12 ms·

People have no bloody idea about saving energy

106 points by sasvari 16y ago

Asa-Nisse 16y ago
Sometimes I wonder if The Register just is internet trolls from 1995.
- cstuder 16y ago
  Ars Technica posted an article on the same study with less trolling: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/08/most-people-in-the-dark-about-best-way-to-save-energy.ars http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/08/most-people-in-t... I would love to get some DigitalStrom[1] in my house in order to get some hard data on my personal energy consumption. But you simply can't buy these systems yet. And I doubt I can get the same amount of data and control (over the data and my appliances) from the smart meters my power company is trying to sell me. [1] = http://www.digitalstrom.org/index.php?id=115&L=2 http://www.digitalstrom.org/index.php?id=115&L=2
  - henrikschroder 16y ago
    "Worse, participants who reported taking the most steps toward energy conservation had the least accurate perceptions of which ones saved the most energy." That's a killer quote right there. I think bad newspaper science is to blame, there's too many articles printed on "do X to save energy NOW", without putting them in perspective, and only reinforcing some sort of feel-good effect in the readers. The only thing that will work is cold hard measurements, and lots and lots of education.
  - Asa-Nisse 16y ago
    Agreed, the only problem with these devices as I see it is that they themselves consume energy. Also I suspect the output is not so fun / worthwhile. Perhaps it can help people to tweak their refrigerators a couple of degrees but then again, the only real weapon against electricity overuse is pricing. What we "need" is a carbon tax, I do not like people telling me I cannot use electricity in whatever quantities I feel like. I will however respect the fact that said electricity cant be had for free.
  - wiredfool 16y ago
    I'd love to get appliance by appliance data of where my house's energy is going. I've got a Killawatt, but that only helps for 120v appliances with plugs, and that doesn't include the in wall electric squirrel cage heaters (x6, on 240v) or the Hot Water heater, or the Oven/Stove, or the dryer. PSE, the local energy co, is supposed to have 5 minute lag time electric meters, but they've never been able to show me any data from them. I have found out that my free, spare, energy guzzling fridge that's stored in the garage costs $5 a month to run in the summer. I was expecting way worse than that. Google was supposed to have some sort of thingy that went on the electric meter, but searching for it is failing me now. If I had real time use data, even for the house as a whole, I could probably back out what's taking the monster share of the load. (especially if I went around killing things at the breaker).
- dozba 16y ago
  Not all. I wrote for the Register and didn't really start my internet trolling career until 2008 or so.
michael_nielsen 16y ago
This article buries an important story beneath bombast. A much better read is David MacKay's (free) book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air": http://www.withouthotair.com/ http://www.withouthotair.com/ As the book itself says, it's an analysis of sustainable energy based on "numbers not adjectives".
- avar 16y ago
  That's an excellent book. I have a paper copy of it. While the article is right about cellphone chargers things like this lack some context: Glass requires so much energy to make - or recycle - that it is always more eco-friendly to use aluminium cans Firstly, that depends on how you recycle things. Perhaps in the UK they melt down their glass and make it anew, but in some other countries such as Denmark they'll actually use the same bottle again after cleaning it out. If you buy a soft drink in a class bottle in Denmark you'll get a container that looks like it's seen war. Secondly, it's presuming that pounds sterling is the best way to measure sustainability, and that just because something costs more now it's less sustainable in the long run. Which is just patently silly. We basically have infinite energy on this planet as long as the sun keeps shining, but we don't have infinite easily accessible aluminum. In the future access to basic material resources is going to be a lot more important than whether someone expended a few extra joules back in 2010.
  - MicahWedemeyer 16y ago
    We have infinite energy, but not infinite accessible energy. It takes millions of years for those rays of sunshine to get neatly packaged into oil and coal, which are honestly still our best ways of extracting energy.
  - sigstoat 16y ago
    is the aluminum going somewhere? we're mooshing it around into different shapes, and drawing pictures on it, but it's still aluminum which has had inconvenient impurities removed. if you're telling me we've got infinite energy, then what's the problem with mining through landfills to extract the useful stuff? if we've got infinite energy, then the problem will be when we want to have more aluminum in use at one time than we've got, total.
gcb 16y ago
In college I used a paper by former green peace founder where he talk about the fallacy of recycling paper. That we'd be better off burning it for energy. And some other arguments about the life span of a tree and the amount of oxygen it produces. Can't seem to find it now as my quoted URL is no longer valid.
parenthesis 16y ago
Transport and heating/air-conditioning presumably are by far the biggest energy hogs of the private individual. So if you want to use less energy: don't drive and fly gratuitously, and live in a property which already by its construction and location keeps the heat in (if you live in a cold climate), or keeps the heat out (if you live in hot climate).
- ugh 16y ago
  Re heating/air-conditioning: get a passive house [+], but those work probably best in relatively moderate climate and you will have to sacrifice some comfort. [+] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
jeebusroxors 16y ago
You would need to unplug it or switch it off for a year to save as much energy as it takes to have one-and-a-half baths. Maybe something is lost in translation but what on earth are they comparing? The energy cost to heat the water in a bath?
- wuputah 16y ago
  Presumably, yes. Although there are formulae to convert water use to an amount of energy consumption (which takes into account processing, pumps, etc), they are probably referring to the energy to heat water. 1 watt for 1 year is (1W * 24h * (365d/year)) * (1Wh/1000kWh) = 8.76 kWh, or ( * 3412 BTU/kWh) about 30k BTU. The average bath is about 50 gallons, or ( * 8.35 lb/gallon) 417.5 lb. 30k BTU is enough energy to raise that much water by about 70°F (30k BTU / 417.5 lb). By that measurement, the Guardian takes baths 46.6°F hotter than their tap water. If that is too cool for you, you can take a smaller bath. It's worth noting that the conversions here assume you can transfer the kWh with perfect efficiency to heating water, while in actuality, all heating systems will be somewhat inefficient. It will actually take more energy to heat the water, regardless of the energy source used by the water heater. Edit: whoops, I originally misread and used 1.5 years and 1.5 baths. Calculations changed.
  - kragen 16y ago
    A couple of points: - It's a lot easier to heat your bath with solar energy than it is to run your phone charger. So if you have a solar hot water heater, a different comparison would be in order. - The inefficiency of the water heater is probably relatively small (under 50%, maybe under 10%) and so can be neglected for the purpose of round-number figures like "one and a half baths".
- barkingcat 16y ago
  what if you have cold water baths? The comparisons are really unclear - really poor use of language. And they assume too many things. What if you don't take any warm/hot baths AND turn off lights? Would that save energy?
btilly 16y ago
This is not a new phenomena. I remember 20 years ago learning that styrofoam is one of the most recyclable materials (very little energy to recycle, can be recycled many times), and the waxed paper we make paper cups out of is one of the least. Yet the world switched to paper cups because styrofoam caused unsightly litter. I remember 10 years ago having a friend tell me about a conversation he overheard between two co-workers. The upshot was that a woman was criticizing a man for driving a gas guzzling pickup truck. As the argument progressed it turned out that his 2 mile commute to his apartment in his pickup truck used much less gas than her 15 mile commute to her colonial in an efficient car. And she was so fixed in her view of the world that she couldn't accept that her desire to have a large house was less environmentally friendly than his desire to have a vehicle that he could use to carry a dead deer. I can't count how many times I've heard environmentally active people talk about how the forests are the lungs of the world. Yet they are wrong. True, cutting down forests inevitably releases a lot of carbon. But mature forests are at equilibrium. They both absorb and release large amounts of carbon with little net effect. (This is especially true of jungles, slightly less true of deciduous forests whose leaves tend to become part of the soil.) The real "lungs of the world" that act as a carbon sink are the algae in the ocean. I could multiply examples, but the trend is clear. When I hear someone start a lecture on what is good for the environment I first try to verify how much that person knows. Most of the time I'm able to ignore that person in good conscience.
- dagw 16y ago
  As the argument progressed it turned out that his 2 mile commute The counter-counter argument at that point should have been that if it's only 2 miles you should walk or ride a bike, and leave the pickup at home. edit: Just to be clear, I agree with your argument and find it strange that so many "eco" people insist on living in houses far off in the country side where they have to drive everywhere.
  - btilly 16y ago
    This discussion took place in Michigan. For a substantial fraction of the year you really don't want to ride a bike there. And 2 miles is long enough that walking is inconvenient. In any case the guy in the conversation wasn't the wannabe environmentalist. He just didn't like being harassed about the impact of his lifestyle choices by a hypocrite who was demonstrably far less environmentally friendly. (But who thought she was doing her bit.) In other word it was a standard beam/mote discussion.
fuzz579 16y ago
http://www.amazon.com/As-World-Burns-Simple-Things/dp/1583227776 http://www.amazon.com/As-World-Burns-Simple-Things/dp/158322... Reminds me of this comic book.
sebi 16y ago
If interested check http://www.energytransitionmodel.com/ http://www.energytransitionmodel.com/ there you can build future energy scenarios. For instance see that you're far better off when you invest money in a better (house) insulation then in efficient light bulbs. Or how much total CO2 emissions are reduced if everybody switched to electric cars.
easyfrag 16y ago
Heard an episode of CBC Radio's Ideas show on Hydrogen that had this fascinating aside (I'm paraphrasing): During the 1970's oil shock buildings in Toronto turned out their lights to save energy, however many buildings had electricity from Hydro-electric resources and were heated via oil-fired generators. The net result was that turning off the lights made the buildings colder and it took more oil energy to heat them up again than if the lights were left on.
MicahNance 16y ago
From the source at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/06/1001509107.full.pdf+html http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/06/1001509107.full... "We recruited 505 participants through Craigslist in seven US metropolitan areas: New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Houston, Dallas, Denver, and Los Angeles."
limist 16y ago
As usual, unmentioned is an individual's biggest single energy impact: dietary choices. Just a single semester's worth of thermodynamics study (the 2nd Law in particular) would make that clear. Some background includes: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report-meat-free-diet http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report-... http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0612sp1.htm http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0612sp1.htm No one who claims to be worried about energy consumption and climate change should be taken seriously, unless they cut down on their meat consumption first. Al Gore and "An Inconvenient Truth" was a case in point, but Gore finally started changing his tune on his diet, to his partial credit: http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/11/04/al-gore-agrees-that-going-vegetarian-helps-the-environment/ http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/11/04/al-gore-agrees-that-going...
- gaius 16y ago
  It is not that long ago that if you wouldn't use animal products or labour in most of Europe you would starve and/or freeze. Veganism as a lifestyle is utterly dependent on huge energy subsidies. They love to play tricks with statistics too, comparing the calories in an acre of simple carbs in crops to the calories in the complex proteins in a cow. That's where the energy has "gone"...
  - kragen 16y ago
    Dried soybeans are 36% protein by weight. Muscle beef is 32% protein by weight, although other parts of the cow are lower in protein. A steer is 4% of the soybeans it's fed, by weight. So feeding soybeans to cattle is even less defensible as a way of providing protein to people than as a way of providing calories to people: you waste 96.5% of the protein that way. The picture is a little less egregiously bad if you look at some other foods (sweet corn is only 3.2% protein, so if you could get your cattle to grow on corn without supplementing their diet with soy or other protein, you'd only be wasting 60% of the protein). But it still isn't good. The fundamental constraint here is that animals can't produce protein from carbohydrates or fat. Animals can only produce protein from protein. In fact, most plants can't produce protein from carbohydrates or fat or carbon dioxide or water, either. They need to take up nitrogen compounds from the soil to make protein. As far as we know, animals can't aminate carbohydrates using other sources of nitrogen, the way plants can. So the protein that comes from your crops is the most protein you can possibly get. Processing it through animals can only reduce the protein yield per acre of crops. The complexity of the proteins in the cow isn't an advantage, either. You have to break those proteins down to individual amino acids before your ribosomes can use them to build proteins of your own. If foreign peptides (protein fragments) get into your bloodstream, your immune system will destroy them. From the standpoint of nutrition, the less complex the proteins are, the better. On the other hand, animal processing can make the protein and calories considerably easier to eat. Ruminants' symbiotic bacteria can extract useful calories (and massive amounts of methane) from cellulose, even if they only pass 5% of them on to their predators; your body doesn't support these bacteria at all. And cows have these massive jaws and teeth for grinding up cellulosic material to extract the nutrients from it. So, veganism as a diet (I'm not sure what you mean by "as a lifestyle"} isn't dependent on "huge energy subsidies". It's just dependent on crops you can stand to eat and that provide you adequate nutrition. Eating animals is a huge cost to your primary productivity; the compensating advantage is that it renders you more adaptable in your crops. Eating animal products is somewhat less of a huge cost. As for freezing, it's fairly unusual for people to heat their homes by burning animals, and in Europe, it was unusual for people to insulate their homes with animals or animal products. Not freezing is really more a matter of thermodynamic engineering than it is a matter of acquiring adequate energy. A good thick thatch roof, a couple of meters of straw bales in the walls, and some whitewash on the inside will allow you to heat even a largish habitation with a small fire. No huge energy subsidies required. (Please don't start complaining about the embodied energy of the whitewash.)
mikaelgramont 16y ago
Can someone explain this to me? "For example, participants estimated that line-drying clothes saves more energy than changing the washer’s settings (the reverse is true)" Makes no sense to me. "Changing" doesn't mean anything. I'm sure the article is on to something, but that quote here is just too unclear.
- jonah 16y ago
  Changing from washing in hot to washing in cold? That's all I can figure. If that is indeed the case one should wash in cold AND line dry their clothes.
- jws 16y ago
  I assume they mean washing the clothes in cold water instead of hot. changing the washer’s settings does cunningly mask that the wash will also be less effective. Numbers: A top loading machine[3] uses about 150 liters (40 gallons) of water to fill. If you fill that with hot water that is water that has had 30°C (50°F)[1] added to it. That is about 20 megajoules (5kWhr). Heating a liter of water from room temperature to vaporization[2] takes 2.5 megajoules (700 watt hours). So… in very rough numbers you can vaporize 8 liters of room temperature water for the same energy it takes to fill a top loading washer once with hot water. I'd say my load of wash doesn't lose 16kg being dried, so I presume less than 8 liters are being vaporized. [1] I'm pulling numbers out of google here, you didn't expect more than one significant digit, did you? [2] Vaporization is more than 5 times the energy from 1°C to 99°C. [3] Terribly inefficient way to wash clothes, but if an article is going to make dramatic statements, you have to figure they will pick the most extreme numbers.
  - kragen 16y ago
    You mean "lose 8kg being dried". I should measure the water consumption of my washing machine.
    - jws 16y ago
      Right you are. I try to be modern and use standard units, but there is a little "multiply by two" always working in my brain when I think about mass.
jsdalton 16y ago
The "easy" solution is for society to imposes higher taxes on energy, particularly those forms of energy which we wish to discourage our reliance on. This would particularly useful in the realm of consumer purchasing decisions. Which apples required less energy, the ones shipped in from Chile, or the ones trucked over from California? There's no way as a consumer I can know that, but if taxes on certain energy forms (e.g. carbon-based) are high enough, then price becomes 1) a signal of how much energy was consumed in production and delivery, 2) a factor which discourages consumers from purchasing products which require more energy, 3) an incentive for firms to minimize their energy usage to keep costs down. Will such taxes ever be effectively implemented? Almost certainly not. For such taxes to work they would need to be high enough that consumers and firms "felt the pinch." This desired effect, however, is exactly what makes these kinds of taxes politically unfeasible, at least in America.
- orangecat 16y ago
  This desired effect, however, is exactly what makes these kinds of taxes politically unfeasible, at least in America. Sadly true. The other factor is that conservatives won't like them because they're taxes, and liberals won't like them because they're market-based. ("Rich people shouldn't be able to pay to pollute").
  - MichaelSalib 16y ago
    I don't know any liberals that don't like carbon taxes or cap and trade regimes because they're market based. I mean, the EPA already runs a cap and trade system for some pollutants. I'd say the bigger issue is that there are some states represented by both liberal and conservative politicians that will lose under a cap and trade regime, and those politicians are going to oppose any carbon price because of that.
    - houseabsolute 16y ago
      Cap and trade is a different thing than carbon taxes. But I understand your sentiment.
    - 16y ago
waivej 16y ago
I personally think we should have consumption guages on our major energy users. Getting a hybrid woke me up to this and I have since added one to the house electrical system and built one for our heat. The cool thing is that it gave an intuitive sense of different energy draws. In general it is true. Our intuition is wrong in many cases. For example, I found unhooking our doorbells was more significant than not using the clothes drier. Today our house uses 20% of the energy it did before having the gauge. We don't even try to conserve because the effort to reduce the baseline made such a difference. Why don't they require this sort of device in all new cars? One study indicated that it would add $12.50 per car. Adding the ones to the house was about $200.
- kscaldef 16y ago
  > For example, I found unhooking our doorbells was more significant than not using the clothes drier. Wait, what? What sort of doorbell do you have? Also, did you figure that out just by trial-and-error of disconnecting things, or did something lead you more directly to them?
  - waivej 16y ago
    We had three old transformers that drew 20 watts each. The drier draws around 6000 watts for 40 minutes. Though I usually use a mode that uses less heat. Anyway, I have a gauge by the sink showing the current usage and monthly total. It's cool because I could flip on a light and see the change. Right away I found $50/month (out of $250) but then over the years I kept looking to find the extra draws. I'd shut everything off and flip breakers to narrow it down. Since then it's guided purchases so I avoid things that waste energy. At the peak of my "research" I had no fridge and then something I built that drew 300 watt hours per day. Back then my electric bill was only $7 (plus $15 delivery charge.). Though now I just live like an ordinary person. We use about $25-$45 plus delivery charge (a big chunk is a dehumidifier for our damp basement).
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
eande 16y ago
"In fact lighting accounts for a relatively small proportion of the average person's energy use" That I do not share this view. The residential household typically uses 11% of energy on light and commercial up to 20%. It might not be much as a single individual if you consistently flip the switch when not needed, but overall as a society it does safe MW of energy. An even better way is to safe energy is the use of CFL (4 times energy savings compared to incandescent light) or the new LED lighting solutions (4-6 times energy savings compared to incandescent light). Australia and some places in Europe by law banned already some incandescent bulbs, because the savings is enormous.
- kragen 16y ago
  The EIA Annual Energy Review 2008 http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/ http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/ estimates that 1340 trillion Btu was used in the US in commercial buildings for lighting during 2003 (p.65), out of a total of 99.30 quadrillion Btu total US consumption in 2008 (p.3), of 18.54 quadrillion Btu total commercial use (of which 1.34 quadrillion Btu is 7.2%, which is, as you say, less than 20%). US residential usage amounted to 21.64 quadrillion Btu in 2008 (p.3). Suppose you're right and 11% of typical residential usage is lighting (what's your source for that, please? The AER doesn't seem to hazard a guess there), and that the US isn't too atypical (admittedly, a very dubious assumption). Then that would amount to 2.4 quadrillion BTU spent on residential lighting in the US. The total, then, would be 1.3 + 2.4 = 3.7 quadrillion Btu per year used on residential and commercial lighting, or 3.7% of the total. Industrial facility lighting adds another 0.2 quadrillion Btu (p.48), which would bring it up to 3.9%. It would immediately follow that 3.7% of the average person's energy use is residential and commercial lighting, and 3.9% is residential, commercial, and industrial lighting, which is indeed a relatively small proportion. If every person in the US went entirely without artificial lighting but otherwise somehow continued their lives as before (except in cars, which are not included in the above statistics), total US marketed energy consumption would drop by 3.9%. I am in favor of compact fluorescent lights, ordinary fluorescent lights, halogen lights, and new high-efficiency LEDs. But the savings are not enormous when considered overall as a society, particularly considering that most industrial commercial lighting is already using more efficient machinery than incandescent bulbs. They are, rather, relatively small. 3.9% of US marketed energy consumption is 130 gigawatts. 3.9% of world marketed energy consumption (about 500 quadrillion Btu/year, according to IEO2010 Highlights, p.1) would be about 700 gigawatts. Laws are not admissible as evidence about energy usage. Laws provide evidence about political reality, not objective reality. Do you not "share the view" that 3.9% is a relatively small proportion of 100%? I think that would merely mark you as a Humpty-Dumpty. (There's glory for you!) Or do you think that the US is deeply atypical, and that the average numbers are much higher than the US numbers?
jws 16y ago
About unplugging adapters: It is worth noting that the EU mandated more efficient wall warts and as a result all new stuff uses negligible power when idle. But a few years ago when DC conversion was done at 50/60Hz with great masses of copper and iron, it wasn't unusual to have a wart burning 8 watts day in and day out. 70kWhr/year. As a good rule of thumb for warts: If it is warm to the touch, it is drawing 4 watts or more. If it isn't warm, don't unplug it. I have a Ryobi drill charger, that if I left it plugged in when idle would use as much power as my high efficiency refrigerator. (A normal refrigerator is about 1800whr/day, so that is quite a bit more than my 200whr/day, but I'm living remotely with an astronomical energy cost.)
DLWormwood 16y ago
From the article… > Glass requires so much energy to make - or recycle - that it is always more eco-friendly to use aluminium cans, even if one is talking about virgin cans compared to recycled bottles. Since when?!? Growing up, in a part of the country that was once known for glass making (but had stopped by the time I was a kid), we were taught in school that glass was cheaper to make resource and energy wise than aluminum, due to the lower technology overhead and ready access to the sand used to make it. Since then, based on my own reading, I understood that aluminum was really expensive to make due to the high electrical requirements for the process of cracking ores to get the pure aluminum out (a substance that is hard to find in nature in pure form, since it’s readily makes compounds and ores due to its reactivity.) It was this basis that politicians and activists gave to push the first recycling programs here in the States. (Which always, without exception AFAIK, started with aluminum.) My understanding is that glass was phased out in favor of aluminum not due to container creation costs, but storage reasons, since cans take up less room and shelf space than glass and were easier for stock boys and shoppers to carry. (The only eco-reason I came across was increased fuel use to ship glass bottles for the old returnable bottle programs. But this reasoning didn’t make sense to me since I thought shipping a pre-existing container was much cheaper than destroying and making new ones.) Did some technology in recent years dramatically reduce the energy cost of making aluminum? Or has the modern requirements of glass making added too much overhead to what was once a cheap process?
- kragen 16y ago
  No, aluminum production still costs the same as it has for more than a century. The cost of the Hall-Héroult electrolytic process dwarfs the cost of mining bauxite, so the easy access to the sand is irrelevant. Perhaps the distinction between what you were taught and what the article says amounts to a distinction of denominators. Glass is much cheaper per kilogram (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Embodied_energy#Embodied_energy_in_common_materials https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Embodied_ener... says glass is 18–35MJ/kg, while aluminum is 227–342) but aluminum is cheaper per container, because the weight of the container is smaller by more than a factor of 10. Also, recycling aluminum costs less than a tenth as much energy as smelting it afresh. This reduces the "embodied energy" of a kilogram of aluminum destined for recycling to the same ballpark as the "embodied energy" of a kilogram of glass. However, washing out bottles and reusing them is cheaper still.
roboneal 16y ago
Is it about saving "energy" or reducing carbon emissions? If it's about reducing carbon emissions, simply follow France's lead and move 80% of the world's electricity generation to nuclear and get a 95-97% emission reduction over coal fired plants.
sliverstorm 16y ago
> For example, participants estimated that line-drying clothes saves more energy than changing the washer’s settings (the reverse is true) Huh? Line drying saves plenty of energy, what settings are you proposing we change?
- kragen 16y ago
  My laundry washing machine has a dial on the front for the water temperature, which goes up to 90° (C, obviously). It heats the water electrically as it comes in. All but the cheapest washers sold here in Argentina have such a facility, because hot water is not normally provided to the laundry room. In the US, washers usually have an option to choose hot or cold water. Using cold water instead of hot will use less energy. Also, "plenty of energy" is not a quantity of energy that can be usefully compared with other quantities of energy. See jws's comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614745 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614745 for more calculations.
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    Does cold water clean effectively enough? Also, does using hot water negate the fact that line drying saves energy?
    - kragen 16y ago
      Cold water sometimes cleans effectively enough. Certainly for any given water temperature you can line-dry to save even more energy. However, it's important to know that lowering the water temperature by a few degrees does more to reduce your energy usage than line-drying.
geebee 16y ago
would this be a good place for me to complain that San Francisco, home to Gavin Newsom's green initiative, just charged me over $150 for a permit to replace my old windows with energy efficient windows? sorry for the diversion, just needed to let that out.
dkarl 16y ago
"Zeal to promote the common good, whether it be by devising anything ourselves, or revising that which hath been laboured by others, deserveth certainly much respect and esteem, but yet findeth but cold entertainment in the world. It is welcomed with suspicion instead of love, and with emulation instead of thanks: and if there be any hole left for cavil to enter, (and cavil, if it do not find a hole, will make one) it is sure to be misconstrued, and in danger to be condemned."
maigret 16y ago
Yes, recycling glass needs more energy that aluminum. That's why reusing glass is better. That's how many bottles (including beer) are handled in Germany.

106 points by sasvari 16y ago

Asa-Nisse 16y ago

Sometimes I wonder if The Register just is internet trolls from 1995.

cstuder 16y ago
Ars Technica posted an article on the same study with less trolling: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/08/most-people-in-the-dark-about-best-way-to-save-energy.ars http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/08/most-people-in-t... I would love to get some DigitalStrom[1] in my house in order to get some hard data on my personal energy consumption. But you simply can't buy these systems yet. And I doubt I can get the same amount of data and control (over the data and my appliances) from the smart meters my power company is trying to sell me. [1] = http://www.digitalstrom.org/index.php?id=115&L=2 http://www.digitalstrom.org/index.php?id=115&L=2
- henrikschroder 16y ago
  "Worse, participants who reported taking the most steps toward energy conservation had the least accurate perceptions of which ones saved the most energy." That's a killer quote right there. I think bad newspaper science is to blame, there's too many articles printed on "do X to save energy NOW", without putting them in perspective, and only reinforcing some sort of feel-good effect in the readers. The only thing that will work is cold hard measurements, and lots and lots of education.
- Asa-Nisse 16y ago
  Agreed, the only problem with these devices as I see it is that they themselves consume energy. Also I suspect the output is not so fun / worthwhile. Perhaps it can help people to tweak their refrigerators a couple of degrees but then again, the only real weapon against electricity overuse is pricing. What we "need" is a carbon tax, I do not like people telling me I cannot use electricity in whatever quantities I feel like. I will however respect the fact that said electricity cant be had for free.
- wiredfool 16y ago
  I'd love to get appliance by appliance data of where my house's energy is going. I've got a Killawatt, but that only helps for 120v appliances with plugs, and that doesn't include the in wall electric squirrel cage heaters (x6, on 240v) or the Hot Water heater, or the Oven/Stove, or the dryer. PSE, the local energy co, is supposed to have 5 minute lag time electric meters, but they've never been able to show me any data from them. I have found out that my free, spare, energy guzzling fridge that's stored in the garage costs $5 a month to run in the summer. I was expecting way worse than that. Google was supposed to have some sort of thingy that went on the electric meter, but searching for it is failing me now. If I had real time use data, even for the house as a whole, I could probably back out what's taking the monster share of the load. (especially if I went around killing things at the breaker).
dozba 16y ago
Not all. I wrote for the Register and didn't really start my internet trolling career until 2008 or so.

michael_nielsen 16y ago

This article buries an important story beneath bombast. A much better read is David MacKay's (free) book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air": http://www.withouthotair.com/ http://www.withouthotair.com/ As the book itself says, it's an analysis of sustainable energy based on "numbers not adjectives".

avar 16y ago
That's an excellent book. I have a paper copy of it. While the article is right about cellphone chargers things like this lack some context: Glass requires so much energy to make - or recycle - that it is always more eco-friendly to use aluminium cans Firstly, that depends on how you recycle things. Perhaps in the UK they melt down their glass and make it anew, but in some other countries such as Denmark they'll actually use the same bottle again after cleaning it out. If you buy a soft drink in a class bottle in Denmark you'll get a container that looks like it's seen war. Secondly, it's presuming that pounds sterling is the best way to measure sustainability, and that just because something costs more now it's less sustainable in the long run. Which is just patently silly. We basically have infinite energy on this planet as long as the sun keeps shining, but we don't have infinite easily accessible aluminum. In the future access to basic material resources is going to be a lot more important than whether someone expended a few extra joules back in 2010.
- MicahWedemeyer 16y ago
  We have infinite energy, but not infinite accessible energy. It takes millions of years for those rays of sunshine to get neatly packaged into oil and coal, which are honestly still our best ways of extracting energy.
- sigstoat 16y ago
  is the aluminum going somewhere? we're mooshing it around into different shapes, and drawing pictures on it, but it's still aluminum which has had inconvenient impurities removed. if you're telling me we've got infinite energy, then what's the problem with mining through landfills to extract the useful stuff? if we've got infinite energy, then the problem will be when we want to have more aluminum in use at one time than we've got, total.

gcb 16y ago

In college I used a paper by former green peace founder where he talk about the fallacy of recycling paper. That we'd be better off burning it for energy. And some other arguments about the life span of a tree and the amount of oxygen it produces. Can't seem to find it now as my quoted URL is no longer valid.

parenthesis 16y ago

Transport and heating/air-conditioning presumably are by far the biggest energy hogs of the private individual. So if you want to use less energy: don't drive and fly gratuitously, and live in a property which already by its construction and location keeps the heat in (if you live in a cold climate), or keeps the heat out (if you live in hot climate).

ugh 16y ago
Re heating/air-conditioning: get a passive house [+], but those work probably best in relatively moderate climate and you will have to sacrifice some comfort. [+] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house

jeebusroxors 16y ago

You would need to unplug it or switch it off for a year to save as much energy as it takes to have one-and-a-half baths. Maybe something is lost in translation but what on earth are they comparing? The energy cost to heat the water in a bath?

wuputah 16y ago
Presumably, yes. Although there are formulae to convert water use to an amount of energy consumption (which takes into account processing, pumps, etc), they are probably referring to the energy to heat water. 1 watt for 1 year is (1W * 24h * (365d/year)) * (1Wh/1000kWh) = 8.76 kWh, or ( * 3412 BTU/kWh) about 30k BTU. The average bath is about 50 gallons, or ( * 8.35 lb/gallon) 417.5 lb. 30k BTU is enough energy to raise that much water by about 70°F (30k BTU / 417.5 lb). By that measurement, the Guardian takes baths 46.6°F hotter than their tap water. If that is too cool for you, you can take a smaller bath. It's worth noting that the conversions here assume you can transfer the kWh with perfect efficiency to heating water, while in actuality, all heating systems will be somewhat inefficient. It will actually take more energy to heat the water, regardless of the energy source used by the water heater. Edit: whoops, I originally misread and used 1.5 years and 1.5 baths. Calculations changed.
- kragen 16y ago
  A couple of points: - It's a lot easier to heat your bath with solar energy than it is to run your phone charger. So if you have a solar hot water heater, a different comparison would be in order. - The inefficiency of the water heater is probably relatively small (under 50%, maybe under 10%) and so can be neglected for the purpose of round-number figures like "one and a half baths".
barkingcat 16y ago
what if you have cold water baths? The comparisons are really unclear - really poor use of language. And they assume too many things. What if you don't take any warm/hot baths AND turn off lights? Would that save energy?

btilly 16y ago

This is not a new phenomena. I remember 20 years ago learning that styrofoam is one of the most recyclable materials (very little energy to recycle, can be recycled many times), and the waxed paper we make paper cups out of is one of the least. Yet the world switched to paper cups because styrofoam caused unsightly litter. I remember 10 years ago having a friend tell me about a conversation he overheard between two co-workers. The upshot was that a woman was criticizing a man for driving a gas guzzling pickup truck. As the argument progressed it turned out that his 2 mile commute to his apartment in his pickup truck used much less gas than her 15 mile commute to her colonial in an efficient car. And she was so fixed in her view of the world that she couldn't accept that her desire to have a large house was less environmentally friendly than his desire to have a vehicle that he could use to carry a dead deer. I can't count how many times I've heard environmentally active people talk about how the forests are the lungs of the world. Yet they are wrong. True, cutting down forests inevitably releases a lot of carbon. But mature forests are at equilibrium. They both absorb and release large amounts of carbon with little net effect. (This is especially true of jungles, slightly less true of deciduous forests whose leaves tend to become part of the soil.) The real "lungs of the world" that act as a carbon sink are the algae in the ocean. I could multiply examples, but the trend is clear. When I hear someone start a lecture on what is good for the environment I first try to verify how much that person knows. Most of the time I'm able to ignore that person in good conscience.

dagw 16y ago
As the argument progressed it turned out that his 2 mile commute The counter-counter argument at that point should have been that if it's only 2 miles you should walk or ride a bike, and leave the pickup at home. edit: Just to be clear, I agree with your argument and find it strange that so many "eco" people insist on living in houses far off in the country side where they have to drive everywhere.
- btilly 16y ago
  This discussion took place in Michigan. For a substantial fraction of the year you really don't want to ride a bike there. And 2 miles is long enough that walking is inconvenient. In any case the guy in the conversation wasn't the wannabe environmentalist. He just didn't like being harassed about the impact of his lifestyle choices by a hypocrite who was demonstrably far less environmentally friendly. (But who thought she was doing her bit.) In other word it was a standard beam/mote discussion.

fuzz579 16y ago

http://www.amazon.com/As-World-Burns-Simple-Things/dp/1583227776 http://www.amazon.com/As-World-Burns-Simple-Things/dp/158322... Reminds me of this comic book.

sebi 16y ago

If interested check http://www.energytransitionmodel.com/ http://www.energytransitionmodel.com/ there you can build future energy scenarios. For instance see that you're far better off when you invest money in a better (house) insulation then in efficient light bulbs. Or how much total CO2 emissions are reduced if everybody switched to electric cars.

easyfrag 16y ago

Heard an episode of CBC Radio's Ideas show on Hydrogen that had this fascinating aside (I'm paraphrasing): During the 1970's oil shock buildings in Toronto turned out their lights to save energy, however many buildings had electricity from Hydro-electric resources and were heated via oil-fired generators. The net result was that turning off the lights made the buildings colder and it took more oil energy to heat them up again than if the lights were left on.

MicahNance 16y ago

From the source at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/06/1001509107.full.pdf+html http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/06/1001509107.full... "We recruited 505 participants through Craigslist in seven US metropolitan areas: New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Houston, Dallas, Denver, and Los Angeles."

limist 16y ago

As usual, unmentioned is an individual's biggest single energy impact: dietary choices. Just a single semester's worth of thermodynamics study (the 2nd Law in particular) would make that clear. Some background includes: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report-meat-free-diet http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/02/un-report-... http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0612sp1.htm http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0612sp1.htm No one who claims to be worried about energy consumption and climate change should be taken seriously, unless they cut down on their meat consumption first. Al Gore and "An Inconvenient Truth" was a case in point, but Gore finally started changing his tune on his diet, to his partial credit: http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/11/04/al-gore-agrees-that-going-vegetarian-helps-the-environment/ http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/11/04/al-gore-agrees-that-going...

gaius 16y ago
It is not that long ago that if you wouldn't use animal products or labour in most of Europe you would starve and/or freeze. Veganism as a lifestyle is utterly dependent on huge energy subsidies. They love to play tricks with statistics too, comparing the calories in an acre of simple carbs in crops to the calories in the complex proteins in a cow. That's where the energy has "gone"...
- kragen 16y ago
  Dried soybeans are 36% protein by weight. Muscle beef is 32% protein by weight, although other parts of the cow are lower in protein. A steer is 4% of the soybeans it's fed, by weight. So feeding soybeans to cattle is even less defensible as a way of providing protein to people than as a way of providing calories to people: you waste 96.5% of the protein that way. The picture is a little less egregiously bad if you look at some other foods (sweet corn is only 3.2% protein, so if you could get your cattle to grow on corn without supplementing their diet with soy or other protein, you'd only be wasting 60% of the protein). But it still isn't good. The fundamental constraint here is that animals can't produce protein from carbohydrates or fat. Animals can only produce protein from protein. In fact, most plants can't produce protein from carbohydrates or fat or carbon dioxide or water, either. They need to take up nitrogen compounds from the soil to make protein. As far as we know, animals can't aminate carbohydrates using other sources of nitrogen, the way plants can. So the protein that comes from your crops is the most protein you can possibly get. Processing it through animals can only reduce the protein yield per acre of crops. The complexity of the proteins in the cow isn't an advantage, either. You have to break those proteins down to individual amino acids before your ribosomes can use them to build proteins of your own. If foreign peptides (protein fragments) get into your bloodstream, your immune system will destroy them. From the standpoint of nutrition, the less complex the proteins are, the better. On the other hand, animal processing can make the protein and calories considerably easier to eat. Ruminants' symbiotic bacteria can extract useful calories (and massive amounts of methane) from cellulose, even if they only pass 5% of them on to their predators; your body doesn't support these bacteria at all. And cows have these massive jaws and teeth for grinding up cellulosic material to extract the nutrients from it. So, veganism as a diet (I'm not sure what you mean by "as a lifestyle"} isn't dependent on "huge energy subsidies". It's just dependent on crops you can stand to eat and that provide you adequate nutrition. Eating animals is a huge cost to your primary productivity; the compensating advantage is that it renders you more adaptable in your crops. Eating animal products is somewhat less of a huge cost. As for freezing, it's fairly unusual for people to heat their homes by burning animals, and in Europe, it was unusual for people to insulate their homes with animals or animal products. Not freezing is really more a matter of thermodynamic engineering than it is a matter of acquiring adequate energy. A good thick thatch roof, a couple of meters of straw bales in the walls, and some whitewash on the inside will allow you to heat even a largish habitation with a small fire. No huge energy subsidies required. (Please don't start complaining about the embodied energy of the whitewash.)

mikaelgramont 16y ago

Can someone explain this to me? "For example, participants estimated that line-drying clothes saves more energy than changing the washer’s settings (the reverse is true)" Makes no sense to me. "Changing" doesn't mean anything. I'm sure the article is on to something, but that quote here is just too unclear.

jonah 16y ago
Changing from washing in hot to washing in cold? That's all I can figure. If that is indeed the case one should wash in cold AND line dry their clothes.
jws 16y ago
I assume they mean washing the clothes in cold water instead of hot. changing the washer’s settings does cunningly mask that the wash will also be less effective. Numbers: A top loading machine[3] uses about 150 liters (40 gallons) of water to fill. If you fill that with hot water that is water that has had 30°C (50°F)[1] added to it. That is about 20 megajoules (5kWhr). Heating a liter of water from room temperature to vaporization[2] takes 2.5 megajoules (700 watt hours). So… in very rough numbers you can vaporize 8 liters of room temperature water for the same energy it takes to fill a top loading washer once with hot water. I'd say my load of wash doesn't lose 16kg being dried, so I presume less than 8 liters are being vaporized. [1] I'm pulling numbers out of google here, you didn't expect more than one significant digit, did you? [2] Vaporization is more than 5 times the energy from 1°C to 99°C. [3] Terribly inefficient way to wash clothes, but if an article is going to make dramatic statements, you have to figure they will pick the most extreme numbers.
- kragen 16y ago
  You mean "lose 8kg being dried". I should measure the water consumption of my washing machine.
  - jws 16y ago
    Right you are. I try to be modern and use standard units, but there is a little "multiply by two" always working in my brain when I think about mass.

jsdalton 16y ago

The "easy" solution is for society to imposes higher taxes on energy, particularly those forms of energy which we wish to discourage our reliance on. This would particularly useful in the realm of consumer purchasing decisions. Which apples required less energy, the ones shipped in from Chile, or the ones trucked over from California? There's no way as a consumer I can know that, but if taxes on certain energy forms (e.g. carbon-based) are high enough, then price becomes 1) a signal of how much energy was consumed in production and delivery, 2) a factor which discourages consumers from purchasing products which require more energy, 3) an incentive for firms to minimize their energy usage to keep costs down. Will such taxes ever be effectively implemented? Almost certainly not. For such taxes to work they would need to be high enough that consumers and firms "felt the pinch." This desired effect, however, is exactly what makes these kinds of taxes politically unfeasible, at least in America.

orangecat 16y ago
This desired effect, however, is exactly what makes these kinds of taxes politically unfeasible, at least in America. Sadly true. The other factor is that conservatives won't like them because they're taxes, and liberals won't like them because they're market-based. ("Rich people shouldn't be able to pay to pollute").
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  I don't know any liberals that don't like carbon taxes or cap and trade regimes because they're market based. I mean, the EPA already runs a cap and trade system for some pollutants. I'd say the bigger issue is that there are some states represented by both liberal and conservative politicians that will lose under a cap and trade regime, and those politicians are going to oppose any carbon price because of that.
  - houseabsolute 16y ago
    Cap and trade is a different thing than carbon taxes. But I understand your sentiment.
  - 16y ago

waivej 16y ago

I personally think we should have consumption guages on our major energy users. Getting a hybrid woke me up to this and I have since added one to the house electrical system and built one for our heat. The cool thing is that it gave an intuitive sense of different energy draws. In general it is true. Our intuition is wrong in many cases. For example, I found unhooking our doorbells was more significant than not using the clothes drier. Today our house uses 20% of the energy it did before having the gauge. We don't even try to conserve because the effort to reduce the baseline made such a difference. Why don't they require this sort of device in all new cars? One study indicated that it would add $12.50 per car. Adding the ones to the house was about $200.

kscaldef 16y ago
> For example, I found unhooking our doorbells was more significant than not using the clothes drier. Wait, what? What sort of doorbell do you have? Also, did you figure that out just by trial-and-error of disconnecting things, or did something lead you more directly to them?
- waivej 16y ago
  We had three old transformers that drew 20 watts each. The drier draws around 6000 watts for 40 minutes. Though I usually use a mode that uses less heat. Anyway, I have a gauge by the sink showing the current usage and monthly total. It's cool because I could flip on a light and see the change. Right away I found $50/month (out of $250) but then over the years I kept looking to find the extra draws. I'd shut everything off and flip breakers to narrow it down. Since then it's guided purchases so I avoid things that waste energy. At the peak of my "research" I had no fridge and then something I built that drew 300 watt hours per day. Back then my electric bill was only $7 (plus $15 delivery charge.). Though now I just live like an ordinary person. We use about $25-$45 plus delivery charge (a big chunk is a dehumidifier for our damp basement).

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

eande 16y ago

"In fact lighting accounts for a relatively small proportion of the average person's energy use" That I do not share this view. The residential household typically uses 11% of energy on light and commercial up to 20%. It might not be much as a single individual if you consistently flip the switch when not needed, but overall as a society it does safe MW of energy. An even better way is to safe energy is the use of CFL (4 times energy savings compared to incandescent light) or the new LED lighting solutions (4-6 times energy savings compared to incandescent light). Australia and some places in Europe by law banned already some incandescent bulbs, because the savings is enormous.

kragen 16y ago
The EIA Annual Energy Review 2008 http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/ http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/ estimates that 1340 trillion Btu was used in the US in commercial buildings for lighting during 2003 (p.65), out of a total of 99.30 quadrillion Btu total US consumption in 2008 (p.3), of 18.54 quadrillion Btu total commercial use (of which 1.34 quadrillion Btu is 7.2%, which is, as you say, less than 20%). US residential usage amounted to 21.64 quadrillion Btu in 2008 (p.3). Suppose you're right and 11% of typical residential usage is lighting (what's your source for that, please? The AER doesn't seem to hazard a guess there), and that the US isn't too atypical (admittedly, a very dubious assumption). Then that would amount to 2.4 quadrillion BTU spent on residential lighting in the US. The total, then, would be 1.3 + 2.4 = 3.7 quadrillion Btu per year used on residential and commercial lighting, or 3.7% of the total. Industrial facility lighting adds another 0.2 quadrillion Btu (p.48), which would bring it up to 3.9%. It would immediately follow that 3.7% of the average person's energy use is residential and commercial lighting, and 3.9% is residential, commercial, and industrial lighting, which is indeed a relatively small proportion. If every person in the US went entirely without artificial lighting but otherwise somehow continued their lives as before (except in cars, which are not included in the above statistics), total US marketed energy consumption would drop by 3.9%. I am in favor of compact fluorescent lights, ordinary fluorescent lights, halogen lights, and new high-efficiency LEDs. But the savings are not enormous when considered overall as a society, particularly considering that most industrial commercial lighting is already using more efficient machinery than incandescent bulbs. They are, rather, relatively small. 3.9% of US marketed energy consumption is 130 gigawatts. 3.9% of world marketed energy consumption (about 500 quadrillion Btu/year, according to IEO2010 Highlights, p.1) would be about 700 gigawatts. Laws are not admissible as evidence about energy usage. Laws provide evidence about political reality, not objective reality. Do you not "share the view" that 3.9% is a relatively small proportion of 100%? I think that would merely mark you as a Humpty-Dumpty. (There's glory for you!) Or do you think that the US is deeply atypical, and that the average numbers are much higher than the US numbers?

jws 16y ago

About unplugging adapters: It is worth noting that the EU mandated more efficient wall warts and as a result all new stuff uses negligible power when idle. But a few years ago when DC conversion was done at 50/60Hz with great masses of copper and iron, it wasn't unusual to have a wart burning 8 watts day in and day out. 70kWhr/year. As a good rule of thumb for warts: If it is warm to the touch, it is drawing 4 watts or more. If it isn't warm, don't unplug it. I have a Ryobi drill charger, that if I left it plugged in when idle would use as much power as my high efficiency refrigerator. (A normal refrigerator is about 1800whr/day, so that is quite a bit more than my 200whr/day, but I'm living remotely with an astronomical energy cost.)

DLWormwood 16y ago

From the article… > Glass requires so much energy to make - or recycle - that it is always more eco-friendly to use aluminium cans, even if one is talking about virgin cans compared to recycled bottles. Since when?!? Growing up, in a part of the country that was once known for glass making (but had stopped by the time I was a kid), we were taught in school that glass was cheaper to make resource and energy wise than aluminum, due to the lower technology overhead and ready access to the sand used to make it. Since then, based on my own reading, I understood that aluminum was really expensive to make due to the high electrical requirements for the process of cracking ores to get the pure aluminum out (a substance that is hard to find in nature in pure form, since it’s readily makes compounds and ores due to its reactivity.) It was this basis that politicians and activists gave to push the first recycling programs here in the States. (Which always, without exception AFAIK, started with aluminum.) My understanding is that glass was phased out in favor of aluminum not due to container creation costs, but storage reasons, since cans take up less room and shelf space than glass and were easier for stock boys and shoppers to carry. (The only eco-reason I came across was increased fuel use to ship glass bottles for the old returnable bottle programs. But this reasoning didn’t make sense to me since I thought shipping a pre-existing container was much cheaper than destroying and making new ones.) Did some technology in recent years dramatically reduce the energy cost of making aluminum? Or has the modern requirements of glass making added too much overhead to what was once a cheap process?

kragen 16y ago
No, aluminum production still costs the same as it has for more than a century. The cost of the Hall-Héroult electrolytic process dwarfs the cost of mining bauxite, so the easy access to the sand is irrelevant. Perhaps the distinction between what you were taught and what the article says amounts to a distinction of denominators. Glass is much cheaper per kilogram (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Embodied_energy#Embodied_energy_in_common_materials https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Embodied_ener... says glass is 18–35MJ/kg, while aluminum is 227–342) but aluminum is cheaper per container, because the weight of the container is smaller by more than a factor of 10. Also, recycling aluminum costs less than a tenth as much energy as smelting it afresh. This reduces the "embodied energy" of a kilogram of aluminum destined for recycling to the same ballpark as the "embodied energy" of a kilogram of glass. However, washing out bottles and reusing them is cheaper still.

roboneal 16y ago

Is it about saving "energy" or reducing carbon emissions? If it's about reducing carbon emissions, simply follow France's lead and move 80% of the world's electricity generation to nuclear and get a 95-97% emission reduction over coal fired plants.

sliverstorm 16y ago

> For example, participants estimated that line-drying clothes saves more energy than changing the washer’s settings (the reverse is true) Huh? Line drying saves plenty of energy, what settings are you proposing we change?

kragen 16y ago
My laundry washing machine has a dial on the front for the water temperature, which goes up to 90° (C, obviously). It heats the water electrically as it comes in. All but the cheapest washers sold here in Argentina have such a facility, because hot water is not normally provided to the laundry room. In the US, washers usually have an option to choose hot or cold water. Using cold water instead of hot will use less energy. Also, "plenty of energy" is not a quantity of energy that can be usefully compared with other quantities of energy. See jws's comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614745 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614745 for more calculations.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  Does cold water clean effectively enough? Also, does using hot water negate the fact that line drying saves energy?
  - kragen 16y ago
    Cold water sometimes cleans effectively enough. Certainly for any given water temperature you can line-dry to save even more energy. However, it's important to know that lowering the water temperature by a few degrees does more to reduce your energy usage than line-drying.

geebee 16y ago

would this be a good place for me to complain that San Francisco, home to Gavin Newsom's green initiative, just charged me over $150 for a permit to replace my old windows with energy efficient windows? sorry for the diversion, just needed to let that out.

dkarl 16y ago

"Zeal to promote the common good, whether it be by devising anything ourselves, or revising that which hath been laboured by others, deserveth certainly much respect and esteem, but yet findeth but cold entertainment in the world. It is welcomed with suspicion instead of love, and with emulation instead of thanks: and if there be any hole left for cavil to enter, (and cavil, if it do not find a hole, will make one) it is sure to be misconstrued, and in danger to be condemned."

maigret 16y ago

Yes, recycling glass needs more energy that aluminum. That's why reusing glass is better. That's how many bottles (including beer) are handled in Germany.