The Negawatt

Good article in The Economist last week exploring the reasons why energy efficiency is not pursued more vigorously as an avenue for investment. The bottom line reasons why it should:

• It returns 10% to 17% annually. (The S&P 500 historically gets 12%.)
• It requires reduces carbon emissions.

The reasons why it hasn't been more actively pursued by individuals:

• Individuals tend to demand a return on investment in the neighborhood of 30%.
• When individuals have a seemingly endless supply of cheap fuels they put off efficiency measures.
• Individuals get overwhelmed with their options.

It has been increasingly pursued by corporations as an avenue for cost-cutting and social capital. Corporations are also more enthusiastic about a 10% annual ROI.

One player in the game has been surprisingly reticent. Power companies in most places profit by selling more power, not by encouraging people to conserve. This is starting to change for a number of reasons including these:

• Providing peak power is increasingly expensive.
• Some states are exploring decoupling profit from units of power sold.
• Mandates that require a portion of the power portfolio to come from renewable sources.

There's a discussion of carbon taxes and how they might shift the game farther, but I'm going to need to take a bit longer than my lunch break to read through that.

HB 1270

I'd heard that Colorado HB 1270 -- which would prevent HOA's from restricting solar installation, shades designed to lower energy costs, installation of attic fans and vents, and from installing clothelines -- had passed the House, but I didn't hear through the same grapevines what had resulted.

I did some poking around today, and found articles on a number of HOA sites that suggested there would be an involved process of getting the Senate and House versions trued up and the earliest it would be signed was August.

Guess again.

Summarized History for Bill Number HB08-1270
(The date the bill passed to the committee of the whole reflects the date the bill passed out of committee.)

01/31/2008 Introduced In House - Assigned to Transportation & Energy
02/19/2008 House Committee on Transportation & Energy Pass Amended to House Committee of the Whole
02/22/2008 House Second Reading Laid Over
02/25/2008 House Second Reading Passed with Amendments
02/26/2008 House Third Reading Laid Over
02/27/2008 House Third Reading Passed
03/03/2008 Introduced In Senate - Assigned to Local Government
03/20/2008 Senate Committee on Local Government Pass Amended to Senate Committee of the Whole
03/27/2008 Senate Second Reading Laid Over
03/28/2008 Senate Second Reading Passed with Amendments
03/31/2008 Senate Third Reading Passed with Amendments
04/02/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/02/2008
04/03/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/03/2008
04/04/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/04/2008
04/07/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/07/2008
04/08/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/08/2008
04/09/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/09/2008
04/10/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/10/2008
04/11/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/11/2008
04/14/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/14/2008
04/15/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Concur - Repass
04/15/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/15/2008
04/17/2008 Signed by the President of the Senate
04/17/2008 Signed by the Speaker of the House
04/17/2008 Sent to the Governor
04/24/2008 Governor Action - Signed

That's a pretty good, if belated, Earth Day present.

Here's a pdf of the bill, for those interested.

Energy Update

I now have 17 months of energy-use data stored in a Google Docs Spreadsheet for easy viewing from whatever computer I happen to be at. The results are very satisfying.

In the months of February, March, and April 2007 -- when I started blogging -- I was using more than 800 kWh of electricity a month (892, 814, 826). By changing all the incandescent bulbs to fluorescent, replacing four light fixtures that required incandescents to ones that could accept fluorescents, and banishing halogen lamps, that number has dropped by about 400 kWh per month (495, 420, 356). I still have three adults living in the house, but they're different adults. And one way this affects my power use is that my other roommate is actually happier sleeping on the couch on cold nights than she is figuring out the space heater.

I've applied for a subsidized energy audit to help me prioritize my next changes.

I'm watching a bill working its way through the statehouse that would keep HOAs from prohibiting exterior shades -- mine currently prohibits this and I have a south-facing patio door I want to put shadecloth over in the summer. The bill also allows clotheslines. I think I can do that anyway on my back patio, so that's less of an issue, but still of interest.

Also of interest is signatures are now being collected for a ballot measure in the fall that will place a small surcharge on the cost of electricity and natural gas (about 3%) and use the funds generated by that to create programs to help people upgrade to EnergyStar appliances, insulate, replace windows and the like. A program like this has been in place in the city of Boulder for several years and the amount saved by homeowners has more than offset the additional cost of energy while lowering carbon produced by the city. If you are a Colorado resident and you're interested in learning more (they also need signature collectors), check out the proposal here.

Found a Peanut!

Most nights, I can get to the bathroom and take care of business without a light. I have good night vision, for one, and there's a street light outside my southern facing windows for two. But every now and again... say I go to brush my teeth after working at the computer for a-while, or I bump something off the sink and onto the floor... I need a light. The fixture in the bathroom has four bulbs and that's just overkill for most of these late-night trips. I also night-lights throw too much light for normal use.

So this weekend I was delighted to find a one-led push-button light that I could put in the bathroom. It's called a Peanut and it's made by Zelco, makers of all sorts of other nifty lamp items. I spent about $20 to get three lights, and one of them lights up my bathroom just fine. I brushed my teeth last night by the light of a Peanut!

Doing a Carbon Footprint Analysis

Soon after I was laid-off, a friend of mine asked me to do a carbon footprint analysis on her company's product for the marketing department. It was an interesting project and one I jumped on.

Poking around the web for the current standards of what is and what is not included, I discovered their request showed up in my in-box days after the very first Carbon Footprint for Consumer Products Conference had taken place. (Info on the 2008 conference here.) If folks like Starbucks are meeting to define what the carbon footprint of a consumer product is defined as, what chance do I have? I have the chance to define my scope narrowly and find what I can find on it.

I started by doing a system analysis of the problem. A system analysis is a way of figuring out which intersection of threads you want to confine yourself to in a web. If I generated a figure that reported the amount of CO2 emitted in manufacturing the product and delivering it to the customer, that would be an interesting number, but ultimately pointless. This is a unique product that is bought because of what it delivers, not because it is the best of a set of similar products. (And because it is a unique product, I am going to try to avoid giving any specifically identifiable information about it.)

Additionally, it isn't much of a stretch to say that any product's carbon footprint is directly related to i's weight. We can see that in the formulas shipping companies use for products. If it weighs more, it uses more fuel to move, and therefore releases more carbon dioxide.

So I decided the best thing to look at was the carbon released to power the product over its lifetime and to compare that to the carbon released to replace the benefit of the product over its lifetime. Imagine a counter-top cappuccino machine. I decided that since the same amount of coffee is going to travel similar distances to get to your mouth, I should look at the energy consumed by the machines. So I compared the carbon in making the electricity to run our product to the carbon released by going to the store for a similar amount.

Another way of phrasing my results looks like this: Is it better to run a 60 watt light bulb for 18 hours every day or to go to the store twice a week to pick up an item shipped from 1500 miles away?

It turns out that shipping food is very efficient. But getting to the store is not. My estimates were based on finding out the fuel costs of running a refrigerated semi-truck and how many of these items would be shipped in a container, and then comparing that to the average fuel economy of a car sold in the US in 2006 (21: EPA 2006 Fuel Economy Trends Report), and figured a round-trip to the store as 3 miles. To convert a gallon of gas to lbs of CO2, I used the Department of Energy's conversion factor of 19.554 lbs of CO2 released in burning a gallon of gas.

For the home-based part of the equation, I took the watts consumed by the product and multiplied that into daily, monthly, and lifetime figures. I used the EPA's figure of 1.55 lbs of CO2 released per kilowatt hour to calculate the energy.

Let's use these numbers to analyze working at home under a halogen light verses driving to a coffee shop or office where the lights would be on either way.

If you drive a standard car 3 miles, that's 1/7th of a gallon of gas. 19.564/7 = 2.79 lbs of carbon. A halogen desk lamp uses 300 watts, so it takes 3.3 hours to use one kilowatt hour. One kilowatt hour off the US grid* results in 1.55 lbs of carbon. So driving your car a tiny three miles will use produce as much carbon dioxide as staying at home with your lamp for nearly 7 hours.

But if you were to walk or ride a bike that 1.5 miles out and back, you get a double savings. Nearly 3 lbs. of carbon dioxide you didn't consume which you might "normally" have.

What could you "buy" with that 3lbs? 142 hours of using a 14 watt florescent bulb. 2 hours of cooking food in a GE convenction microwave oven. 15 hours of watching a 32" HD LED television. Or since we don't have a way to sequester surplus CO2 yet, maybe the life of a migrating bird.

*Whether you buy wind power or not, the power you use comes out of a reservoir of electricity generated by a number of means. You contribute more wind power to the total than might otherwise exist, but any electricity you use comes from all the streams if it comes from the grid. If you're generating your own power, you already know better than to use the $12 halogen lamp from the big box store. ;-)

Why houses don't use the information we already have

I love fireplaces. I know people who hate them, but I love them. I have fond childhood memories of getting to build fires and light them any time I wanted to at a certain neighbor's house, so there's a sense of connectedness and competency that comes from seeing one. Another part is the coziness that the smell of pine smoke hanging in the winter air evokes. I've never had to depend on a fireplace for heat, so it's recreational. And I make fires so rarely that I just buy pre-chopped wood, so there isn't work associated with it.

My childhood home had a fireplace chimney on the roof, but the space the fireplace would have been in under it was a sun room. Someone long before my parents bought the house took out the fireplace. I always wondered about this, and vowed that I'd never do that.

Well, I have a fireplace now, and I'm seriously thinking about doing exactly that. It is the fireplace that makes my living room cold.

First, there there the masonry which conducts my heat outside. Second there is a pipe that allows air warmed through the glass doors to move upward toward the sky. Third, and most frustratingly, the fireplace is located in a bump-out in an external wall and the bumpout is capped above ground. So this conduit for the warm air in my house is exposed to the elements on 5 out of six sides. Finally, the cap on the bottom on my bumpout is rough plywood. And when I knock on it, I can hear the firebox echoing. So it is an uninsulated exposed masonry extension of my living room. I feel like my house is mooning the world.

When I was house shopping I found myself wondering over and over, "With 6,000 years of building experience, why do we still do things like this?" My house was the first I'd seen that I didn't have that reaction too... all the windows are double-paned, the roof space is insulated, I share a wall with neighbors for better use of heating resources, the roof lines and decks are positioned to provide shelter from the summer sun but access for the winter sun, and the floors are partitioned into modest-sized rooms that open onto shared areas.

Then there's this darn chimney. So why do we do things like this?

The simple answer is it's the market. I want the best house for the money I have to spend, and I'm more likely to respond to the visible things inside -- the fireplace -- than the care taken in construction. If I wanted to buy a house this size with a pre-insulated basement, insulation in the external walls, an efficient fireplace, great window placement, and energy star appliances, they're available just up the street... for a mere doubling of the cost. If I want all that, and my current house payment, I'd have a condo in a transitional urban neighborhood.

This, of course, is also the reason why there are so many more houses like mine than there are like the houses up the street.

Report Card Day

I just got my utility bill for the month of May. Finally! Spring has sprung.

Here's the bottom line:

Month	KWh	Therms
Feb	892	79
Mar	814	34
Apr	826	35
May	542	18

The big difference from April into May was the average temp went from 49 degrees to 60 degrees. As mentioned here before, we helped the thermostat figure out it was spring by turning the heat off at the beginning of the month, and that definitely shows in the therms drop. There's a chance my basement-dwelling roommate has been using the space heater in this marginal period, so the kilowatt hour number may have some more room to go down. (And since I don't have central AC I don't expect it to go up by much.)

Since we have all had pretty much the same schedule for the last month as for previous months, I think this is pretty close to our baseline usage for hot water, dish washing, clothes washing, lights, etc. This means that my best use of money to reduce my usage is for insulation and weather proofing. I'll be doing research on this.

Of the list I made last month about things I could do to lower use, I didn't really do any of them. I did change two of my high-use bulbs and unplugged my halogen so that I wasn't running it accidentally (or conveniently). I also showed roommate #1 the Kill-a-watt meter and she's very excited about checking out what she's using. Yay for toys! Roommate #2 and I have talked about what we're comfortable doing to keep the house cool on hot days. Fortunately, she already knows that shading windows that get sun and closing windows while the house is cool so I don't have to wait for a stretch of really hot weather to demonstrate that to her.

My current home-energy goals are:
1.) Hang a clothes line.
2.) Hang a shade curtain over my south-facing patio doors
3.) Insulate and ventilate my root cellar room. Continue experimenting with keeping food down there instead of in the fridge.
4.) Hire a handyman and get the ceiling fan put up in the living room.
5.) Start hanging foil insulation in the attic.
6.) Insulate the attic door and other spots as needed.
7.) Research replacement windows.
8.) Research weather-proofing options for the fireplace.
9.) Research patterns for window quilts.
10.) Replace fridge with an Energy Star model.

A tale of four lamps

I got my Kill-A-Watt meter in the mail on Monday and finally had a chance to test it out tonight. I took pictures of four lighting combinations in my bedroom.

The first is my florescent nightstand lamp

That's 18 watts, which means that it takes about 55 hours of continuous usage to use one kilowatt hour of electricity. (The units my bill is counted in.)







The second is my full-spectrum SAD light

59 watts. This seems to be an incandescent, despite the lack of that word on the packaging. (It just said it would last longer than regular bulbs.) 17 hours to burn a kilowatt hour.








The third is the two of them running together

A not-too-surprising 80 watts for 12.5 hours per kilowatt hour.









And the final entry

Clocking in at 220 watts (this is exactly the same setting as the other photos), my halogen torchiere. It takes a mere 4.5 hours to clock a kilowatt hour with this baby.

Suddenly my $20 lamp doesn't seem so cheap. ;-)

Update:
I am watching the meter while posting this and my computer is using 150 watts without the hard drive and 175 with the hard drive. My halogen seems like a total energy hog!

I was also watching the watts setting on the stationary bike this morning. Apparently I can run a 22 watt device off my pedaling. This may be why my dad was never enthusiastic about wiring the TV to an exercise bike...

Quote of the day

"The single most effective way of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions would be full social-cost pricing of fossil fuel," said Dr. Rees. "The price we pay for a litre of gasoline or a cubic meter of natural gas should reflect the cost of the damage caused by the use of that material. . . . if we were to do that, we would be paying $3 to $6 a litre for gasoline."

- Dr. William Rees, an environmental economist at the University of B.C. and the inventor of the ecological footprint, a tool used worldwide to measure human impact on the environment.

"How urban sprawl goes against the green"
Deborah Jones for The Globe and Mail

1 liter = .264 gallons
1 gallon = 3.788 liters
$/gallon = 3.788 * 3 = $11.364/gal
$/gallon max = 3.788 * 6 = $22.728/gal

This may be Canadian dollars, so using the XE.com universal currency converter (As of May 4, 2007):

1 Canadian dollar = .903710 US dollars

CA$11.364/gal * .903710 = $10.27/gallon (USD)
CA$22.728/gal * .903710 = $20.54/gallon (USD)

Hmm... $10 to $20 a gallon in real costs that we're mostly paying in other ways...

Report Card Day

I just got my utility bill for the month of April. I am starting to feel like I'm into my third month of a new exercise program... the giddiness from the newness of it all is lessening, and new giddiness from seeing progress is in short supply.

Here's the bottom line:

Month	KWh	Therms
Jan	583	129
Feb	892	79
Mar	814	34
Apr	826	35

The 80-odd KWh drop from the 15 cfls I changed is still holding up, and therms are about the same for average temps that were exactly the same as March's. I keep thinking that the change from spring into summer is going to show up, but we're obviously not there yet. We had about 5 days with snow last month and the chilly temps that accompany that. We also had days in the 80's, and the swing between the two may have meant that windows were left cracked and/or electric blankets were used more...

I have about 10 more moderate-use bulbs I can change to CFLs, and then I think I'm stuck on the easy stuff.

I still have this voice from my solar assessment that says, "I'd be surprised if you were using that much electricity regularly." And apparently we are.

I find it's easy to blame other people for the discomfort I'm feeling. I wonder if this is universal? If this is the impulse behind our pattern of ever-increasing separation? I am reminded of C.S. Lewis's description of hell (The Great Divorce) as a perpetually growing city where people move farther and farther apart as the result of pettiness and perceived slights.

Okay... back to the focus on what I can do. Ten things I can do to lower the electricity bill next month:
1.) Change the remaining CFLs
2.) Put up a clothes line and hang dry my clothes.
3.) Put the entertainment system on a timed outlet so that the power is off even when people forget the power strip.
4.) Hang the foil insulation in the cold room and the utility room so the basement bedroom keeps more of it's heat.
5.) Give myself permission to consume a bit more since I am using the utility company's electricity more and buying it in little tubes less.
6.) I have plans for an electricity-generating bike trainer. I can look at how I want to use the batteries I can charge with it.
7.) Put the cat and dog on hamster wheels to generate power for the lights. (Joking, but something I *could* do...)
8.) Pull the breaker on the house. (Joking, but something I *could* do...)
9.) Bring up conservation as a topic at the next house meeting. Brainstorm with my roommates instead of acting unilaterally.
10.) Pick two or three things to do and then forget about it and go do something fun... so that I'm not tempted to medicate my depression by watching a bunch of media.

Keeping cool in summer

No Impact Man was asking for advice about washing laundry and keeping his NYC apartment cool without using power. I commented that hanging the laundry to dry inside the apartment might act as a swamp cooler. I don't know if that will work in NYC... you need to get both a breeze and a humidity that's less than 100. But I unwittingly performed this experiment today. One of my roommates is fond of loose embroidered shirts which she washes and then hang dries. She hung four of them in the doorway to my office today and as long as the shirts were damp to the touch, my office was noticeably cooler.

I may need to start hang-drying my laundry...

Sleeping in a colder house

I sleep colder than anyone I know. Always have. I also love to camp. And I'm allergic to wool and down. Put these three things together and you have a formula for a life-long interest: What does it take to stay warm at night? The following tips are from a lifetime of sleeping in all kinds of places.

Increase your R value. Camping teaches that you want fluffy layers near you to make spaces for warmed air. And then put a shell over them to prevent the air from floating off into the house at night. At home when it's cold I use a denim-comforter cover over a comforter, a fleece blanket, and flannel sheets.

Naked or clothed? I got to test this one out by taking a friend from California camping in October. I had two sleeping bags and she got the heavy one. I spent half the night awake in my clothes and the other half the night awake naked. The verdict? Clothes are just part of your R-value. If you have enough insulation from other places, naked can be great. But if you're cold, put on clothes. Layer if you have to. On really cold nights, I'll wear an undershirt under my flannel pj's.

Make sure you're insulated below. If you sleep in a bed, this probably isn't a problem. But if you're sleeping on the floor and the floor is a concrete slab with a layer of carpet over it then your body is bravely working to heat up the earth all night long. By sleeping on something that will warm up and stay warm you give it a break. In a pinch these days, I'd use puzzle mats. At my karate dojo, the difference between the concrete slab part of the floor and the puzzle mat part of the floor is night and day.

My cat is my hat. I learned the joys of sleeping with a night cap one week when I was living in a brick-on-brick construction house in a bedroom on the north west corner of the house. We had an early cold snap that September and didn't have the storm windows up and all the other usual winter warming things. Several nights that week I woke up to find I was sweating and my cat was wrapped around the top of my head. I figure if the cat thinks it's the warmest place in the house, I probably should add some insulation. I made a very loose-fitting watch-cap style hat from some fleece fabric and that's what I usually sleep with at night. I avoid hats that are stretchy or use elastic to stay on.

Heat your feet. My feet are my thermostat. If they're warm, I'm warm. I think there's a good reason behind this... when we're cold, our bodies turn down the blood flow to our extremities, and our feet are the most extreme of our extremities. I have a theory that there's also a feed-back loop at work... if my feet start to get cold, my body pro-actively shifts into cold mode, turning down blood flow to my feet. I learned while camping to make my water bottle with hot water and put it in the bottom of my sleeping bag. (Actually, I put in tea bags too so I have my morning tea without even turning on the stove.) At home I'll take a similar water bottle and stick it in the microwave for about 3 minutes. I did have one of those rubber water bottles for a while, but my cat poked holes in it. And if I'm chilled I'll go run my feet under warm water until the insides feel warm, put on loose-fitting socks and head back to bed.

Go to bed warm. The first job your body has when it goes to bed is heating all that insulation. So it helps to start out warm. 10 to 20 sit-ups usually does the trick for me. Also good for when you wake up cold in the middle of the night.

Make sure you're fueled and lubed. The #1 use of food energy is to keep our bodies warm. A wonderful book on camping and backpacking (and therefore on staying warm in all kinds of conditions with a very small amount of stuff) is the NOLS Wilderness Guide. They have this to say:

Fats are a more concentrated form of energy and a more complex food than carbohydrates, so it usually takes the body from two to nine hours to metabolize them. .. they are a good long-term energy source to keep you hiking all day and warm all night.

NOLS Wilderness Guide, 1983, "Cooking for Nutrition and Pleasure" page 168.

Links

Hypermiling resources:
Article on AutoBlogGreen
Article in Mother Jones
Forum post by Wayne Gerdes, subject of Mother Jones article. Explains the acronyms in the article.

And why it matters:
BBC: Billions face climate change risk

How to get Energy Star to tell you what the best appliances are

If you've done any appliance shopping in the US in the last 20 years, you've seen the Energy Star logo. It would be nice if the logo meant "buy this product and all will be well with the world," but it doesn't mean that. I have noticed that lots of appliances have cards that suggest they are Energy Star compliant, but in fact they say "we've been tested for Energy Star compliance" or "We're somewhere on the Energy Star scale." And actually, the SUV exemption exists for Energy Star too... "as long as you're looking for a fridge just like this -- size, freezer placement, etc. -- then we're above average."

The US government does keep a database with more information, energystar.gov, but even that is presented in a very passive way. It looks like it's just there to present results in a neutral way. Look up your manufacturer and the model number and it will tell you -- yes or no -- whether what you're looking at is better than average.

Well, what if you really want to know what the best option is? It turns out that's in there too. Here's how to use Excel to get at it.

1. Go to the web page for finding consumer products. (http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=find_a_product.)
2. Click on the class of product you want information for.
3. When the new page comes up, it should have general information in the main column, and then over in the right-hand column, it should have a "Product List" subheading with links under it.
4. Click on the Excel worksheet link. Now, if you right click and try to save this file, you'll get page data instead. So click on the link and when the computer asks what you want to do, open the link with Excel.
5. Once the file is open, save a copy on your computer. We're going to edit the data.
6. I start by making a copy of the sheet I'm on. That way I still have the original data if I mess something up.
7. On the copy, I do two things:


Remove the headers in the merged cells at the top of the sheet. Our goal is to sort the data and these headers don't sort well.
Then I look to see if there is a column for what I really want to know. For example, I decided that I wanted to know the fridges that used the least watts per cubic foot. So I added a column that divided the watts by the cubic foot. You can add this column by typing a formula in the top cell in the column (=i2/h2), hovering over the lower right-hand corner of the cell until the skinny plus sign shows up, clicking there, and then dragging the formula down to fill the rest of the rows.
8. Highlight the column that contains the information you want to use for your decision-making. (This is my new column.) Now go to the Data item in the menu bar, click on that, and then click on Sort. It will ask whether you want to include the rest of the data on your page. You do, so expand the selection and click the sort button.
9. A new pop-up appears. Your highlighted column is the first option to sort by. Tell Excel whether you want an ascending or a decending sort. If you want to know which appliances exceed their appliance class the most, you want a decending list. If you want to know which appliances use the least energy in a year, you want an ascending list.


10. There are some other options in the box. You can use additional criteria to sort by, like the manufacturer's name. And then it asks if you have a header row. If you kept the rows in the spreadsheet that tell you what each column is, then you have header rows.

Press OK to sort the data. You should notice that the manufacturer names are no longer in alphabetical order.

I did this with the refrigerator data, adding the watts/year/adjusted volume column mentioned above and sorting by that. I look down the configuration column for refrigerator/freezers, and the most efficient model is the Sun Frost RF-12. Now, the "Percent Better" column confirms that... this model is 51% better than the standard for fridges in this class. But would you have looked through 1800 models to find the best? Or would you have looked for a familiar name, found a part number, and gone to look for that one?

Confession time... I did that when I bought the washer and dryer for the new house. I'm going to do better with the fridge. ;-)

Report Card Day

I just got my utility bill for the month of March. I had really hoped that the changes over the last month would make an amazing difference in my bill. Okay, so I still hope for magic. ;-)

Here's the bottom line:

Month	KWh	Therms
Jan	583	129
Feb	892	79
Mar	814	34

So, that's a difference of 78 KWh between our February usage and our March usage. Or 8.7%. How much of that is warmer weather and longer days and how much of that is conservation? I don't have real good stats on that. But since most of my conservation has been changing to CFLs, and I've recorded my changes at One Billion Bulbs, I'm gonna use their numbers.

According to my account, I've changed 15 bulbs. They're showing estimated savings of $7.55. They're also currently using a figure of 9 cents per kilowatt hour for Colorado, which means they estimate my changes have resulted in nearly 84 fewer kilowatt hours being used. They don't have a filter that allows me to see savings during a date range, so this does include a few days of February usage.

Hmm. So, it looks like, based on very rough estimates, my 8.7% savings, or 78 KWh, can pretty much all be attributed to changing CFLs over the last month or so (84 KWh). That's pretty reassuring.

But numbers over 800 KWhs feel high to me. I got a quote on a solar PV system and the estimator said, "I'd be really surprised if you were using over 400 KWhs regularly." And yet my 3 bdrm house appears to be using nearly twice that regularly.

What I don't know is whether the estimator was commenting on one person living here or a couple or more than that.

Month	# of people	KWh/person	Therms/person
Jan	2	291	64
Feb	3	297	26
Mar	3.2	254	10.6

It is rather comforting to look at it this way. It makes it easy to see that it is worthwhile to share expenses with others, even if the bottom line numbers go up because actually the per person use is going down.

My solar estimate was $15,000 to supply 400 KWh of electricity per month off my own roof. The economics of that are pretty interesting... the system pays for itself in about 20 years assuming that KWh prices stay in the 10 cents an hour range. It pays for itself more rapidly if electricity costs go up... which is likely considering retrofitting power plants to sequester carbon and increasing demand for coal and natural gas worldwide. I am disappointed that 400 KWh isn't enough to make my household self-supporting. But maybe that's an indication that there's more to save. Hmm... how many more bulbs can I change before my roommates revolt? ;-)

How about that Halogen?

I have 5 halogen lamps in my life. A torchaire in my bedroom, a torchaire in my office, 2 desk lamps--one at work and one at home--and then a torchaire in the utility room in the basement. Halogen bulbs aren't the standard Edison bulb that's pictured when I see something on CFLs, so these have been a question-mark in my head.

The Energy-star site doesn't talk about halogens.
One Billion Bulbs doesn't have anything on halogens.
Mr. Electricity doesn't talk about halogens on his lighting page.

I did a search early this morning on Halogen bulbs and CFLs, and I got a whole bunch of links to places that sell both. Which was mostly worthless for my question, except for this page. And since that's a page that's dedicated to selling a product, I have to discount the info on it. But which info?

This target on Wikipedia's page on incandescents provided some guidance.

• Halogens are more efficient than incandescents, at 9% of energy converted to light.

However with a torchaire bulb being 300 watts, verses the 60 watts for an incandescent lamp, that's a whole lot more electricity for a little bit of efficiency.

I also found this formula on the Mr. Electricity page:

((Watts x Hours Used)/1000) x Cost per kilowatt-hour = Total Cost

So I can figure that the halogen costs:

((300 watts x 1 hour)/1000) x $.10 = $.03 per hour (3 cents)

Verses the 27 watt CFL in the wall sconce:

((27 watts x 1 hour)/1000) x $.10 = $.0027 per hour (a third of one cent)

Over on the OneBillionBulbs site, I pretended I changed three 100 watt bulbs for three 28 watt bulbs and estimated I was using them for 2 hrs a day. Results:

Annual savings: $14.26
Annual CO2 reduction: 225 lbs

Okay. So my answer is: whatever the specific numbers, the halogens need to go. Or be used a whole lot less.