supply for communities living downstream.

Tidal Energy:

With tidal energy, hydro-power is generated as the tides comes in and goes out.

This has been achieved by France and Russia since 1966 in areas with a large tidal range, such as bays and estuaries. One of the systems of tidal power works by trapping water at high tide with a tidal barrage, then releasing that water in one quick burst at low tide. This gushing water drives turbines to produce power.

Although the tides are very predictable and consistent, the problem with this system is that the turbines only operate every 6 hours (once every tide).

A second, more recent, tidal system looks very much like an underwater wind turbine. Large windmill like turbines are sunk in shallow water, where they are slowly spun by shifting tidal water.

The nice thing about this tidal system is that the technology is advanced and derived from our land-based wind turbines. And water is much denser than air, meaning it takes only a small current to get the turbine spinning.

The drawback is that the current systems can only be built in shallow water, where tidal activity is greatest. This is very limiting since many other economic activities – like oyster farming – occur in the shallows. Furthermore, these structures can damage marine life on the seafloor.

Wave Power:

This is the youngest of the three hydro-power solutions. The system harnesses the power from ocean surface wave motion, where air displaced by waves is driven through a generator than spins a turbine. The end result is electricity. These generators can either be coupled to floating devices outta sea, or fixed along the shore where seas are rough.

What makes this technology so appealing is it potential to harness over two thousand megawatts of power that the ocean’s waves contain.

But, like any renewable energy system, there are environmental implications. These systems can damage the various corals and other ocean species along our coastlines. And the hydraulic fluid used could cause major water pollution if it ever leaked out into the sea.

Last words:

Man has come up with ingenious ways to harness the power of nature to produce electricity, hydro power being one of them. Although it is an important renewable energy for the future, there is still much controversy over its long-term environmental impact.

Tim McDonald Environment alternative energy, earth, energy, energy conservation, Environment, global issues, going green, green living, home improvement, hydro-power, hydroelectric power, renewable energy, saving energy, society

For centuries we have used the sun’s natural energy to our advantage. For example, it has been used in ancient times to provide natural lighting in temples, for photosynthesis and natural heating for growing crops, to desalinize and purify water, and it has been magnified and intensified to heat thermal power plants.

But, more importantly it can also be used on a domestic level, as a clean source energy for various households.

So far people have discovered how to solar power their homes in 4 ways:

Solar Ovens:

Using a solar oven is a really inexpensive and healthy way to cook food. It used to be used in poor, underdeveloped nations where electricity was not freely available. But now a lot of travelers, campers and environmentalists use it during summer as a green alternative to a conventional oven.

With solar cooking, the oven has a number of reflective panels arranged in a parabola, where they focus the sun on a single pot, in which the food is placed. Depending on the design, the cooker can make a variety of dishes from bread to steamed vegetables to fried eggs to a roast beef, and it typically caters for up to 5 people.

The one drawback of solar cooking is that it tends to take three to four times longer to cook food in. But if you weigh that against the unlimited power savings and its portability, having a little patience is not that bigger deal.

Solar Water Geyser:

With a solar water heater, the advancement in technology has enabled any households and business to completely replace their traditional electric or gas geysers and hot-water cylinders.

As cold water is pumped through a solar collector, the pipes absorb the sun’s energy, and heat the water, which is then stored in an insulated tank for later use. Usually the water can get so hot that it has to be mixed with cold water before it can be used.

Passive Solar Living:

To think that Americans consume up to 50% of their energy to heat, ventilate and air-condition their homes, a large amount of money and energy could be saved by using passive solar design at home.

With this form of solar power employment, sunlight is used as a natural heat and light source. The ideal passive solar home would have large double-glazed windows, with the length of the house facing the sun, and designed with materials that absorb the sun’s light and radiate heat even after the sun has set.

And like the Romans used the sun to light up their temples, careful placing of windows and mirrors in our homes can increase natural lighting, helping us reduce the need for electric lighting.

A natural air conditioning solution would be to plant deciduous trees on the sun-facing side of your home. This would provide cool shade in summer, but allow warm sunlight though in winter.

A solar chimney can be installed for ventilation, where the air in the chimney is heated by the sun and rises, causing fresh, cool air to rush in through the home and up the chimney.

Solar Electricity:

More accurately called photovoltaic power, this is the most commonly known way to solar power your home. For this system to work properly, a number solar panels need to be facing the sun to produce electricity.

As the sun’s rays penetrate the solar panels, electrons in the cells become charged, creating a current that is stored in deep-cycle batteries. When electricity is needed, the stored power is passed through an inverter to change the DC to AC, which can then be used to power various household appliances or connected to the grid for net metering.

Other than providing you cheap, clean renewable power, solar electric panels have become affordable and simple enough for anyone to install at home. In fact, with the right information it is possible to make your own solar power for under $200, as compared to getting a professional installation for a couple of thousand dollars.

And these are the 4 ways how to solar power your home. If your are willing to learn how to use these methods at home, you will not only be living a greener life, but you will reduce your power needs and costs, receive renewable energy tax incentives, and lower the burden on our vanishing energy sources. So take the initiative and enjoy the sun’s free, clean, abundant energy now.

Tim McDonald Environment alternative energy, daily living, diy solar power, earth, energy conservation, energy efficiency, Environment, Hobbies, home improvement, how to solar power, renewable energy, solar energy, solar panels, solar power

Everyone likes to save money, but many people do not realize how easy it is to save money when you cut down on your energy bill. I will be going over 8 ways that you can lower your energy bill, without spending to much money to start saving.

Installing plastic window covers on your windows, or tinting them. This will help keep the cool air inside, and slow down the process of heat entering the home. Or it could go the other way around if you are trying to heat the home.

Make sure that you have a good seal on all the doors that are in your home leading outside. One way to check if you have a good seal is, if the door is shut and you can see daylight, you do not have a good seal. These gaps can be sealed up with any type of weather stripping.

Replace your incandescent bulbs with fluorescent lights. You will save as much as $40 on electric bills over the life of the fluorescent light. And since it lasts 8 to 10 times more than the regular incandescent, you spare yourself in spending 8 to 10 times on replacing bulbs.

Replace your regular overhead shower with low-flow shower heads. Low-flow shower heads will work efficiently and would yield to better energy use. Not only it will contribute on your energy conservation, the shower experience would not be very bad at all. Doing so would let you save about $50 every year.

Most people do not know about this one, but the louder you play your music the more energy you are using. So unless you absolutely need the television and stereo loud enough to annoy the neighbors, turn it down a notch and save a couple of bucks.

Make sure that you have energy efficient appliances. When you shop, you may want to see Enery Guide labels first. The EnerGuide states how much energy the appliance consumes. You can see it on most appliances for sale. Knowing this would give you better electricity savings would yield to long-term energy saving effect.

If you have any cracks or crevices in the walls, make sure that they are sealed as best as possible. Even by putting childproof plugs in outlets can help save you a little bit of energy as it will give the heat one less place to escape.

Use laptops instead of desktops. Believe it or not, desktops consume 10 times more energy than laptops. So whenever possible or if you have the choice between the two you can prefer the more energy efficient one. One last thing: there are printers and fax machines with power management feature, prefer buying them.

Dan Corey Home appliances, electricity, energy conservation, energy efficiency, enviromental, Home, home improvement, save money