While I find it important to take actions that make sense for me and my immediate environment, I don’t kid myself about the overall effect of reducing my footprint to 50%, 10% or 1% of its original value or my planetary individual allowance. It will not “save the planet” or help overthrow the systems that put life at risk.
For good perspective I recommend “As the World Burns: 50 Simple things you can do to stay in denial” by Stephanie McMillan and Derrick Jensen.
Today Nest announced it’s newest version of their programmable thermostat.
I had the incredible luck of buying a Nest “1.0” on the day it was released (10/25/11), *by accident*. My previous thermostat had died the day before and after adding it to our e-recycle box (thermostats have mercury and other materials that need to be correctly handled i.e. not chucked on the top of a landfill where it will slowly seep into the surroundings) I googled for thermostats and the Nest showed up – I read about the features and after some frustrated attempts at their website (“Why does the checkout page keep crashing!?”) I placed an order. Only later did I realize it had been unveiled just hours earlier and all the web was a-twitter about the new product of Tony Fadell, a former Apple designer I admire for taking on a job to more directly work on things that are good for our ecosystem.
Nest Thermostats are a form of smart control that are make it easy and automatic to keep your house comfortable using less. Nest improves efficiency by taking into account furnace types and heat inertia to better time when gas has to get burned; and reduces waste by allowing you to control it remotely and sense when everyone is away.
The little data I have suggests the Nest has reduced the heating natural gas used in my household by about 20% – once I correct for water heating, the only other use of natural gas use at our place, and a series of efficiency upgrades we did shortly after.
Analyzing it from a perspective of “Dollar to % savings”, it has been about 10x as efficient as changing our insulation (a $6000 job that improved our heating efficiency drastically) or the prospect of upgrading our furnace (depending on installation costs, it could be $5000 to replace a 80% efficient furnace with a %97 efficient furnace, without considering a heat pump system for simplicity of the comparison).
The previous thermostat was not optimally programmed to week by week changes, it was a hassle to program anyways, did not modify its own programming based on your real day-to-day behaviors, did not sense when we were out of the house, and did not allow us to control it anywhere via our phones (think of the convenience to turn the heat on from your car as you approach home at the end of a day outside), did not provide nice monthly reports to give you a sense of what’s going on, etc. etc.
I am also glad I got rid of the Honeywell device due to their corporate practices selling weapons worldwide and their ridiculous suing of Nest for patent infringement in -get this- “round thermostat” design and asking you setup questions. Nest is trying to get the USPTO to see the ridiculousness of those patents.
Further improvements that affect heating efficiency we do or have done include:
I don’t want this post so sound like an ad, but the Nest did save a lot of burnt natural gas for everyone, and saved money for us. Plus, it looks stunningly gorgeous on our wall, and I especially like how the screen fades on and off as I walk by.
I love tinkering and building things, especially after work. This means working indoors, and good light makes for an enjoyable, productive and safe workplace. Usually it is better to have multiple sources leading to less shadows but sometimes you need one very strong light source. Just like for bulbs that are too small, finding efficient replacement for bulbs that are too large can be hard. Fortunately I found this CFL bulb by Ecosmart that for 68 Watts generates more light than a regular 300 W fixture.
The bulb is quite big – almost comically big – as compared to a regular bulb, as you can see in the picture below. Make sure you are planning to put it in a fixture that will fit it!. But it gets the job done and I can use it for a handful of hours without blowing my daily energy budget.
Of course, as with any CFL, one has to be very careful not to break them and to recycle them appropriately because of their Mercury content.
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I would love to hear stories of others making their work lights more efficient. I have seen, but haven’t tried these other work lights which are LED based but because of the cost and form factor – I just needed something to put in a bulb socket.
In the USA large appliances like clothes dryers or electric car chargers are built for 240V. I happily have used the Kill-A-Watt EZ for simple measurements, but 240V appliances can’t be measured through it. The TED5000 I have measure whole-house electricity usage, but I wanted to update my chart of where power goes in my house (electric power, that is). I want to get an updated picture of what % goes to heating, fridges, etc.
The TED5000 could be a great option but having to install a new MTU and CTs seemed complex, especially once it comes to aggregating the data into only one gateway. I thought splitting the 240V lines and feeding one live/neutral pair in a Kill-A-Watt… but not knowing more about the internals of the Kill-A-Watt I felt I may introduce unnecessary safety risks.
Instead, I built my own portable 240 Volt power meter:
With these elements in hands I assembled a simple 240V “extension cord” that has a remote display to measure the power going through it. The remoteness of the display (a design idea from the Belkin Conserve meter that is otherwise useless) is useful especially with 240V appliances where the outlets are inaccessible, behind heavy stuff, plugs are huge and hard to maneuver in cramped conditions, and you generally don’t want to be messing around with them.
The assembly was simple. I got lucky since the CT of the EKM device fit nicely in the surface mount box with no stress to case or cable.
Since it measures current going only through one live lead, the actual power is twice the displayed value in the meter. Unlike many other countries where the use of 2 out of 3 phases at 120deg phase is common, in the USA higher-voltage appliances are powered with two counter-phase live lines of 120V each, so getting the real power used is a simple matter of multiplying by 2 instead of by square root of 3.
This meter is handling 240V with high currents so it is important to do a careful job if you decide to build your own. Doing 240 V in Canada is illegal if you are not an electrician and you can void your house insurance. You can hurt your loved ones, yourself, or your property if you don’t know what you are doing (this is true for everything in life, however).
The EKM meter gets the current reading from the ring ammeter in the outlet, and reads the voltage through a couple of extra cables.
Here is the end layout before getting the EKM meter and cable into casing and protective stuff:
The meter reads cumulative kWh so you need to keep a logbook of when you started and stopped measuring what. It tracks kWh to 2 decimal places so it’s more than precise enough for the use we are giving it.
I like the meter I built, for its portability, simplicity, and that I can lend it to friends.
But after getting some basic measurements I am considering installing the EKM as an add-on to my breaker panel. This will allow me to periodically re-wire the CT onto different circuits. I may decide to invest in a better meter – EKM has a very compelling product line– , but I have pushed my electricity consumption so low already that I would need to expect to discover significant in the data obtained in order to recover the cost. After all, the basics save most of the money.
But if you are starting the process I went through improving your house’s electricity efficiency from the beginning, or you want to discriminate between appliances such as electric cars, and you care about measuring stuff, I would highly recommend installing one of EKM’s smarter meters near the breaker box and investing in a couple of clamp-on CTs. If you don’t care about fine-grained measurement just follow the main improvements and use your bill to track improvement.
Feel free to leave comments & questions below!
I’ll do a couple of quick posts to share how I have improved efficiency in situations/fixtures that require non-standard or hard-to find bulbs.
These are hard to find in CFL because of their small size. I couldn’t find a direct replacement that had enough lumens to be any good or had a good temperature.
What I did is I bought some LED GU10 bulbs that are smaller. The GU10 plug looks like two fatty prongs that are intended to be twist-locked in place (see the pictures). I then got a ceramic adapter that has a normal bulb screw on one end, and a socket for GU10 plug on the other.
With that, I could adapt some EcoSmart bulbs and they worked great. Here they are in HomeDepot but with a different packaging than I had them (I bought them in little cardboard boxes, and Amazon doesn’t carry them as I write this). I wish I hadn’t given away the old normal bulb to give you a comparison image – when assembled, the picture of the combined bulb+adapter to the right looks disproportionately long, but the overall length is less than a 1/8th of an inch longer than the original.
The adapters are not cheap (I got them at Amazon for $5.95) but worth it. These lamps tend to spend a couple of hours on in the winter. I got rid of 2 bulbs, so 2 x 40W= 80 W went out and got replaced it with 2 x 6 W = 12W. It repays itself in 5 years with calculated guesstimates.
Finding a bulb that I liked wasn’t that easy – the Philips brand was both too bluish,weak and had a weird, diffuse shadow. These are brighter but 3000K. I would have preferred 2700K for a mellower, warmer look. Still these look great and given how much they are used definitively worth it.
For my house, this LED bulb became the star as the house has a lot of small recessed lights in high-traffic areas.
All in all we have replaced 34 50W halogen bulbs (that’s 1700 W spread between the kitchen, stairs, hallway and main bedroom) with 29 of 7W Philips LEDs (to 203 W). Just swapping the kitchen lights and hallway/stairs lights made a measurable difference. In this area of the world, days are short in the wintertime and you need lights on until 9AM and from around 4:30 PM. The halogen bulbs required 8 TIMES more electricity.
I liked these Philips bulbs after trying others because of:
For my “good” goal of 16 kWh/day, having a kitchen circuit with 10 x 50W for 3 hours was blowing 1500 kWh – that’s just one room in the house eating up 10% of the energy budget!
LED bulbs are not cheap and it’s not where you start with an energy reduction effort, but I saw an immediate difference in the electricity use in the bills. Since these are recessed lights, having kill-a-watt meters is not possible (how long until in-wall switches and outlets report their use via wifi?) so there is a little bit of interpolation going on.
I spent a lot of my ‘efficiency’ budget on these bulbs (once I had improved house thermal insulation, and done other basic improvements). It will take around 10 to 15 years for a recovery on the investment assuming the bulbs live their advertised life and assuming some 3hs of daily use. It would take 23 mega Watt-hours to keep the halogen bulbs on, and they would need many many replacements along the way. With these LEDs it’s buy once and 3200 kWh using the same assumptions. Even though my energy sources are now somewhat renewable, they still have a carbon footprint larger than zero, so using less Watts is still good beyond the money.
Remember our economy of fossil fuels is vastly distorted due to externalizations and subsidies so the money-cost of burning coal or gas is quite irrelevant to calculating the real ROI of the bulb. Of course the cost of the bulb itself is lower than it should be too, because of the equally artificially lowered costs in its manufacture and transport – but the difference between the manufacture of different sorts of bulbs (CFLs, LEDs) is so little when done at scale so that difference evens out if we are doing comparisons between bulbs (comparing these bulbs to light from candles made of beeswax in your own backyard is a very different exercise, but I don’t have that luxury). I haven’t seen a great supply-chain analysis of the material, energetic and human costs involved in making and transporting different bulbs; including data for fossil fuel and rare-earth elements, so a lot of externalizations are hiding there; but the ones that I have seen lead me to believe it ‘makes sense’ to go with the LEDs in the larger scheme of things – their 5x + longevity alone offsets a lesser increase in complexity and reliance on mercury. It is a complex landscape with no map…
Installing the TED 5000 to monitor your electricity use is easy and it does not require you to tinker with your mains cables- but does require to clamp the meters around those cables. Read here how I use it in conjunction with Kill-A-Watt EZ to understand and improve electricity use. I have experience working with high-power electric installations so it was a snap to do for me and I am familiar with safety and electricity.
The foundation of the TED5000 is two clamp-ammeters that measure the current flowing through the main cables powering your house. They can measure this without touching the circuit by measuring the electromagnetic induction inflicted on a ring caused by the alternating current in the cables. The “clamps” are rings that you can open and close around the cable without having to touch it. You use two clamps as most likely your house receives electricity via two AC ‘phases’ Then, the TED5000 MTU connects to a breaker on each ‘Phase’ directly, and to the neutral bar, so it can measure voltage. It multiplies voltage and current, to get a power reading.
Here is what the overall map of the installation looks like:
Basically:
Here are some tips to set it up. Some are common sense and others are from experience. Needless to say be careful, think ahead and rehearse mentally when you are doing something you are not familiar with.
The Gateway is just a little device you plug in to an outlet. Since it communicates with the MTU via power line communication you need to plug it into an outlet controlled by the breaker switch you chose to install your MTU communication line in the mains box. It can be frustrating if you don’t get a signal at first. I had to try on two different outlets until I got a strong reliable signal. The closer it is to the mains (physically) the better as the power line communication degrades with distance. This can be challenging as usually the mains is in a basement or somewhere far from ethernet cables.
Once it’s set up you can use the TED5000 web interface or one of many smartphone apps (I list mine here) to look at the data. You need to discover the IP address of the TED device. I happen to be handy around network configurations so it was easy for me, but the TED 5000 materials give you clear instructions to follow and helper applications to do it yourself.
If you buy the TED 5000 from a store it’s likely you’ll get the kit which includes a portable display you can use anywhere in the house. I don’t have one so I can’t review it or give you tips about using it.
I also chose to expose the IP address of the TED 5000 on the internet so I can access the information directly anywhere with a connection.
Enjoy your measurments!
You can improve a lot of things about your energy consumption by following a few rules of thumb, but at one point or another you’ll need to measure your use to know where to place your efforts. Your utility bill is a great tool, and it gives you a high-level overview of trends, but it won’t help you change your behavior in real-time, pinpoint problem areas, or dispel assumptions.
By tracking things better you can also decide where it may be worth it to install some smart control (a timed switch or outlet, a presence sensor, etc), or if upgrading an appliance is worth it energetically. In this post I will share some some of the approaches to measurement I’ve taken for electricity use.
The TED 5000 (http://www.theenergydetective.com/)is a small simple device that installs in your main electricity junction box and measures current and voltage in real-time. This allows it to compute power used and keep track of it over time.
You install the measurement unit (which they call “MTU”) in the junction box, and then it sends out the measured data to a box plugged elsewhere in the house which is called a “Gateway”. This gateway has a network cable interface and you can plug it into your ethernet. The Gateway exposes a web page which you can see in your browser, which shows real-time and aggregate information.
The TED 5000 Dashboard, accessible by browsing to your TED Gateway’s IP Address
I have found TED 5000 (TED is an acronym for “The Energy Detective” and a not-subtle resemblance to the TED talks logo) to be useful for:
I have not found it useful for:
The information can be seen in a bunch of mobile apps which connect directly to your TED 5000 Gateway, amongst which Mirawatt T5K (http://ted.mirawatt.com/)is the one I liked the most (I use an iPhone, there are similar apps for Android and possibly Windows Phones). It is only worth the $4.99 price because it has no competition as far as user experience goes. (It is not spectacular, however. It is just the least bad of the bunch). Others I didn’t like as much were TED-O-Meter or iTED. These are free, so yay & kudos for the efforts to those developers. To access the information outside your home via your mobile network you will need to configure your internet router to expose the TED Gateway IP address directly on the internet.
PeoplePower (http://peoplepowerco.com/)is a relatively new effort that provides an internet service and a mobile app to access your data. The TED 5000 Gateway stores some usage data, but PeoplePower promises to save your data for a longer time on a real server and its mobile app has more features around projecting and setting goals for your electricity use. It’s headed in a promising direction, and they are also making some steps in gameifying environmental behaviors.
You configure the service by telling your TED device to “post” data to their website. Just follow the instructions you get when you sign up. If you run into any issues or the TED configuration is acting up on you, just email them- I can attest their technical support is excellent.
The Kill-A-Watt EZ is a great little device. It tracks the energy usage over time and displays real-time or accumulated information. It can show Watts, KWH, or $ (you have too tell it your electricity rates).
I have found it useful for:
I have tried other devices like the “Belkin Conserve Insight Energy-Use monitor”. It has a nicer physical design but it’s almost a waste of money when it comes to measurements, because of the way Belkin chose to aggregate and display the data. I’ll stick with the Kill-a-watt.
I have a couple of Kill-A-Watt unit (one fixed for the car charger and one that ‘roams’ around the house as I make week-long measurements). The next obvious evolution is to have these meters transmit data via wireless to services such as PeoplePower’s. I’m sure an enterprising soul with a Kill-A-Watt, some micro controller knowledge or a new ElectricImp and time to invest in a cool project could take the output of the former and beam it via wireless provided by the latter. Sounds worthy of a Maker Faire project.
Note that none of the above help measure electricity used by built-in lamps or lighting systems that you turn on and off via a wall switch (unless you wire things yourself). Maybe one day soon light switches and outlets that automatically measure, store , and forward usage patterns will become economically viable. Some smart digesting of the ensuing data deluge could provide actionable and personalized tips to do more with less.
In general, to reduce the footprint of a resource I look at the following strategies:
Smarter control is really a means to reduce demand or increase efficiency, but I like calling it out as it forces me to think of new areas of improvement. Smart controls avoid the use of resources when they are not needed because of real-time environmental conditions, they allow remote or automatic control, give you more fine-grained options on how to use a resource, and can even learn your behaviors and nudge you into less demand. The difference between a control and just a sensor/meter is that it does stuff.
Examples of some controls I have installed:
Nest Thermostat
This is the energetic rockstar of my house, and a design beacon for the growing industry of smart controllers. Based on my data, I can attribute an approximate 20% on heating gas savings this last winter to this device alone. It has been the item with the highest energetic ROI-per-dollar in my house since. The Nest thermostat allows me to control my heating remotely via my phone, learns common patterns, turns of unnecessary heating, and nudges my behavior via little ‘green leaf’ icons and monthly points I can accumulate, gamefying my energy conservation. It’s worked so well it will get a bunch of blog posts on its own.
Nest’s website
See the Nest thermostat and reviews on Amazon.
This smart power strip senses if a ‘master’ outlet is being used, and if not, shuts off the power to most other outlets. I use this strip to reduce “phantom draw” from peripheral devices around my computer, for example. USB Hubs, speakers, and other accessories are all plugged into the secondary/slave plugs. When I take my laptop away or it is not drawing power from the source, all these devices loose their source power within a few seconds.
This small plug adapter from Belkin has a built-in timer that can be set to 1/2, 3 or 6 hours. Press the button, and the outlet will deliver power for that long. It’s that simple. I use this for:
Solenoids (electric faucets) controlling outdoor irrigation.
I’m on the fence on this one, but I’ll include it as it touches upon using smarter controls for water conservation.
I am not a fan of using mains water for irrigation and I believe automated timers have done more harm than good in conserving water (I haven’t seen data either way, but it’s a strong hunch), even with the growing popularity of drip irrigation. Anyways, I recently wired some solenoids (water taps that can be controlled via electricity, in this case 24v) on a couple of irrigation lines and hooked them up to a timer device. It stays off and we use it as a manually activated timer on seldom occasions. If I could hook it up to soil humidity sensors I would feel better about leaving them in automatic. I guess this “Smart control” isn’t so smart yet. Maybe it will be an Arduino project for a rainy weekend to improve this. It rains so often here that capturing some of that would make the most sense.
Another example of a smart control for water conservation would be those simple toilet-flushing buttons that give you two options to use more or less water based on what needs to be flushed. It’s simple but I haven’t installed these yet.
Smart controls can help us reduce consumption and increase efficiency. Sometimes they may seem expensive but if you make sure to keep measuring your gains you may be surprised! There are many other ways to reduce, reuse and conserve resources that don’t require you to buy anything, but these controls are an example of technology playing a good role in helping improve our lives and the planet.
Why reduce our footprint? What is the need or the drive? Does it matter? What does it change? Who cares?
I have found that in trying to answer these questions I bounce between three perspectives.
Planet-as-spaceship: A study on the physical/chemical conditions that make (human) life possible on Earth
Ecosystem-of-life: A study on how communities of humans can coexist with nature in sustainable systems.
Spiritual-community: A spiritual perspective on doing what’s right for the sake of yourself and others.
Whimsically, these three frames are typically represented using wheels, so yay.
The earth is a closed system (as far as we know: except for the sunlight, radiation, and chunks of space stuff coming in; and radiation, heat and gases and spaceships going out). For life as we know it to exist in this planet (and specifically, human life) there are certain physical characteristics that need to be maintained. Scientists are making progress in determining what are the metrics within which we can live on the planet, defining what is called a ‘habitable envelope’. If environmental measurements go outside the envelope, species survival is at risk.
The best attempt at determining the key boundaries of this habitable envelope has been published by Nature in their Planetary Boundaries special issue:
http://www.nature.com/news/specials/planetaryboundaries/index.html
Here you can download the actual paper “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity“. Bad news is that we’ve blown three boundaries, and still can’t get a grasp on how to measure two others. Good news is that we are starting to think about, measure and track these boundaries. The worse situation we can be in is one in which we don’t even know what they are – which accurately describes the state of affairs for most of humanity’s history.
If you make lifestyle changes that help rope these 10 boundaries in, you are helping save all life.
Planetary Boundaries as published in Nature
Permaculture is an area of research that takes a dynamic-systems perspective at sustainable living. The system encompasses ethics and design principles, Health & Spiritual Well-being, Finances & Economics, Resource Governance & Stewardship, Building, Technology, Education and Culture.
The core tenets of permaculture are (from wikipedia):
While suburban high-income environments are FAR away from a permaculture ideal, every time you help make incremental progress towards the principles outlined in the discipline you are helping in your bit. For example, you may not be involved in agricultural land stewardship, but you can decide to stop using artificial pesticides on your lawn, or replace a patch of your grassy garden with some cool vegetables and local plants. The spiral around the flower underscores the incremental nature of effort.
Permaculture Flower
We should not discount that there are ways of life and decisions we take that make us feel better because they are right. Buddhism has developed the eightfold path “to develop insight into the true nature of phenomena (or reality) and to eradicate greed, hatred, and delusion” It is typically represented as a wheel, too. When we do things that are good for our mind, body, community, other living beings, and the planet, we feel a sense of well-being that is strong yet humble and ego-less.
The Dharma wheel, often used to represent the Noble Eightfold Path (wikipedia)
| Division | Eightfold Path factors | |
|---|---|---|
| Wisdom (Sanskrit: prajñā, Pāli: paññā) | 1. Right view | Try to look at life, nature, and the world as they really are. |
| 2. Right intention | Aspire to rid yourself of whatever qualities you know to be wrong and immoral. | |
| Ethical conduct (Sanskrit: śīla, Pāli: sīla) | 3. Right speech | Make best use of your words. |
| 4. Right action | Avoid harm to yourself or to others | |
| 5. Right livelihood | Do not to engage in trades or occupations which, either directly or indirectly, result in harm for other living beings. | |
| Concentration (Sanskrit and Pāli: samādhi) | 6. Right effort | Make an effort to abandon all the wrong and harmful thoughts, words, and deeds. |
| 7. Right mindfulness | Keep your mind alert to phenomena that affect the body and mind. | |
| 8. Right concentration | Meditate to supress desire, anger, sloth, restleness, and doubt. |
Try these wheels out when explaining to yourself or others why you want to reduce your footprint.
In different occasions, you may find it resonates more to rely on the shock of the cold realities of the physics that make life possible life, on the appeal of living integrated to our ecosystem, or the wellbeing from doing what is good for yourself and others.
How To Change a Light Bulb 