What are the top 4 Things you can do to save electricity in your office?

1. Turn your computer off at night if you aren’t already.
2. Even better, change the power settings on your computer so it goes to sleep after 15 minutes or 20 minutes.
3. Turn your lights off when ever you leave your office.
4. Next time you buy a computer, seriously consider purchasing a laptop (they use about 1/4 the power of a desktop computer).

Do you know how much electricity you use in your personal office or cubicle?  Do you know how much energy your desktop computer or laptop uses?  If you are like me, you probably don’t know.  Over the past year I’ve measured how much electricity the different electric and electronic devices use so that I can make better decisions as I try to reduced my personal energy foot print (I use a device call the Kill-A-Watt to measure the electrical draw of each item).

Below are the power draws of all the electrical devices in my office (here is spreadsheet with a longer list of home and work electronics & their power draws):

• Lights On: 64 watts
• 27″ iMac Computer in Use w/ 2nd 24″ monitor (both screens at 50% brightness): 142 watts
• 27″ iMac Computer idle (both screens asleep): 60 watts
• Computer speakers on: 6 watts
• MacBook Air (screen 50% brightness): 14 watts
• iPad charging: 10 watts

Now here are some different options I have when I leave my office for lunch or for a meeting:

1. Office occupied and in use: 236 watts
2. Rich just walks away: 132 watts
3. Rich turns off lights & walk away:  66 watts
4. Rich auto sleeps computer, laptop, and turns off lights: 8 watts
5. Rich sleeps computer, laptop, and turns off lights and power bar for computer speakers: 2 watts

Notice the dramatically different levels of electrical usage between me just walking out of my office (#2) and me changing the settings in my computer to hibernate and turning my lights off (#4).  Instead of just walking away from my office, I’ve now programmed my monitors to turn off after 2 minutes of inactivity, and my computers to sleep after 15 minutes on inactivity, and trying very had to remember to turn my lights off.  There are motion sensor switches you can purchase to turn lights off for you, but I just need to get into the habit of turning my lights off when I’m leaving my office. Changing my habits slightly translates into an 94% reduction in energy consumption.

Why is it important to know how much electricity each device uses?  Here’s a quick example from my home. It’s been ten years now since we converted all our lighting in our house to compact florescent bulbs (CFL’s).  We made the change believing that we’d reduce our electrical consumption… which it did.  Last year I started measuring the electrical usage of other appliances in our home and was shocked to discover that our electric hot water tank uses the majority of the electricity in our house. I was worrying about turning lights off, when it was shower length that I should have been worried about first. For example, reducing my personal daily shower from 20 minutes to 10 minutes is the same as turning off all the lights in our kitchen, living room and front entry way for 10 hours.

Should we have switched to CFL bulbs?  Of course, but we should also have been encouraging everyone in the house to limit their time in the shower. By doing both we would have reduced or energy consumption significantly more.

P.S. Here are some facts about other electronics in your office that might be interesting to you:

• Digital Projector: 150-300 watts (depending on the model)
• Kyocera 2020D printer printing: 820 watts
• Kyocera 2020D printer idle: 25 watts
• Kyocera 2020D printer off: 13 watts

P.P.S. I use the kill-a-watt device to measure the electrical draw of plugin electronics and appliances.  At home I use The Energy Detective to monitor in real time energy usage in my home.

Island Energy is doing the install of an Enerworks system.  Photos and more information to follow!

Not rocket science, but a much less expensive way to save electricity or natural gas than buying expensive new appliances.

The same principle holds true when building or renovating a home.  I never would have guesses that carpeting is several orders of magnitude more energy intensive to manufacture and install than ceramic tiles or hard wood floors.  The 8 Minute TED Talk video below by Catherine Mohr provides some great non-intuitive examples from her home building project:

Rather than entailing higher construction costs, smartly designed and renovated buildings can often actually cost less, a phenomenon Lovins refers to as “tunneling through the cost barrier”. Amory talks about potential gains through air conditioning, lighting and heating, and through innovative design of lamps, windows, and ducts. “Imaginative design is not rocket science, and requires most of all that we decide to do things in ways that we are not used to.”

http://sic.conversationsnetwork.org/audio/download/siconversations-3265.mp3

http://sic.conversationsnetwork.org/audio/download/siconversations-3266.mp3

It has been a running joke here at the Law Library that I’m so anxious to go home after work I just ride down the loading dock stairs so I can make a faster get-a-way. Have a great Bike To Work Week Everyone! Enjoy!

To start with, I had to get something that would allow me to measure the amount of electricity that my PC was using. The best gadget I found for the job (maybe I should say the least expensive gadget I found) was the kill-a-watt. It is a great little tool that you plug into an electrical outlet, then plug in the appliance that you want to measure, and within a couple of minutes, you’re done… you know how much electricity the appliance, or in our case computer, uses.

So how much does it cost to run our home computer all day and all night? The total cost is $60 per year. Electricity in Victoria, BC costs $0.0633 Canadian per Kilowatt Hour (kWh). In California the average cost is about $0.12 US per kWh. So to run my computer in California would cost $114 per year, or $9.50 per month. If we only ran the computer during the day for 12 hours a day, we could cut the cost of running it in half to $57 per year (in California).

This made me think about where I work, and how much we could save if we turned off our computers at night. In my building at the University of Victoria, Faculty of Law, we have about 120 computers in the building. Most run 24×7 so that they can get windows updates at night. The total cost of running those computers per year is about $7,200. That’s a lot of money!

If we were able to only run the computers during business hours (say 10 hours a day) we save $4,200 per year! Something I’ll look into. I just need to get the computer updates happening during the day… I wonder if my boss will split the savings with me?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7773650/site/newsweek/

UNDERWOOD: Why do we need a new industrial revolution?
MCDONOUGH: The Industrial Revolution as a whole was not designed. It took shape gradually as industrialists and engineers figured out how to make things. The result is that we put billions of pounds of toxic materials in the air, water and soil every year and generate gigantic amounts of waste. If our goal is to destroy the world—to produce global warming and toxicity and endocrine disruption—we’re doing great. But if the goal isn’t global warming, what is? I want to crank the wheel of industry in a different direction to produce a world of abundance and good design—a delightful, safe world that our children can play in.

You say that recycling, as it’s currently practiced, is “downcycling.”
What we call recycling is typically the product losing its quality. Paper gets mixed with other papers, re-chlorinated and contaminated with toxic inks. The fiber length gets shorter, allowing more particles to abrade into the air, where they get into your lungs and nasal passages, and cause irritation. And you end up with gray, fuzzy stuff that doesn’t really work for you. That’s downcycling.

[My mentor and colleague] Michael Braungart and I coined the term upcycling, meaning that the product could actually get better as it comes through the system. For example, some plastic bottles contain the resi-dues of heavy-metal catalysts. We can remove those residues as the bottles come back to be upcycled.

Not all products lend themselves to that.
Most manufacturers take resources out of the ground and convert them to products that are designed to be thrown away or incinerated within months. We call these “cradle to grave” product flows. Our answer to that is “cradle to cradle” design. Everything is reused—either returned to the soil as nontoxic “biological nutrients” that will biodegrade safely, or returned to industry as “technical nutrients” that can be infinitely recycled. Aluminum is a technical nutrient. It takes tremendous energy to make, but it’s easy to recapture and reuse. Since 1880, the human species has made 660 million tons of it. We still know where 440 million tons are today.

Are there products already that meet cradle-to-cradle goals? If so, how do we find them?
Within the month, we will be branding cradle to cradle. Products that meet our criteria for biological and technical nutrients can be certified to use our logo. A note on the packaging will tell you how to recycle it. You’ll know: this one goes into my tomato plot when I’m finished or this one goes back to industry forever. We have already approved a nylon, some polyester textiles, running tracks, window shades, chairs from Herman Miller and Steelcase, and carpets from Shaw, which is part of Berkshire Hathaway. The first was a Steelcase fabric that can go back to the soil. We’re now working on electronics on a global scale.

How do paper products like magazines fit into this picture?
Why take something as exquisite as a tree and knock it down? Trees make oxygen, sequester carbon, distill water, build soils, convert solar energy to fuel, change colors with the seasons, create microclimates and provide habitat.

My book “Cradle to Cradle,” which I wrote with Michael Braungart, is printed on pages made of plastic resins and inorganic fillers that are infinitely recyclable. They’re too heavy, but we’re working with companies now to develop lightweight plastic papers. We have safe, lightweight inks designed to float off the paper in a bath of 180 degrees—hotter than you would encounter under normal circumstances. We can recapture the inks and reuse them without adding chlorine and dioxins to the environment. And the pages are clean, smooth and white.

So we can keep our trees and have newspapers, too.
Most environmentalists feel guilty about how society behaves, so they say we should make longer-lasting products—for example, a car that lasts 25 years. That car will still use compound epoxies and toxic adhesives, but the ecological footprint is reduced because you’ve amortized it over a longer time. But what’s the result? You lose jobs because people aren’t buying as much, and you’re using the wrong technology longer. I want five-year cars. Then you can always be getting the newest car—more solar-powered, cleaner, with the newest air bags and safety features. The old car gets upcycled into new cars, so there are still plenty of jobs. And you don’t feel guilty about throwing the old one away. People want new technology. You’re not typing on an Underwood, if you know what I mean.

So growth is good?
Yes, if you use nature as a model and mentor, if you use modern designs and chemicals that are safe. Growth is destructive if you use energy not from the sun and a system of chemicals that is toxic, so it’s anti-life.

Given that industry today fits your definition of anti-life, why aren’t you fighting for stricter environmental regulations?
If coal plants release mercury—and mercury is a neurotoxin that damages children’s brains—then reducing the amount of mercury in emissions doesn’t stop that. It just says, “We’ll tell you at what rate you can dispense death.” Being less bad is not being good. Our idea is to make production so clean, there’s nothing bad left to regulate. This is extremely interesting to people of all political persuasions—those who love the environment and those who want commerce free of regulation.

Can you really have industry so clean it requires no controls?
[At the Rohner textile plant in Switzerland] we designed a fabric safe enough to eat. The manufacturing process uses no mutagens, carcinogens, endocrine disrupters, heavy-metal contaminants or chemicals that cause ozone depletion, allergies, skin desensitization or plant and fish toxicity. We screened 8,000 commonly used chemicals and ended up with 38. When inspectors measured the effluent water, they thought their instruments were broken. The water was as clean as Swiss drinking water. A garden club started using the waste trimmings as mulch. Workers no longer had to wear protective clothing. And it eliminated regulatory paperwork, so they’ve reduced the cost of production by 20 percent. Why spend money on paperwork, when you can spend it delivering service or paying your workers a living wage?

Where would I find this fabric?
It was selected for upholstery on the new Airbus 380. It’s made of worsted wool to keep you at the right temperature—cool when it’s hot and warm when it’s cold—and [a plant fiber called] ramie to wick away moisture. It’s a high-performance-design product. Going ecological doesn’t mean downgrading performance criteria.

How do you get more industries to adopt these ideals?
Industries don’t change unless they have to or there’s some commercial benefit. At Herman Miller [the furniture company], we designed a factory full of daylight and fresh air. Productivity soared. And because of all the natural light, they cut lighting costs by 50 percent—overall energy by 30 percent. We’ve been doing this a long time. But now that China has taken it up, it portends exciting things.

What are you doing in China?
The China Housing Industry Association has the responsibility for building housing for 400 million people in the next 12 years. We’re working with them to design seven new cities. We’re identifying building materials of the future, such as a new polystyrene from BASF [with no noxious chemicals]. It can be used to build walls that are strong, lightweight and superinsulating. The building can be heated and cooled for next to nothing. And it’s silent. If there are 13 people in the apartment upstairs, you won’t hear them.

We’ve designed a luxurious new toilet. The bowl is like a lotus leaf—so smooth, axle grease slips right off. Nothing sticks to it, including bacteria. A light mist when you’re done will be enough to flush it, so you won’t use lots of water. We’ll have bamboo wetlands nearby to purify the waste—and the bamboo, which grows a foot a day, can be harvested and used for wood.

The Chinese are afraid urbanization will reduce productive farmland, so we’ll move farms onto rooftops. At least, that’s what I’m proposing. The farmers can live downstairs. And when you look at the city from a distance, it will look like part of the landscape.

Is it practical to put farms on roofs?
Traditional roofs aren’t practical. They degrade from thermal shock and ultraviolet radiation and have to be replaced in 20 years. For the Gap’s corporate campus in San Bruno, Calif., we planted a “green roof” of ancient grasses. The roof now damps the sounds of jets from the San Francisco airport. It absorbs storm water, which is important because they have serious issues with storm water there. It makes oxygen, provides habitat, and it’s beautiful. We also made a green roof for Ford Motor Co.’s River Rouge plant. It saved Ford millions of dollars in storm-water equipment.

How will you fuel the Chinese cities?
I want to see solar power cheaper than coal, but to get the speed and scale to do that fast, you need a place like China. We’re not talking about dinky solar collectors on roofs. Think of square miles of marginal land covered with them. This could drop the cost of solar energy an order of magnitude. And for every job making solar panels, there are four jobs putting them in place and maintaining them. We could import these panels, and for every job the Chinese give themselves, we get four. What a gift. And I guarantee you, China will never be able to capture an American photon. We would have indigenous energy and energy security. And we wouldn’t be throwing our money into holes in the ground.

And we wouldn’t need nuclear energy.
I love nuclear energy. I just want to make sure it stays where God put it—93 million miles away, in the sun.

Your ideas are really catching on.
It’s an amazing moment in history. We also have two huge new projects in England—working with the cities of Greenwich and Wembley. The developer, Adrian Wyatt, has asked us to conceive the meta-framework for the project.

We won’t get everything right the first time. Change requires experimentation. But no problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. Our job is to dream—and to make those dreams happen.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7773650/site/newsweek/

• Solar Closet: It’s a small, well-insulated room with lots of thermal mass (water is best), and a large triple glazed south facing window of about 30sq ft. Hook it into your heating system, and you can do away with the furnace (There’s a guy up in Calgary with one, and so long as he gets 15 hours of sunshine every 2 weeks over winter; he can keep his house at 70F all the time, with no furnace or other heating.)

• Put in a Stonehenge feature, ie, some quirky thing where one day a year the sun hits a photocell and lights up a scale model of the Eiffel tower or something.

• Definitely need one wall setup to be used as the junk drawer.

• Appliances that are Internet enabled.

• Exercise equipment connected to generators, for selling energy back to the grid.

• Use the central computer/electronics room to warm water pipes.

• Totally stainless steel kitchen counters that all drain to a sink. When you’re done cooking (making a mess) cleanup consists of hosing it down, and then pushing all the debris to the sink-disposal with a simple squeegy-like device. Cleanup of nearly any mess takes all of 15 seconds.

• A system to get materials from the kitchen to the outside compost heap without going outside.

• Toddler dining area that’s easy to hose down.

• It’s crazy to warm your house to 70 degrees while cooling your refrigerator to the temperature outdoors, at least on cold days. Is there some way to bring the outside cooling to the rear of the fridge without making the house cold?

• Windows should be argon filled low-e filtered glass and plasticized frames color-matched to whatever Dilbert wants (low maintenance).

• The exhaust from the clothes dryer, should be filtered to clean out the lint, and the heat generated used to heat the house in winter.

• Flexible LCDs for walls.

• The yard should have ground cover (pachysandra, vinca, etc.) instead of grass to eliminate mowing. The plantings should be the most trouble-free evergreens which would be azaleas (which are beautiful but need no pruning, etc.). The trees should be only evergreens as they don’t have leaves to drop and be raked up. One exception for a shade tree….the honey locust, whose leaves are so tiny they dry up and disappear when they fall. (Much as we all loves oaks and maples their leaves would give Dilbert work).

• Bulk buying storage: In the kitchen the cabinets should be on an outside wall so they can be restocked by Costco from the outside. Items bought in bulk will include paper plates and plastic utensils, paper towels, and ketchup.

• Dilbert will need a dedicated games room, full surround sound etc All set up for LAN parties X-box type parties (it has never been used by anyone outside the house – but Bob is often found there playing dinosaur games, or prehistoric games such as the original pong and space invaders!

• He should have a rainwater collector and purifier, to conserve water and not have to get city water. And definitely solar power collectors, and maybe even wind power collectors too.

• Staging area at bottom/top of stairs, for items that are continuously on the wrong floor.

• You have to be able to see a window or a good TV from the main kitchen sink or people won’t spend any time there!

• Lots of wall sockets a desktop height for plugging in computers.

• A sound proof office where one can work while the kids destroy the rest of the house.

• It would be fantastic if Dilbert could show brilliance and forethought by including principles of Universal Design (UD) in the Dilbert House. By making his house usable by all people (with features like zero-step entrances and wider hallways), he could enlighten an entire generation, and perhaps even save them from institutionalization later in life!

• Put the laundry room upstairs. Most families store their clean clothes upstairs, along with the dirty laundry basket(s).

• A Sunroom / greenhouse. Can be used for solar gain, natural air freshening (with proper ducting) and growing fresh herbs etc.

• Walls that resist kids writing on them.

• Hidden room for danger or storing valuables

• Whole house protected power circuits

• No air ducts in the ceiling (or in the floor) for air conditioning. It creates too much dust all over the place.

• Without doubt, Dilbert’s house should Not have baseboards that protrude, however little, from the walls. Rather, they should be somewhat RECESSED, so that they never need dusting.

• Dilbert must have those light guides from 3M that pipe solar photons into his interior rooms, thus saving electricity in the daytime.

• Cluster services together, especially hot water so that the pipes don’t have far to go to deliver the water. This cuts down on heat loss, original installation costs, and repair and maintenance costs. (Put all bathrooms at core of house?)

• It should definitely have a completely enclosed cat deck so your cats can enjoy the essence of the outside world without being exposed to the dangers.

• Use the heat of the hot water line to warm your bath towel!

• Several outlets in front and back.

• Office-only doorbell in addition to whole-house doorbell.

• TV antenna on roof

• Make your garage double deep and double high so that you don’t need to build a shed as soon as you’re done building your house.

• One of those “forever hot water” things that gives hot water on demand but doesn’t waste money on heating it when not in use. Ideal for single people who don’t like replacing those leaky tanks… or who own fuel cells. http://www.foreverhotwater.com/index.shtml

• Water source near your bed for when you wake up thirsty.

• Brick exterior, no maintenance required. (fake brick facade?)

• It seems to me that he should be able to run his computer through his TV and theater system