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.
Those videos are awesome, Gavin! I couldn’t watch the first one, I tried twice and it shut down my computer (literally) both times, so I skipped it, but the other two are perfect, and if you don’t mind, I might forward them to a few friends.
The kWh challenge – I left my 3 week stats on your post earlier this week about the challenge. We have just begun major structural repair in the basement, which in fact began as the simple task of preparing the window frames down there to receive thermal panes – the rest of the house is getting them too – in January. This will make a big difference to our energy efficiency, but the gaping holes in the house while the repair is ongoing are definitely not contributing to energy efficiency. Our Christmas tree and inside decorations are up, and you’ll be please to hear we have been using LED Christmas lights for a couple of years now. 2 out of the 4 of us now have 5 min showers routinely. This is small stuff compared to you lot down under with your 3-20 kWh averages, but it’s still progress for us. We’ve been using CFL’s for most of our lights for a few years, and our province has put a ban in place which means that by the end of 2011, no store can sell the incandescant kind anymore, so it’s nice to be ahead of the curve on that one. And one good outcome from the challenge is that we have agreed we need to put programmable thermostats in place on the two rooms that use baseboard heaters – we hadn’t realized quite what a significant difference they made in our electrical use, and when the teens are at school that heat can be turned way down. Everyone in the house is getting better at turning lights off when leaving a room, though I wouldn’t say we’re 100% on that yet. I notice the teens are using their computer far less just now, except for homework…I think because we have decided that our main present to each other should be homemade (my poor husband was aghast…he’s allowed to by handmade from someone else, and it must be local), so secretive activities happen most evenings right now…there’s a point to made in that somewhere – is the computer use from boredom? Neither kid is active on facebook, it’s mostly games they’re doing…I’ll have to think about that. Anyway, yes, I think that ads like these are quite useful – humour always seems to make a message stick better.
It’s been cool for December here in Brisbane, so our use has been down. Over the last week we have used 7.85w and our PV system has produced 7.15Kw. Am looking forward to looking at the videos. scsidul
I’m afraid I’ve fallen off the bandwagon. Last I read the meter, we used 5-9kw in a day. Getting that lower would be pretty hard, at least for us. But my partner is turning off the computer when he’s not using it, so that’s good.
Also, I’ve been meaning to say that there was an article on natural pools in the latest G magazine. Instead of chlorine, they use plants to clean the water and it all looks so much nicer. There was a name and a website for the company in the article but I can’t remember it now.
LOVE ’em! thanks for sharing!!