Big things happening on this end of the Internet. The missus and I have started looking for our first house. A large portion (almost 40%) of our carbon output is dictated by where we live, and by renting in a multi-unit building, our hands are kind of tied on energy saving home repairs. Hopefully, this means some larger (but still manageable) projects on the horizon. I just want to insulate something, you guys.

And now for something completely different. I do a ton of driving for my job, all day, every day. In the summer, I get warm and gross very quickly. And since it's mostly stop-and-go city driving and I have all kinds of paperwork in the car, just rolling the windows down isn't always an option. So my car AC is running quite a bit. I've always had a little bit of guilt about that, until my dad said it didn't matter. He claimed that rolling the windows down and having all that wind dragging on the car would hurt the fuel efficiency much worse than the AC. Something about that just didn't quite sit right with me, but my dad's a pretty smart, technical guy, so I wanted to dig a tiny bit deeper into it.

Lo and behold, someone did the hard work for me. My spiritual gurus the Mythbusters tested this out for themselves. Short video below. Please don't sue me.

So, essentially, my dad was mistaken, but I'm still wrong. My car (a little Toyota Yaris) has a rated fuel efficiency of 29 MPG City. Using the Mythbusters' rough 15% calculation, I'm down around 24.5 MPG with the AC running. I average about 320 miles of driving for work every week, which works out to 13 gallons of gas with the AC on or 11 gallons with the AC off. Shutting off the AC for the entire summer (13 weeks) means saving 26 gallons of gas. The EPA estimates that one gallon of gas generates 19.4 pounds of carbon dioxide, so rolling my windows down would end up saving me about 504 pounds. Not bad at all.

Hoping to keep up with this a bit better in the near future. Hoping for fewer non sequiturs, too. Until next time.

Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)

Too long in between posts here. My apologies. That soupy Northeastern summer is upon us here in Philly. The houses I visit that are lucky enough to have air conditioners are running them unapologetically, and at full force. And if you want to know a dirty little secret, so am I. The "energy man" runs his A/C a lot. A LOT. No shame in my game. It's a luxury I'm willing to pay for...to a point.

One of the questions I'm asked nearly every day at work is about how people should be using their air conditioners. Warmer is always better when you're sitting right there. But people always want to know if they save more money by leaving the AC running all day, or turning it off when they leave and back on when they come home. There's a lot of conflicting information about this. A LOT. Sorting through all of it took me the better part of two days. If you talk to an AC repairman, they will say leave it on, because they want you to wear it out (and then pay them to repair it). But if you talk to the engineers who design HVAC systems, they'll always do what I do and turn it off. The reasons require us to do a little bit of SCIENCE!™, but I'll try to simplify things.

Nature is always trying to balance itself out. Not trying to get all hippie drum circle, the rules of this universe just work that way. Things like air, water, pressure, and heat all want to even themselves out as much as possible. In order to do this, they need both a way to move and a reason to move. If there's not a hole, wind can't blow through it. If it's 70°F inside and 70°F outside, there's no reason for the heat to try and get through your walls. The bigger the hole or the bigger the difference, the faster things will move. So, if it's 70°F inside, the heat will come in faster on a 100°F day than it will on a 75°F day.

For this example, let's say your air conditioner has to run for three minutes to bring the temperature down 1°F. You keep it set to 70°F all day, and today, it's 90°F out, so that heat really wants to get in. You set the thermostat and leave for work. The AC runs for three minutes to bring the house down to 70°F, and then five minutes later, it's back up to 71°F, so the AC kicks on again. Three minutes on, five minutes off. All. Freaking. Day. 24 minutes out of every hour. By the time you get home from work, you've removed 60°F of heat from the house, and the air conditioner ran for more than three hours. That works out to $42 a month for an average central air system, not even counting weekends or what you're spending when you're actually home.. That's a lot of money to spend with no one getting anything for it. A LOT.

Now instead, let's say you turn the AC off when you leave for work that day. The house starts at 70°F, and it heats up. By the time you get home, it will probably be right around the 90°F that is is outside. Feels kind of gross. Hope you left plenty of water out for the cats. You switch the AC on the second you get in the door. Remember, it runs three minutes to take every 1°F out of the air, so that means it's gonna run for an hour straight, and remove 20°F from the house all at once. The math gets a little easier here: one hour is much less than three hours, and 20°F is much less than 60°F. And that saves you about $30 a month.

With the AC running, the heat has a reason to keep coming in, so the AC has to keep removing it; with the AC off, it has much less of a reason, so it is removing less over the course of the entire day. The missus came up with a great analogy for this: Running the air conditioner is like grocery shopping. It takes less "work" to bring them in from the car one item at a time, but you have to do it over and over again. Keeping the groceries in the bag and bringing them in all at once is far more efficient in the long run.

That's your physics lesson for the day, all. Time to go taste test some cookies in the kitchen. Of course, I'll be turning the air conditioner in the living room off when I go.

The pros and cons of tomatoes

Happy Independence Day to all the Americans reading this (I assume that's everyone reading this). I hope you're doing something fun with your long weekend. Hopefully, it involves a grill, some beers or space beers, and not blowing up anything important.

That's kind of related to food, so I'll take the segue here. I've been thinking about food a lot lately. Beyond trying to get healthy for myself, and being hyper-conscious of the ingredients in prepared foods on behalf of the vegan missus, one's diet has a major impact on their carbon usage. I'm planning to visit some of the issues around organic food and cow flatulence and what not more in depth later on, but I want to talk about gardening and seasonality today.

The basic idea is this: if your food is grown far away from your house, it takes a lot more effort (and a lot more gasoline) to get it to you. An 18-wheel truck will exhaust an average of 65 tons of carbon dioxide per year. This is part of the reason why more and more people are talking about eating local and "farm-to-table" cooking, and farmers markets are popping up everywhere. For most of us, the closest your food can possibly grow to your house is, well, your house. And even if you're not living on a farm, there's still plenty of stuff you can grow yourself.

I've always enjoyed gardening, ever since I was a kid helping my dad pull weeds and accidentally uprooting one of his hot cherry pepper plants. When I lived at my brother's house, and we had a backyard and some free time, I planted a full bed and had some very good luck with it. We were swimming in tomatoes and zucchini, peppers and broccoli, lettuce and herbs. We spent less money, the fresh food tasted better, and we didn't have to worry about peppers flying here all the way from Mexico or tomatoes being driven up from Florida.

Fig. 1 - My brother watering the garden, circa July 2010.

Here at the apartment, we have a little less space and a lot less flexibility. The backyard here at the house is great for hanging out, but it's pretty wild and overgrown, with a lot of shade, which is not good for most food crops. There is one little spot, on the concrete patio at the rear corner of the house, that gets a decent amount of sun. It's tough to plant things in concrete, though. So I scavenged an old table that was abandoned by a former tenant, bought a couple seedlings (small, immature plants) from the garden center, and planted them in some pots.

A "container garden" is a great option for people without much space or a permanent place to plant a garden. It's flexible, requires a bit less of a time commitment, and can really look great. I'm far from an expert, so I'll defer to Google on this one; there are plenty of resources out there for those interested in building a container garden. I went a very basic route myself. I tried to choose plants I knew would be useful. I planted a cherry tomato, because they tend to do better in pots than larger tomatoes. There are some of the herbs we use most in the house, such as Italian parsley, cilantro, basil, and mint (which is great in pots because it spreads like a weed and is pretty much impossible to kill). We also planted a big pot of mixed flowers at the missus' request, and some lavender and marigolds, because squirrels and other critters that would try to eat my tomatoes are repelled by the smell. The soil was a basic organic potting mix out of a bag, and I mixed in some worm castings, which make a great natural fertilizer. Nearly two months in, most of them are doing well, with one exception.

Fig. 2 - Tomatoes, not quite ready

Fig. 3 - Clockwise from top: flowers, parsley, basil, so much mint

Fig. 4 - The cilantro is the exception.

The numbers here are kind of tricky, as many people can buy the supermarket produce that comes off of one truck or one plane. According to the calculation websites, growing all of one's own produce can help eliminate around 940 pounds of carbon emissions per year. Obviously, I'm on the small scale with my garden, but hey, every little bit helps. Besides, the pesto I made last night with that fresh basil was amazing. WOrthwhile for any number of reasons.

The cats like watching the Nature Channel

Haven't been feeling well lately. Seeing all kinds of doctors over the next few days. A very simple project today, but one that I feel gets overlooked all the time, especially in my house.

I have a terrible habit of leaving things on when I leave the room. You know, that thing that I tell people to do all day, every day, a bit sheepishly because I know full well we've all heard it a billion times before. Well, I don't do that. The missus does what my parents always used to do, following behind me and flipping light switches all day (yes, day, when the sun is out) and night. It's one of the things I do that annoys me the most. I'll even leave lights and TVs on when I'm clear on the other side of the house. I can't help it; I like it bright when I'm inside.

But this is a simple fix. Mindfulness and all that. Next time I get up to raid the fridge or play with the cats or clean the bathroom, I'm just gonna turn the TV off. I mean, it doesn't even need to be on right now, while I'm typing this post.

Fig. 1 - Watching TV

Fig. 2 - Doing absolutely anything else

According to the labels on the back, my TV uses 102 watts of electricity when it's on, and the cable box uses an additional 36 watts. The rough estimate we use at work is 17 cents per kilowatt-hour (how much electricity a thousand-watt appliance will use if it's turned on for one hour). So, I can work out what my with a little bit of math:
102 + 36 = 138W
138W / 1000 = .138kW
.138 x $.17 = $.023 for every hour the TV is on, whether I'm watching something, using it for background noise, or asleep on the couch.

Okay, a hair over two cents an hour is a drop in the bucket, right? Well, it depends. I tend to turn the TV on as soon as I get home from work, and leave it on until I go to bed. Let's call that an average of five hours a day. Most of that time is spent messing around on the Internet or in another room. That means I could turn it off for four of those hours and not notice a bit of difference. That's 201 kilowatt-hours, or $33.58 a year. Of course that much money isn't gonna make me filthy rich, but it's something. More importantly, 201kWh is going to save me almost 246 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions for the year. And that's just from the TV; switching off the lights or the radios or anything else I'm not actually using will make it add up even faster. In fact, I've got to wash some dishes right now:

Fig. 3 - In the room

Fig. 4 - Not in the room

Until next time.

How many lightbulbs does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Today's post is brought to you by the World Cup distracting me like crazy. Even if FIFA is corrupt and terrible, and their board room looks like something a Bond villain would install a mile underground, I always enjoy a soccer game when it's on. Of course, I'm pulling for Team USA, but since it's fun rooting for an underdog, I'd love to see Cote d'Ivoire make it out of their group; they have the lowest carbon emissions of any country in the tournament (Uruguay is close behind).

For today's project, something extremely simple. I'm going to change a couple of lightbulbs. The old-school, incandescent light bulb was popularized by Thomas Edison in 1878, and that's been the standard in homes for over 130 years. Not being one to stand on tradition, I've been using fluorescent bulbs for several years. Customers tell me all the time that they're not crazy about the "energy bulbs," because the color is weird or they take a few seconds to warm up, but they've made huge improvements in quality and price over the past few years. Combined with the facts that they use about 25% the electricity and last WAAAAAAAAAAAY longer, and CFL bulbs end up being the better choice for nearly every household application.

But I'm not just going for "better" with this experiment. I want to get as much impact as possible. So I'm trying out light emitting diode (LED) bulbs. Instead of heating a wire until it gets white-hot for incandescent, or shooting electricity through a cloud of chemicals until they glow like fluorescent, LEDs use electricity running through a microchip to make a semiconductor shoot out beams of light. Just like any new technology, they're still a bit pricey, but they last 20 times as long as old incandescent bulbs and use significantly less electricity than CFLs. The table below compares the three most common types of bulbs:

Bulb type	Watts (energy used)	Lumens (light output)	Lifespan (hours)	BTU/Hr (heat output)	Cost per year (used 6 hr/day)
Incandescent	60	760	1,000	85	$22.39
Fluorescent (CFL)	13	850	8,000	35	$4.84
Light Emitting Diode (LED)	10	800	25,000	4	$3.35

You can see the benefits clearly. CFL bulbs use less electricity, last longer, and generate less heat than the old Edison bulbs, but LEDs beat both in every category. I bought two different types of LED bulbs to try. Both are around 800 lumens, so equivalent to a 60W incandescent bulb.

Fig.1 - Cree 9W LED bulb, $4.97

Fig. 2 - Phillips 9.5W SlimStyle LED, $8.97

I hope I don't have to give anyone a tutorial on how to change a light bulb. I wanted the biggest impact, so they went in two of the lights we have on the most: one in the lamp in the living room, and one in the ceiling light in the bedroom.

Before (CFL)

After (Phillips LED)

Close-up of individual diodes. Weird, right?

If my calculations are correct, I've cut out around 272 pounds of carbon dioxide per year by changing two bulbs, and I brought down my electric bill by about $4 a month. More than makes up for the $14 I spent on them. And as an added bonus, I think these things just look cool. The journey of a thousand miles begins.

Step One: The Footprint

So, what precisely am I talking about with this whole carbon footprint thing, anyway? There are a bunch of scholarly articles that I won't bore you with, and a bunch of embarrassingly crunchy nonsense that I won't make you want to punch me with. Without putting too fine a point on it, it's a simple way of measuring how much impact your lifestyle has on our environment. Directly or indirectly, everything from the car you drive to the Chilean strawberries you buy in January contributes to the greenhouse effect and drives climate change, which keeps our kids from having water and air, and makes polar bears frown.

I visited several carbon accounting websites to work out my own impact, because doing the math myself would take forever because I just wouldn't do it so it would never happen. I am nothing if not pragmatic. Every website had its own methodology; some only asked about my house and car, while others were so detailed that they asked about how much food I composted and compared me to other houses in my zip code. Three websites were especially helpful:

http://www.nature.org/greenliving/carboncalculator strikes a good compromise between simplicity and detail, and I've used their numbers for this post.
http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/carboncalculator is quite detailed, and lists a ton of suggestions to help reduce your emissions at the end.
http://footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/calculators is extremely interactive, but gives one's result in the number of Earths needed to support one's lifestyle. An interesting thought experiment, but a bit esoteric for my needs here.

After I put in all the relevant info, I was gobsmacked by the result. I am personally responsible for approximately 28 tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere every year,  just slightly above the US average of 27 tons. I figured I'd at least be better than average. It's worth noting here that the world average is about 5 1/2 tons, partly because of stricter environmental controls in many European countries, and partly because large swaths of the planet are simply so poor that they can't afford cars or electricity in their homes.

Screen capture from nature.org

Just a shade over half of my emissions come from my car. It's a tiny, TINY compact, but I rack up miles super fast driving between customers' houses. My apartment is roughly a third, a lot of which is unfortunately out of my control. Me and the missus are saving up to buy a house, but I can't very well rip out my landlady's old oil heater or insulate her attic. I'm not crazy enough to advocate selling all my material possessions and grow a beard that birds can nest in. But clearly I've got some work to do in the put up or shut up department.