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Carbon Footprint, etc
A couple of months ago I talked about carbon footprints and had some really thoughtful responses from people.
The calculator I used was rightly criticised, it wasn't a particularly good one.
I'm now using this one I went for the detailed version which asks for things like exact electricity consumption.
I came out as 1.8 planets compared to a UK average of 3 planets (you get a share of government CO2, which is fair enough, so even if you lived in a tent you couldn't get zero)
I'm pretty happy with 1.8. There's a few things I can improve - we've recently installed LED lights and that won't have shown up in the electricity consumption yet, but there are also things I can't do much about.
(The only drawback with this particular calculator is that it's tips ignore some of what you've said about yourself. )
Although the calculator does not ask about children, I feel that people who do not have children at all are clearly benefiting the world in the long term. In my personal view, having more than 2 children is incredibly selfish in an over-populated world.
If you've got time, tackle the calculator and in weeks to come I'll try and talk about ways of improving your score.
The simplest tip of all is to go for renewable electricity. The cost is about the same (in the UK at least) and the effort involved in changing supplier is minimal. My personal recommendation is Ecotricity. Their prices are good, they have excellent customer service, and they invest their profit in creating more renewable energy (which is not something guaranteed with the renewable tariff of the big energy companies). They're an ethical supplier and the same tariff for all their customers, so you don't lose out if you've been with them a long time, or if you're on a prepayment meter.
The calculator I used was rightly criticised, it wasn't a particularly good one.
I'm now using this one I went for the detailed version which asks for things like exact electricity consumption.
I came out as 1.8 planets compared to a UK average of 3 planets (you get a share of government CO2, which is fair enough, so even if you lived in a tent you couldn't get zero)
I'm pretty happy with 1.8. There's a few things I can improve - we've recently installed LED lights and that won't have shown up in the electricity consumption yet, but there are also things I can't do much about.
(The only drawback with this particular calculator is that it's tips ignore some of what you've said about yourself. )
Although the calculator does not ask about children, I feel that people who do not have children at all are clearly benefiting the world in the long term. In my personal view, having more than 2 children is incredibly selfish in an over-populated world.
If you've got time, tackle the calculator and in weeks to come I'll try and talk about ways of improving your score.
The simplest tip of all is to go for renewable electricity. The cost is about the same (in the UK at least) and the effort involved in changing supplier is minimal. My personal recommendation is Ecotricity. Their prices are good, they have excellent customer service, and they invest their profit in creating more renewable energy (which is not something guaranteed with the renewable tariff of the big energy companies). They're an ethical supplier and the same tariff for all their customers, so you don't lose out if you've been with them a long time, or if you're on a prepayment meter.
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Unfortunately, the general case in Australia is that if you want "green" electricity, there's an extra tariff added on to your bill; not very much, but still there. I expect that could be eliminated if the government really wanted to; all they would have to do is take all the money they are spending subsidising fossil fuels and put it on to subsidising green energy. But the current government is about as anti-green as it is possible to be; I don't feel like rehashing all the nasty things they've done in that regard. (sigh)
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So we can both sigh about the stupidity of subsidising fossil fuels.
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If the questions had asked things like "how much energy did you use in the last 12 months and the 12 months before that?" it would have shown a huge difference for us. That is mostly down to three factors:
1) The warmer winter (that should have helped everyone this year)
2) My wife no longer being seriously ill, so I have been able to turn the heating down from 21°C to 18°C.
3) My computer replacing the time switch on our heating so the boiler only switches on when needed rather than at set times. When it used to be on a timer it would switch on and keep the water at around X°C even if the house was warm enough. That adds up to a bit of gas used and a steady 90W of electricity to run the pump. With the computer running it the pump might run for an hour total on a mild winter day, instead of maybe eight hours. That would be a 0.63KWh saving per day just on electricity.
I've also fitted LED bulbs throughout the house. I've wanted to do this for a while as I hate the slow start of CFLs and the reduced lifespan if you switch them on and off a lot, but the cost of LEDs have been too high to justify except in the two rooms we use the most. Then I found that one of the "pound" shops had 3W and 5W LED bulbs in a range of fittings and formats - £10 later and the whole house has been upgraded :-) I would like some brighter ones in the main room, but I'll probably change the fitting so we can have 3x3W instead of 1x5W. Still very low compared to the 3x60W I had in there once.
The least efficient light bulbs I have (I never use them nowadays) is a couple of 275W incandescents. They were used for photography work and are possibly older than me. I keep them to remind me of my grandfather who gave them to me with some of his cine photography gear.
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I'm so glad to hear your wife has improved -I remember she was really unwell.
Can you tell me a bit more about what you did with your heating controller? We looked into getting a NEST, but they don't work if you have a hot water tank.
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What I did was to get a Raspberry Pi computer, a simple temperature sensor and a relay board. I then wrote some software to monitor the living room temperature every five minutes and compare it to a setting for that time of day. If the room temperature is lower than the setting it turns the boiler on. If higher it turns it off. That simple. My settings are 16°C overnight (to stop the pet spiders getting too cold) and 18°C during the day, with a gentle ramp up and down between the range morning and night.
As I said, the main advantage over the normal timer or room thermostat is that the boiler is completely off when not needed. The Pi computer uses less than 3W of power.
Next project may be to limit the amount of heat the boiler generates. If the room temperature is only slightly low there is little point in it coming on full power. I should be able to bypass the manual water temperature control to do that - again I'm not interfering with any of the safety feature of the boiler, just limiting what it will do. Worst case is the same as if I'd turned the control to maximum.
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When this boiler finally dies (and I think it has several years yet), we'll do many clever things with timing.
If it wasn't for the carbon cost of buying anything new, I'd consider it now, but boilers take a lot of energy to make.
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There are two heat pumps (what we call aircon, very efficient for winter) and two wood burners which the people around there swear by, so we won't freeze for 3 days like we did during the last big power cut two winters ago.
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I think the maximum output is under 2KW? Not enough to run a big kettle like the one we've got, but fine for lighting and most domestic appliances.
LiOn batteries have still got room for improvement in capacity, and I salute Telsa for making some progress on that, but there are new battery technologies on the way which could blow LiOns out of the water (which is good, as Lithium is not nice stuff and they can be very dangerous if anything goes wrong.
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I score 2.6 but I have just made a huge number of thumb-in-air guesses and/or answered odd questions like: "Do you avoid garden products containing peat?"
(I have a small garden which I avoid. Once every 2 years I pay someone to come and cut bits down so I can still get to the front door. Other than that I do nothing. I presume this means I do since I never buy garden products at all.)
I think it missed a lot of respects in which I'm an oddball - eg the Personal Action Plan says "Make sure your heating thermostat is set between 18C and 21C" - done that, except additionally I only ever heat the room I'm physically occupying and awake in.
"Think about walking or cycling for short journeys. Amazingly over half of journeys between one and two miles are made by car." - well, yes, but none of them are made by me, and I already told the survey this.
(I'm not trying to be totally complacent here, but a lot of the questions left me thinking "it's a bit more complicated than that".)
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BUT: The Office of Energy (this name just won´t translate adequately) wants to change the rules, they want the customers to pay not for the amount of used energy but for a capacity of their circuit breaker. If the succeed with their plans, all the effort for saving the energy will be useless...and customers like me, who live in a village and need a strong circuit breaker because they use motor power, will pay much more than before. I am not sure I managed to explain the absurdity of this plan but this is a strategy of our government...
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I don't understand what you mean by motor power. Do you mean that you are not on the main grid and get your power from a generator?
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Sorry for my clumsy expressions, we use "motor power" here when speaking about these things. A weak breaker can´t be used for these machines, of course.
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I got 1.9 planets.
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There's a carbon cost to replacing a boiler, especially if your gas usage is fairly low as ours is.
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I got 2.1 planets, but, like the previous one it advises me "Think about walking or cycling for short journeys" when I've already said that's what I do. I don't have a car, and very occasionally I will take a taxi.
I also said I have a combi boiler, so why does it tell me to insulate my non-existant hot water tank?
Meh.
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