The Lowly Power Bar

Vampires of electricity.

That's one of the names for all the appliances we hold in standby mode, sucking power but doing nothing other than lying in wait, ready to serve us should be condescend to call upon them.

Mr. TV and his buddies, VCR and DVD. Computer. Rechargable vacuum cleaner. Stereo, CD player, telephone, these are the most obvious ones. Every teensy tiny clock radio or digital display in the place. Slurp, slurp, mmmm, mmmm.

Well, I have been rationing the little suckers with power bars. Seven with one blow - just like the valiant little tailor in the kids' story - I kill seven household machines with one flick of a switch, their pathetic probosci still pulling on the plug end, hoping for a wayward electron.

We need more power bars around here.

I Saved $9.00 on Water Last Year Using My Shower Bucket

Here are the current prices for water and sewer in Calgary, for residential metered customers. (Source: City of Calgary website).

Water
$10.87 service charge every 30 days
$1.1853 per cubic meter usage charge

Sanitary Sewer Service Charge
$9.64 service charge every 30 days
$0.6027 per cubic meter usage charge

Now, I can't do anything about the fixed service charge, short of disconnecting altogether, and that's just not an option I would even want to consider.

The usage charge is within my control. Or at least part of it is - what my family does is really up to them. I haven't turned into an eco-tyrant just yet. Trying to set an example instead.

Since early 2007 I have been catching water from my shower in a big bucket and using it to flush the toilet. The bucket holds 17 litres, and each toilet flush uses about 15 (not six as I originally estimated). I can safely say I have used this on 90% of the days in the past year for at least 15 litres of water per day.

Calculating the Savings in Water and in Money

In one cubic metre of water, there are 1,000 litres.
The usage cost for getting one litre of water is $1.1853 / 1000.
The usage cost for disposing of one litre of water is $0.6027 / 1000.

When I use shower water to flush the toilet, I save myself both the purchase price of the 15 litres and the disposal cost.
Savings per litre: 1/1000 of ($1.1853 + $0.6027)
Savings per bucket is 15 times the savings per litre.

In one year, at 90% usage, I save 15 litres a day for 90% of 365 days.

Putting all of this together, the amount of water I have saved from use (and therefore from processing by the City's system) is 4927.5 litres. I think I can safely round this up to an even 5,000 litres to make it easier to calculate.

5,000 litres is 5 cubic metres.

By not using that 5 cubic metres, I save $5.9265, or about $6.00 per year on the cost to buy the water, and $3.0135, or about $3.00 per year on the cost of disposing of it.

It's like I'm getting paid $9.00 a year and getting my exercise hoisting the bucket.

Not a huge saving, I agree, not for one household.

But imagine if just one percent of the people in Calgary did this. That's about 10,000 people. Instead of 5 cubic metres per year, it would be 50,000 cubic metres, equal to 50,000,000 litres (50 million). Maybe it sounds like a tiny amount compared to the approximately 450 million litres per day we Calgarians are accustomed to using, but it's a start.

The UN Report

The title of this post links to the Summary for Policymakers of the recent report (Feb. 2007) on the science of climate change.

The full title of the summary is:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,

Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis

Summary for Policymakers

Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Working Group I deals with the physical science of climate change. In this Summary, the group says that human activities are responsible for climate change.

Doesn't it?

Looks pretty clear to me.

Hypocritical?

I know that it's hypocritical to preach what you don't practice. I am trying not to preach, but just to record what I am practicing.

I want to make it clear that I have a huge carbon footprint. Last year I flew a lot. I'm afraid to do the calculations.

I live in a city where all the best jobs are in the oil industry, in a province where a large part of the public dollar comes from the sale of oil and gas. My own comfort is based on the continued well-being of the oil and gas industry.

Having said all that, here I am trying to make some changes to cut down my carbon footprint. Is that hypocritical?

I don't know. Maybe it is. But you know what? Two wrongs don't make a right.

If we all stopped trying to make a good change because it would be hypocritical of us, where would that lead us? I am less afraid of being called a hypocrit than I am of living through a world-wide drought and all the other horrors of continued global warming.

Meter reading

Meter reading has the same cadence as Train Spotting, but no one's made a movie about it yet that I know of.

I walked around and read the meters at the start of the year. Here's where we begin:

Van odometer - 311026km
Car odometer - 219540 km
Water meter - 3997
Gas meter - 0366
Electricity meter - 29015

The two odometers show exactly what they mean. If I drive one km, the meter goes up by one km.

All of the other meters use calibration constants. A lot of scientific instruments are like this. The meter goes up by one when you use some of the gas, or water, or electricity, but it isn't necessarily going up by one unit when you use exactly one unit.

There's nothing fishy going on, as long as you trust the utility companies to keep the instruments properly calibrated. We have no control over that. All we can do is take next month's reading, subtract the starting reading, and multiply the difference by the calibration constant. I can read the constant from my bill. When the bill comes I'll give a real-life example.

How the kettle and the hot water bottles save energy in bed

The lowly kettle is mightier than the furnace when it comes to heating the part of the home that really matters.

I get cold in bed. My feet are cold. When my feet are cold, the rest of me soon follows.

For Christmas Santa brought me two hot water bottles. I heat water in the kettle, put it in the hot water bottles, take them to bed and like magic, I'm warm all night.

It's more pleasant than heating the room and feeling stuffy. I like to breathe cool air. Under warm blankets.

Energy savings? I don't know but I bet it's worth 5 degrees on the thermostat. That's a lot.

A reply from the David Suzuki Foundation on carbon offsets

Thanks to Paul Lingl of the David Suzuki Foundation who replied to me today on the question I had about buying carbon offsets. (See my earlier post, "I flew. Now what? George Monbiot vs. David Suzuki and the "carbon offsets" question"). Like Monbiot, it turns out that the Suzuki people also have concerns about carbon sequestration. They prefer other approaches to carbon offsets.

Their website has links to the carbon offsets the Suzuki people consider to be good. I infer that all carbon offsets are not created equal.

Further exploration of carbon offsets to follow. There is a lot of information on the Suzuki Foundation's website. I'm almost afraid to start using their free carbon calculators to see how bad I've been, but avoidance is no solution. It's not about what I have done in the past, it's about what I do now and in the future.

The shower is leaking.

After yesterday's revelation that I waste about a bucket full of water every day in my shower (but no more! I'm catching that water in a bucket and using it to flush the toilet), today to my dismay I found out just how much water the shower is leaking every day.

I left the bucket in the shower all day, with the shower head inside it. We know the shower has a bit of a leak. My husband, who is a pretty handy guy, has repaired it several times but there is just a tiny nagging drip we can't get rid of.

That tiny nagging drip filled the bucket.

I don't know whether we can ever properly fix that drip, but for now I'll leave the bucket in place and get a second one to catch the shower water.

It feels like one step forward and one step back today, but with two pails, I'll be two steps ahead every day.

Blogging and learning about polar bears

In my blog of evidence on the effects of global warming, today I wrote about some of the problems polar bears are having.

Catching wasted shower water

I know that the little things I do to cut down my personal environmental impact are small, trivial, even silly.

I know that I don't care what everybody else thinks about that.

Today I put a bucket in my shower and caught all the water I had to run before the shower got warm enough for me to step in. (I hate standing in cold water). I used the water to fill the toilet tank. There was enough for 1 flush. I'll have to measure the actual volume sometime.

If I do this every day, I will save about 6 litres (if I guess that's the volume of water in one flush) X 365 days, or 2,190 litres of water. In fact, I will probably save almost double that much because I don't have a low-flow toilet. Guess what else is on the list of home improvements?

The City of Calgary (where I live) wants us to reduce our household water consumption from about 340 to 240 litres per day. In the UK, the average is closer to 150 litres per day.

By reducing my personal consumption of water, I reduce my carbon footprint because it takes energy to process the water I send down my drain. How much carbon per litre? I don't know... yet.

I flew. Now what? George Monbiot vs. David Suzuki and the "carbon offsets" question

Here's the problem.

Flying is a huge contributor to climate change. I am relying on George Monbiot, a British journalist who just published a book called Heat. Heat gives facts and figures about climate change and its causes. I am prepared to accept that flying has a big impact. Unfortunately this news is (a) not really news to me, I have just been unwilling to accept it and (b) hitting me at a really bad time. Last year I made more, and longer, trips than I have ever done. Lots of guilt.

So, I'm ready, willing and able to do something to offset all this carbon I've pushed into the atmosphere. There have been carbon sequestration opportunities (planting trees, that sort of thing) available forever, really. Just this morning, Canadian Olympic skier Sara Renner was speaking quite earnestly about the measures she and her husband, Olympic skier Thomas Grandi, are taking to offset the carbon emissions they create by flying around the world to ski. Through some connection to David Suzuki (Canadian environmentalist), they pay $500 or so extra for every flight, to a fund for carbon sequestration.

The radio program I heard Sara Renner on is this morning's The Current on CBC Radio 1. Here's the program's home page: http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/. Past shows are available through links on the left hand side of that page; you're looking for December 21, 2006.

http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Campaigns_and_Programs
/Climate_Change/News_Releases/newsclimatechange12080601.asp
This is a link to a press release from the David Suzuki Foundation about the impact of climate change on skiing. It talks about Renner and Grandi's decision to purchase "high-quality carbon offsets" and to live a carbon-neutral lifestyle.

So far, so good. If I can afford to travel, I can afford to pay extra and buy some of those great-sounding carbon offsets.

But here's the fly in the ointment. According to George Monbiot, buying carbon offsets doesn't solve the problem. It's not enough, it's too late, it's a temporary fix, it's often done in a way that causes more harm than good. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/10/19/selling-indulgences/

I have just emailed the David Suzuki Foundation posing the question of how they would respond to Monbiot's objection. But I don't want anyone spending their holiday writing to me instead of spending time with their family, so I specifically suggested they could wait for January to reply. That seems only fair.

In the meantime, any thoughts?

Stern review on the Economics of Climate Change: my entry point

I want to understand climate change at both the personal level and in the big picture. Personally, I know what I have to do. Cut down on energy consumption. Flying is by far my worst contribution to climate change. Driving, home heating, home appliances are the other main ones.

For the big picture, I want to be able to convince people that this is a real problem. I want to have the key facts available and the deeper resources at my fingertips.

Here's the first one:

Stern review on the Economics of Climate Change. (The link is in the title of this blog entry).

This report came out on October 30, 2006. I haven't read it yet - a project for my quiet reading time over Christmas.