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.