Green Options » Energy Savings

Just Start Save the Planet a Little Bit - Solar Charger Your PSP

Jahon — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:50:25 +0000

Playing Call of Duty on your PSP is so much fun – but now when you are racking up energy expenses in order to keep things running. The best thing to do to keep enjoying your game play without increasing your electric bill due to numerous charge times is to buy a solar charger for your PSP.

There are many solar chargers out there, and it is recommended that you look up the different features of each one in order to find out which charger is best for you. Admittedly, solar chargers can get a bit expensive – but some people see it as an initial investment which will put them in the way of many great savings in their electrical bill because they will be able to charge their PSP for free thanks to solar power.

The best place to learn more about this and to purchase one is to go online, where you can also browse their different features.

A solar charger for your PSP should ideally be a portable one, with cables in place and can be stowed away in an easy manner. If you are planning to buy one, you might probably think of getting one which will get the most sunlight even when it is a cloudy day. To spot a quality solar charger, check if it has extra ports that you can use to charge other things. There are many reviews out there that can help you pick out the best one for your own personal use.

Charging your PSP using the solar charger will probably require around thirteen hours of straight and direct sunlight in order to make a full charge. This is taking into consideration a 2.2 ampere hour battery, and a charger that has a 2 watt type of solar panel. When your solar charger is powerful, the less time you need to charge your PSP.

One good thing to try out is the Logic 3 solar charger for PSP. It comes with specially designed cables which will let you connect it to third party sources of power and it easy to tote around with you. On a full charge using this, you can power up your PSP for over four hours. You can even use this for cloudy days and can be powered up using artificial light.

Another is the Freeloader solar charger, a portable unit that comes highly recommended. You can use your PSP for over two hours if you use this model, and it is made from a very sturdy aluminum body that is also on the stylish side. Its cables and adaptors are usually compatible with different models of PSPs, and it comes in a compact size that feels very light (you can even put it in your shirt pocket). Charging is also done via USB for convenience.

And finally you have the PSP 2000 charger – a fast solar charger that comes in a unique folded design that also protects the solar panels and keeps it from being damaged. It is very durable and uses a DC charge port for its spare battery. It also comes in a very appealing lithium pack, too.

Save on Electricity… and Get Rewarded

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:34:22 +0000

Do you remember RecycleBank, the Philadelphia-based company that rewarded customers for recycling? I thought that was a great idea, and I’ve got a similar response to Earth Aid’s new rewards program for energy savings. Rolled out earlier this month in Washington, DC, Earth Aid offers a program to track your energy use and savings, and then to “pay” you for those savings through reward points that can be redeemed at partner companies.

In its press release for the launch of the rewards program, the company claims that its program “…creates a virtuous circle of local businesses providing incentives for households to save energy, and households re-circulating their savings on their utility bills into local businesses - benefiting both the local environment and the local economy.” All of this is on top of money actually saved by consumers cutting their energy use…

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European Union Begins Ban of Incandescent Light Bulbs

Beth Graddon-Hodgson — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:11:43 +0000

The European Union is on the cutting-edge of green technology; already ahead of many nations through its introduction a ban of incandescent light bulbs that began on September 1, 2009. The ban of these incandescent light bulbs has a goal of reducing region-wide energy costs through use of the more eco-friendly compact fluorescent light bulbs instead.

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Green Talk Radio: Green Web Hosting with Solar VPS

Sean Daily — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:00:56 +0000

Sean Daily, Green Living Ideas’ Editor-in-Chief, talks with Ross Brouse, founder and owner of Solar Virtualization Technology Group (Solar VTG) and Solar VPS, about green web server hosting for personal and professional applications.

[Courtesy of our friends at GreenLivingIdeas.com]

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Cut Your Energy Bills: Fire Your Dryer

Jamie Ervin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:59:51 +0000

It appears that our “New Economy” has made people take a good look at needs vs. wants. These days, more people (as much as 1/3) feel that a dryer is no longer a necessity, rather its a luxury and an expensive one at that!

Line drying used to be the standard and we are trending toward that again (We’ve doubled the number of people who say the dryer is a luxury in the last three years). Here’s how to fire your dryer which will result in lower energy bills (good for you and the planet) and happy clothes (the dryer is hard on clothing).

No matter the climate you live in, you can air dry clothing. Read on to learn how to fight restrictive CC&R’s for your right to dry and ways to circumvent such silly ordinances.

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Ledalite’s Ergolight Office Lighting Reduces Energy Consumption by up to 80%

Amiel Blajchman — Sun, 10 May 2009 21:10:42 +0000

Building managers and environmental passers-by always scream when they see office lights on in the middle of the night, illuminating someone’s cubicle for hours when they’re not there. Ledalite’s Ergolight Controls System has been designed to take care of that problem, as well as increase office energy efficiency. It’s such a good solution, that it was recognized by the David Suzuki Foundation as one of their climate change solution case studies. Designed to help building designers and architects achieve LEED certification, depending on the set-up, customers can decrease their energy consumption by up to 80%.

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SolveClimate: The Next 100 Days — Let’s Launch a War Against Energy Waste

SolveClimate — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:20:19 +0000

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Friday, May 1, at SolveClimate.

It is time for President Obama to mobilize us all to help build the new energy economy.

He has begun shaping the public policies we need. Now he needs to launch an Apollo project, interstate highway project, war effort and Marshall Plan all rolled into one.

For starters, he should call on us all to pick up our caulking guns and enlist in the war against energy waste – a national clean energy surge.

The potential for savings through efficiency improvements and conservation is enormous.

As Obama noted during the campaign, the United States is only the 22nd most energy-efficient major economy in the world right now. With very few exceptions, every vehicle, home, power plant, factory, community and state is hemorrhaging energy, energy dollars and greenhouse gas emissions.

Consider just a few examples:

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Missouri Offers Green Tax Holiday — Apr. 19-25

Adam Williams — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:35:08 +0000

Being a Missourian, it is particularly nice to see this Midwestern, conservative state step up to the green plate at times. Recently, a Missouri tax holiday was announced for the purchase of energy-efficient home appliances.</

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported:

From April 19-25, the state is waving its 4.225 percent sales tax on washing machines, refrigerators, freezers, dishwashers, water heaters, furnaces and air conditioners if the new appliance is Energy Star-certified. Nine counties and just over 50 cities also are waving their sales taxes for the week.

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Green Home Contest: Win 3 Nights at the Green Hotel Carlton

Low Impact Living — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 07:00:55 +0000

We want to start the New Year off with an eco-bang, and so we’re launching a new Green Home Contest. Low Impact Living and Joie de Vivre Hotels challenge you to make your home as green as you can! We’re going to reward the greenest home of all with a luxurious 3-night stay at the very environmentally-friendly Hotel Carlton in San Francisco. More on the hotel and the prize in a minute!

Low Impact Living will identify the single family home (and its proud owners) that has the lowest Low Impact Living Index (calculated using our Environmental Impact Calculator), and we’re going to share with you what that family has done to get there. Don’t worry if you haven’t done big projects like installing solar panels or a wind turbine - as the calculator shows, many of the best green home projects are simple and inexpensive. We’ll show you how to identify projects to make your home more eco-friendly. The contest will close on February 15, 2009. So you have time to make green changes!

What you have to do to enter

1. Visit our Household Environmental Impact Calculator and calculate your base LILI (Low Impact Living Index). It will only take you five-ten minutes to use the calculator and create your account.
2. Once you have entered all of your base inputs, move on to the “select projects” page of the calculator. Make sure you only check projects that you’ve finished (or will finish by February 15th) before you log out.
3. Make sure that you log out or save your profile before leaving - if you just move on to another web site without logging out, your inputs could be lost.
4. If you’ve already created an account through our calculator, then you need to return and, log in again. We’ve added some new features recently, and they won’t work unless you refresh your account.
5. The calculator isn’t all-encompassing yet, so there may be projects that you’ve done that don’t show up. If this is true, send us an email at contest@lowimpactliving.com describing what you’ve done. Low Impact Living staffers will review your efforts and award up to a 5% additional deduction for compelling projects.

How we’ll select the winner

The contest closes on February 15, 2009, and we will announce the winner on March 1. This will give us time to check with the finalists to make sure that they’ve completed all of their checked projects. (Past entrants to our green home contests are not eligible.)

If you are a finalist (in our top 10 lowest LILI scores), we may ask you to verify that your projects are actually completed, via photos or receipts / invoices for work performed. We’ll also ask for your address (not to be published!) so that we can verify entered information about your home. If you are a winner, then you have to be willing to let us share your projects and process with everyone via our blog, and to provide us with the photos and project descriptions necessary to do that. You’ll become a green star overnight!

What you could win!

The greenest homeowner will receive three nights at Hotel Carlton in San Francisco. The Hotel Carlton is a member of the Joie de Vivre chain of hotels, which is deeply committed to making sustainability part of its core business operations. In fact, their mission is to “adhere to the strictest environmental standards, engage in sustainable practices and maintain an impeccable quality of guest experience.” The JDV Hotels environmental program includes hotel-wide recycling programs, composting, use of renewable energy, use of recycled paper products, energy-efficient lighting and much more. To learn more about Joie de Vivre’s commitment to sustainability, click here. To learn more about the Hotel Carlton, click here.

So, good luck, and get to greening!

California Maps Out Plan to Ban Plasma Televisions

Jerry James Stone — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 07:25:46 +0000

The California Energy Commission hopes to end the burden of energy-inefficient plasma and LCD TVs on the state’s power grid. The regulations are expected to pass mid-2009, and could be in full effect by 2013.

Officials claim that the standards, once fully in place, would be a power gain equivalent to that of 87,000 homes. On the flip side, if the regulations do pass, it will surely remove some TVs from store shelves and slightly boost sticker prices.

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Daylight Savings: Bad for Energy Conservation, Pollution

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:47:27 +0000

Congress might have finally moved the one-hour “fall back in the fall” time switch past Halloween so young trick-or-treaters don’t have to roam the streets in the dark, but it’s time to chuck the idea of Daylight Saving Time altogether. Why? Because it wastes energy and creates pollution.

The concept has been around since the days of Benjamin Franklin, who saw it as a way to reduce candle tallow consumption for household lighting. But while Daylight Saving Time, or DST, might have made sense purely from a lighting perspective in the 18th Century, it doesn’t work in a 21st Century society that also uses electricity for heating and cooling, according to research by Matthew J. Kotchen and Laura E. Grant of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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A new Research Suggests a New Solar Material to Absorb the Entire Spectrum

Jahon — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:59:19 +0000

A new hybrid inorganic/organic material could usher in solar cells that absorb all solar wavelengths.

The new polymer could also enable much more efficient charge separation since electrons dislodged by light in the material remain free much longer than in conventional solar cells used in solar powered battery chargers.

The inorganic/organic hybrid polymer material can be made into polymer blends that can “absorb essentially across the entire solar spectrum–they go from about 300 nanometers down to about 10,000 nanometers,” said professor Malcolm Chisholm of Ohio State University.

Solar materials work by using incident light to boost the energy of electrons, thereby separating then from the hull of atoms in the material. They can then be harvested to generate electricity.

However, separated electrons fall back into their host atoms if not collected quickly. Usually, solar materials either fluoresce (called singlet emisson) or phosphoresce (triplet emission). The new hybrid material does both, further increasing potential efficiency.

“The materials we have made show both singlet and triplet emissions,” said Chisholm. “The singlet state lasts a relatively long time, in the region of about 10 pico seconds; the triplet lasts a lot longer–up to a 100 or so microseconds, which should be good for separating the electrons and the hull.”

Are You Ready for a Four Day Work Week?

Robin Shreeves — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:21:10 +0000

There is an interesting explanation about how our five day, forty hour work week standard almost wasn’t in the book Affluenza: The All Consuming Epidemic. It seems that in 1933, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would make thirty hours the official work week for Americans. Anything past that would have been overtime. It was voted down by a few votes in the House in favor of President Roosevelt’s New Deal Program. The thirty hour work week would have allowed for more job sharing, something that was sorely needed in the years following 1929’s Black Friday. The five day, forty hour work week, however, became the U.S. standard.

Of course, in many cases, that forty hour work week has gotten stretched to 45, 46 or more hours. When workers add their commute to and from work to their working hours, it begins to add up to a lot of time away from home and family.

Things are beginning to change, however, and many companies, local government work places, and even some schools are beginning to change to a four day work week, many tacking an extra two hours on to the remaining four days to make up the time.

What’s bringing about these changes? The economy, the rise in energy and fuel prices, and a concern for the environment can all be cited as reasons for the change to the four day work week.

The environmental advantages of this trend are many.

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Interested in Greening Your Commercial Kitchen? Enter to Win $40,000 in Equipment

Joel Bittle — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:07:35 +0000

The folks over at Food Service Warehouse are celebrating the announcement of their Certified Green Commercial Kitchens program by announcing a green commercial kitchen contest, with $40,000 worth of kitchen equipment and supplies going to the winner. If you operate a commercial kitchen and have taken steps to make it greener, fill out the form by October 31 to enter the contest. It’s free and the prizes include a refrigerator/freezer, steamer, fryer, ice machine, oven, and more.

Food Service Warehouse is an online source for commercial kitchen equipment that has taken impressive steps in encouraging green commercial kitchen practices. They have devoted dozens of pages to explaining the advantages of going green and giving practical advice on how to achieve it.

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‘Cool U.N.’ Turns Thermostats Up, Carbon Emissions Down

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:34:03 +0000

When the weather’s warm in New York City, so are staffers at the United Nations’ headquarters on the East River. That’s thanks to a pilot program dubbed “Cool U.N.,” which raised the thermostats in U.N. offices from 72 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit during August (conference rooms were allowed to stay at a slightly less balmy 75).

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched the effort by saying he would wear lighter suits during August, according to a report from the Associated Press. Staffers followed suit, with women going sleeveless and men leaving their jackets off to keep cool in the warmer offices.

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Post-Katrina New Orleans Goes Energy Smart

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:23:55 +0000

With this week marking the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans residents are looking back … but they’re also looking ahead, to a more sustainable and energy-efficient future. (They’re also praying feverishly that Gustav doesn’t head their way.)

In addition to all the green rebuilding efforts underway throughout the Crescent City, existing homes that survived the post-storm flooding are also getting eco-friendly makeovers. Those efforts received a boost earlier this summer, when the New Orleans City Council approved the Energy Smart New Orleans Energy Efficiency Program.

Among the program’s goals

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Pacific Gas and Electric in California announced it will buy 800 megawatts of solar-generated electricity

Jahon — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:05:41 +0000

Electric utilities are warming to solar power in a shift that promises to turbocharge a technology that has been hindered by high prices and slow consumer adoption.

Pacific Gas and Electric in California announced last week it will buy 800 megawatts of solar-generated electricity from two companies, enough to light 239,000 homes. Within three years, PG&E will buy its solar energy from OptiSolar and SunPower, which plan to build the world’s two largest solar farms in California as part of the deal.

It would nearly double the USA’s entire solar-panel capacity. Driving the trend are solar’s falling costs and state alternative-energy mandates.

Solar power has grown but still makes up well under 1% of U.S. power generation. More than 90% of solar panels have been installed on rooftops by maverick consumers and businesses. Utilities’ embrace of solar energy will help push it to about 10% of power generation by 2025, predicts Ron Pernick, principal of research firm Clean Edge.

“Just a handful of utilities doing something big changes the scale of the entire market,” says Julia Hamm of the Solar Electric Power Association.

Solar energy refers to the utilization of the radiant energy from the Sun. Solar power is used interchangeably with solar energy, but refers more specifically to the conversion of sunlight into electricity, either by photovoltaics and concentrating solar thermal devices, or by one of several experimental technologies such as thermoelectric converters, solar chimneys or solar ponds.

Great Air Barriers Equal Energy Savings

Dawn Killough — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:25:43 +0000

In a recent article in Environmental Building News (June 2008), author Tristan Korthals Altes informed us that having a working air barrier on the outside of a building could save as much as 30% off heating and cooling costs. I was quite surprised to find out how much of a difference an air barrier could make. I knew that air leaks in a building were not good, but did not realize that it costs so much in heating and cooling to compensate for them.

What is an air barrier?

An air barrier is any material that prevents outside air from getting in, and inside air from getting out. Possible materials include siding, sheetrock, roof felt, building paper, caulking, doors, and windows. Some of these materials are better than others at blocking the flow of air.

There are times when you may want air flow, so some of the materials are controllable, such as doors and windows. These aren’t a problem, most of the time (unless you forget that they are open). The problem comes from all the gaps and openings that you can’t see. That is where the money is at!

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Programmable Thermostats Save Money and Energy - EPA Shows You How

Joel Bittle — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:45:26 +0000

As part of their year-long “Change the World, Start with ENERGY STAR” campaign, EPA has launched a website to help you save money and and energy with your programmable thermostat. A programmable thermostat properly programmed and used can reduce 1,847 lbs of green house gas emissions a year. According to the EPA, maximizing household energy use through serviced heating and cooling systems, leak-less ducts, and thermostats that are programmed to save energy at night or when residents are away, would prevent 169 billion lbs of greenhouse gas emissions per year. To those who are more swayed by the impact on their wallets, programmable thermostats can save about $180 a year. Find valuable tips and resources, including tutorials and a video podcast, on their new website www.energystar.gov/programmablethermostats.

Some of the helpful tips include lowering the temperature setting by 8 degrees when you’re away or asleep in the winter, or raising the temperature setting by 7 degrees when you’re away and 4 degrees when you’re asleep in the winter. Take advantage of the “Vacation” and “Hold” features to manage temperatures while you’re away from home for an extended period. More helpful tips from the EPA:

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Automatically Preheat Water to Save Energy

Philip Proefrock — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:25:01 +0000

Usually when we are talking about plumbing fixtures for green building we are dealing with something that conserves water. But some plumbing devices can contribute to energy savings, as well.

When you are in the shower, the hot water from the shower strikes your body and transfers some heat before it falls away. But most of the heat in that water simply goes down the drain. Reportedly, 80 to 90 percent of the energy used to heat water for the shower is lost down the drain.

A drain water heat recovery unit (DWHR) transfers heat from water running down the drain to cold water going to the water heater. This preheats the water so that the heater is starting with warmer water, and thus needs less energy. A DWHR unit can save as much as 25-30% of the energy used for water heating, and payback periods range from 3 to 7 years, depending on use patterns.

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