The Greening of Gavin

Archives for December 2011

TGKWC – Saving Electricity

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Just a quick one to check in on The Great Kilowatt Challenge.  How is everyone going?  Still reading the meters and trying to reduce your electricity consumption?

We are still trying to reduce our daily load, and are closely watching what we are doing.  Speaking of watching, I was looking around YouTube for a few videos about saving electricity and stumbled upon these few gems.  I think the narrator is Dawn French, and believe that these info videos might have been shown on UK television.

Anyway, the message is a good one and I hope these help a little or a lot.  Humour is always a good tool for driving your point home.

This one is about leaving devices on standby.


This video is about energy efficient lighting.


And finally this one is about heating. 


What do you think? Are these sort of videos a good way of communicating the energy efficiency message to the masses?

Ben’s Consumerism Essay

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Our son Ben (12) is now officially being home schooled, and he loves it.  We have been studying consumerism this week, and I set Ben a task of watching the documentary “What Would Jesus Buy?” which I wrote about in this post many moons ago.

After he finished watching it, I set him an essay to write with the question, “What is the main reason for the rapid growth of the consumer culture?“

Ben wrote one of the best essays I have ever read for a lad his age, and I am not being biased at all 😉  He said that I could share it all with you.  So here goes:

“On the 25th December Jesus was born and this day became known as Christmas.  Christmas was all about love and family time, but with the invention of advertising everything changed massively, which means people are no longer happy just being together.

The effect of advertising has overcome most of us and we are consuming too much and shops are being taken over by industries like Wal-Mart or Disney and hardly anything is being made local, it now comes from places like India and China. 

People are starting to think that Christmas is all about buying lots of expensive gifts for each other and confusing this with love, but this is not the point and people don’t understand.  Advertising is getting out of control; you can see advertisement basically anywhere like magazines or television or even bill boards, this is making people shopaholics!  People are wasting a lot of money and they should really try to spend their money wisely and get the most out of their money.  Another bad thing that people are doing is using credit cards to buy lots of things on them, but they are getting into debt and this causes other problems like having no money to pay for their normal household bills. 

I honestly think there are five points that make ads draw you in:

  • Detailed words
  • A picture showing a product
  • Good value (because it’s imported)
  • Adjectives: such as “You must have” “The new craze” “get it and it will change your life”
  • And most of all, its purpose!

Let’s talk about cheap labour now and to explain this lets begin with China for example poor people are working in sweat shop making toys or clothes. If people knew how much abuse and work it takes to make these things people might finally switch to buying local things!
Another thing about cheap labour is that they put so much work into something they then send it off to America or somewhere else and the shop charges more money for it, like $10 while the person in China only gets paid like 30 cents which is very sad.  Another sad thing is that people are getting killed by shopping because people are rushing into stores and pushing just so they can get limited edition or things that are nearly out of stock or on sale!

My summary of this story is to return Christmas the way it use to be, people need to stop spending money and maybe they should start making local things instead of buying Chinese toys/TVs/Clothing which breaks very easily and are often thrown away which then causes more pollution. 

And last thing DON’T FALL FOR ADVERTISING!”

Please leave a comment to let Ben what you think of his essay.  I bet he would love some feedback.

Tanks Again

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As a follow up to the post titled “Tanks For The Memories“, here is a story about installing my new rainwater tank.

Sunday was a nice day to install a rainwater tank.  The irony of it all was that all day Saturday it rained which in hindsight was good because the garden got a good soaking, and I had all of those cherries to process!

I had to duck town to the hardware store to buy a few joints for the plumbing, and got stuck into the job at about 10 am.  The builder put down the hardstand earlier on in the week, so it was nice and dry so that I could move the tank into place.

Firstly I drilled a hole in the bottom most thread with a 24mm spade bit so that I could screw the tap on later.

Then I had to figure out the most efficient way to plumb in the first flush diverter that already existed.  I found that the diverter had to be moved 7cm to the left of the tanks (what a pain), so I got stuck into it with a little bit of help from Ben.  Two crappy masonry bits later the first flush diverter was fixed in place.  After many expletives, I managed to fit the input pipe so that the water drained into the inlet at the top of the tank.  Kim thinks it looks like a hamster run and is a work of art.  Being an Aussie, I don’t really know what a hamster run looks like (they are a prohibited import), so I will just have to take her word for it!

Then I started on the outlet.  It was easy enough, with two 45 degree angles, so that it reached the drain pipe, and so that the tap was unobstructed.  The tap was easy enough to fit, and with a bit of Teflon (plumbers tape) it was in place and connected back up to the irrigation system.

Here is the tank in all of its glory!  It took me about 4 hours in total probably because I was meticulous enough to use the least amount of PVC pipe.  All off-cuts were placed in the recycling bin.

The old tank is still standing in the carport waiting to be cut into garden beds.  And as for the vacant space, there are signs of movement there as well.  We now have a new back door, thanks to our builder.  I am just not that handing with major building work, nor have the patience.  I am more of an outdoor type construction bloke!

Anyway, all I now need is some rain and then I will have 4900 litres of rain water stored on the property.  It gives me that extra feeling of security now that we have a supply of our own and that we can water our veggie patches and fruit trees even in the hottest weather or drought.