Earth Notes: Saving The Planet @Home

Want to do your bit at home to improve your quality of life, save money, cut down on waste and carbon pollution and save the planet?

"The majority of your neighbours are undertaking energy saving actions every day."

This site is not about selling you 'hell' or 'hell-avoidance', but rather all about practical things that I have done or thought about to make my own life (and that of my family) a little better and lower-carbon without wearing a hair-shirt, and many of them are things that you could do too... (But note that the average European probably has to cut their carbon-footprint by 80% to stand a chance of averting the worst of climate change!)

Catch yourself doing something right and do more of it!

A positive quote from Michael Liebreich, Head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance:

Look at the clean energy penetration in Germany, Spain, Denmark, even Texas. Look at the investments being made in China. And then look at what is going to happen in the next decade. Solar costs will go down by another 50 percent. Wind costs will go down by another 25 percent. GE is looking at producing a 15 megawatts wind turbine. LED light bulb costs will go down by 90 percent. Smart grids will be pervasive. The cost of managing intermittency will go down by 75 percent. Battery costs will go down by 75 percent, so there will be electric vehicles everywhere and grid-scale storage. The combination of wind or solar and an electric vehicle is a game-changer.

Things That I've Done

I've crunched my carbon footprint, and I've pondered other things that I might do, but most of all I've had quite a lot of fun learning. Maybe it's my engineering mindset, but I've made a hobby out of conservation and meter watching, and had fun out of 'tuning' my life a little.

See a full list of articles in the site guide, but here's some things to start with that I did:

• made my home study/office carbon-neutral including reducing energy consumption from my Internet-facing servers at home from over 600W to under 4W
• switched our electricity supply to a "100% green" tariff with Ecotricity so that what we do consume is as green as possible
• cut our electricity consumption and added grid-tied solar PV microgeneration to the point where we are net exporters to the grid
• weatherproofed/weatherised our home amongst our other conservation measures such as using thermostatic radiator values and aerogel insulation and upgrading to energy-efficient appliances
• built a little off-grid solar system that provides lighting and mobile phone charging and power for my Internet server
• toyed with wind power (turbines) and found that wind doesn't really work for most of us urbanites
• built a compost heap or three and we grow a tiny amount of veg in our postage-stamp garden...

Things That You Can Do

Effective changes that can be made at home are based on lowering energy/resource demand:

• Lighting: low-energy light bulbs (eg CFL / compact fluorescent and LED preferably at 60 lumens per Watt (60lm/W) efficiency or better). If rewiring, then look at 12V light circuits connecting to PV/battery systems.
• High-efficiency white goods (eg fridges) and other electrical goods at home and at work; look at energy consumption in use, eg per wash or while on, and in 'standby' mode if you won't be turning them off at the wall.
• For cooking: investigate CO₂ savings with induction cookers and microwave ovens.
• Clothes washing: alternate ideas with drying (eg on a line), and low-temperature (cold/30°C/40°C) washing and do full loads. Also, simple changes in habits and textiles (wool is brilliant compared to cotton for whole-life costing as well as washing/drying/ironing). Re-use fashions!
• Low water-use toilets, showers.
• Insulation and thermal mass (over-cladding buildings).
• Close curtains at dusk to retain heat (and on hot sunny days to keep the sun/heat out).
• Turn down your heating thermostat 1°C for up to 10% saving; 18°C to 21°C is about right during the day (and hypothermia is only really a risk when temperatures at home are as low as 5°C, but spending more than two hours at 12°C raises blood pressure), and nearer 14°C at night when sleeping. Only heat rooms that you are using. Use a timer to avoid heating when no one is home! Wearing the right clothing helps keep you comfortable at lower temperatures.
• Don't have your hot water thermostat set higher than 60°C/140°F, and 'instant' water heaters avoid losses from a tank for new systems.
• Don't leave gadgets and appliances on standby/charging, turn them off (maybe with a smart power-strip or trailing adaptor) or unplug them; you might trim as much as 30% off your electricity bill.
• Check your mains electricity use at home with tools such as the Kill-a-Watt meter, or just read your supply meter daily or weekly. Gas too.
• Minimise the electricity you use at times of peak grid load (eg 4pm to 9pm in the autumn/winter in the UK) since more carbon-intensive and expensive fuels may be burnt in 'peaking' plants, and the grid is under most strain too. Intensity at peak time circa 2009 is probably ~0.6kgCO2/kWh, as much as 50% over typical levels.
• Reduce, re-use, recycle.

Every kWh of electricity saved avoids production of ~0.43kg of CO₂ in the UK.

News

Sources and Links

• NEW 2012/04/03: Flexible working trial reveals big benefit for the environment: O2 sent all but 125 of 3000 HQ staff to work from home 8th February: 88% of staff said that they were at least as productive as on a normal day at the office, with 36% claiming to have been more productive.
• EU GHG emissions map.
• NEW 2012/04/02: Domestic energy use map of Britain down to very small areas giving consumption averages for ~6000 people. Area E02000602 in Kingston upon Thames: average consumption of gas, per meter, kilo-watt hours: 13,143kWh, average consumption of electricity, per meter, kWh: 4,106kWh (cf ~6,000 and ~1,000 respectively for us, 14,898kWh and 4,709kWh for Britain). See backing data.
• NEW 2012/04/02: New energy saving advice line launches: energy efficiency advisors will be on hand to take calls from the public on 0300 123 1234.
• NEW 2012/03/25: The solar envelope: how to heat and cool cities without fossil fuels.
• NEW 2012/03/19: Over 60% renewable electricity country list.
• NEW 2012/02/16: Western HVDC Link to be fully operational by 2016: 420km, 2.2GW, 600kV from Hunterston, North Ayrshire in Scotland to Connah's Quay in Flintshire, north Wales.
• NEW 2012/02/09: DECC: Improvements to the Feed-in Tariffs scheme.
• NEW 2012/02/08: Do the Math: The Alternative Energy Matrix; look where solar PV is on the grid!
• NEW 2012/02/08: Energy Realities. From New Scientist, The Economist and others.
• NEW 2012/02/08: DECC launches the EEDO ie Energy Efficiency Deployment Office.
• 2012/01/31: US report finds that building reuse almost always offers environmental savings over demolition and new construction.
• 2012/01/18: Elexon currently 'sees' (ie meters input to the GB national grid from) 4GW of 6GW installed capacity (assumed GB wind capacity rather than UK).
• 2011/12/15: Low-carbon technology 'will not mean big bill rises' (BBC/CCC).
• 2011/12/12: Fun rebuttal of "hide the decline" hype.
• 2011/10/31: BBC Energy Futures section.
• 2011/10/14: Here comes the sun: a field trial of solar water heating systems: EST study finds "well-installed and properly used systems provided around 60 per cent of a household's hot water. The trial also found examples where systems were not properly configured or used, and where the contribution from solar was as low as 9 per cent. The median across all systems was 39 per cent" and "there was little difference between the total solar energy yield of those installations that used flat-plate solar collectors and those that used evacuated-tube solar collectors."
• 2011/10/03: Got Storage? How hard can it be?
• 2011/09/12: The AEA Microgeneration Index: reports total UK microgeneration at 160.96MWe (PV ~75%/120MWe) as of 2011/06/30, with Kingston-upon-Thames borough at 0.121MWe (0.08% of the UK total) of which about 4% is on my roof!
• 2011/09/07: It's cooler in the cloud: using the cloud can mean a smaller carbon footprint...
• 2011/09/07: Cure for Wind Farm Noise Policy Gridlock: Back Off, But Allow Easements.
• The new setsuden culture in Japan: energy saving in the wake of Fukushima.
• 2011/07/12: DECC UK Renewable Energy Roadmap.
• 2011/07/12: DECC Electricity Market Reform (EMR) White Paper 2011.
• 2011/06/10: Skeptic Arguments and What the Science Says.
• 2011/06/06: Is Burning Wood For Heat Really Green? To which the answer is almost certainly "no" in urban areas on the basis of particulate emissions, regardless of the CO2 story.
• Videos:
  NEW 2011/12/28 How does carbon offsetting work? (Adam Hart-Davis), 2011/09/26 A day in the life... dovetailing energy and water and time and money saving, 2011/09/06 Visualizing a plenitude economy, 2011/03/20 Wind doing good in a small US community (Siemens), 2011/03/19 Living in a Zero-Waste Home, OLD Isaac Asimov on the greenhouse effect in 1989, time history of CO2, simple and clear "smart grid" summary from Con Edison (New York), the Energy Saving Trust YouTube channel which is witty and watchable, December 2009 Human Power Shower - Bang Goes The Theory - BBC One, the excellent and light-hearted YouTube video on global warming "How It All Ends", the "We can fix it Together" call to action, and Adam Hart-Davis talking about the Masai and how small is beautiful.
• Here's how you can reduce your carbon footprint by 1 tonne per year; just four steps for the average Brit.
• Amongst other things the sust-it site ranks electrical goods such as TVs and fridges by energy consumption in sensible ways, which is a very valuable service.
• The Energy Saving Trust (generate your own energy); a member of the European Energy Network.
• There are various smart power-strips available to make it easy to turn off things properly and avoid bending down too often, or delving behind the sofa, such as from oneclick.
• The fantastic Freegle (was FreeCycle) for giving useful things a good home, as an alternative to charity shops or landfill.
• Free DIY repair manuals from iFixit.
• Without Hot Air (free) book by David MacKay; real crunchy numbers and a TreeHugger summary and 2012 video at TEDx.
• The Zerocarbonista blog by Dale Vince of Ecotricity, the very good and sometimes tongue-in-cheek TreeHugger.com blog/news site, the ForceField DIY alternative power generation board, BusinessGreen, the RealClimate Data Sources page, Renewable Energy World, the Cleantech Blog, the BBC's Green Room, the Green Thoughts blog, Green Energy News, Energy Central, Home Power magazine.
• Housing Energy Advisor and its forum.