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.

Ahoy-hoy

Welcome aboard, strangers. My name is Mike. I live in Philadelphia, and I'm a part of that so-called "green collar workforce" you might have heard some talking head mention on TV. I'm starting this project as a way to reform myself a little bit. You see, I spend my days helping people use less energy in their houses, through a combination of home repairs and customer education. I like what I do, and I believe it's important for any number of reasons, but I feel that I'm not holding up my end of the bargain as much as I could. I sometimes don't take my own advice, and it makes me feel like a terrible hypocrite.

I'm going to be using this blog to examine my own carbon footprint, figure out exactly what a carbon footprint is, and make changes in my day-to-day life to help reduce my impact. You know, tread lightly and all that. I'm going to keep it reasonable; I rent an apartment, and I'm in no position to buy an electric car. But I'm sure that there are little things I could be doing without even going out of my way, and if you're reading this, maybe you could do them, too.

As for the content here, I like to keep it light where I can. No sense taking one's self too seriously. I'm shooting for weekly updates, but we'll see how that goes. If there's an important or relevant link, I'll just leave it as a URL; links in the text will probably be funny pictures or something. Things will of course be work safe. And on the subject of work, I'll try my best to go easy on specifics, but of course, my words and opinions are not necessarily those of my employer or anyone else.

I hope to start my project in earnest sometime this week. I'll talk at you then.