How green is my household?

Homework

Last week, both our school age kids had assignments that required them to check out our households energy usage. Becky's assignment was to record our electricity meter readings over 3 consecutive days, sit down with the family to brainstorm ways in which we could reduce our electricity use, then implement the changes and take meter readings over the same 3 days the following week. Toby's assignment was to look at energy use in a solar passive house (he chose to study our house, which is almost solar passive).

The first 3 meter readings for Becky's assignment showed that we're using about 11.5 kWh per day. Given that we had already made many changes to our household to reduce our energy use, we didn't think that there would be much more we could do. For example, in the past couple of years we've installed a solar hot-water system, insulated the walls and ceiling, bought a more efficient fridge-freezer and replaced some light bulbs with low-energy ones. However, we duly sat down and brainstormed, and came up with quite a few ideas, including:

• turning off all non-essential appliances at night (eg the answer machine and internet router)
• turning off some of the few standby lights that were being left on
• replacing every single ordinary light bulb with a low-energy one
• using the microwave instead of the electric stove where possible
• using a low-energy radiant heater on cold mornings rather than a fan heater.

Amazingly, making these small changes, we were able to get our daily usage down to about 8 kWh. This was of great interest to me and Bruce, because we've been investigating the possibility of having solar power, but the cost for an average use of 11-12 kWh/day was prohibitive. However, we're now inspired to look at whether there are other ways we can reduce our energy use even more, and thus make solar power a more feasible option.

New computer or upgrade?

What's the most climate-friendly way to deal with an out-of-date computer - upgrade or replace? This was the question Hilary was posed with this week. Her home computer, purchased in 2000, was struggling to keep pace with modern technology (eg it wouldn't run the software for Hilary's digital camera and couldn't 'see' her daughter's MP3 player).  Although tempted by the bargain price of a shiny new machine complete with flat-screen monitor, Hilary eventually decided to opt for an upgrade of the old machine. Apart from the financial advantage (it was about half the price to upgrade rather than replace), upgrading involves a lot less resources than buying a new machine. Also, keeping the old monitor means less electricity use, because flat screens are apparently very energy hungry.

Getting started

This is our first posting. Today's issue is imported foodstuffs, in particular, marmalade and nuts. Hilary purchased a jar of organic marmalade from Woolies yesterday, thinking it was good to support their efforts at being more environmentally friendly. But today we were horrified to find it had been imported from Denmark! This means that the jar has been shipped many thousands of kilometres, probably generating a sizeable quantity of greenhouse gases, so it isn't environmentally friendly at all.
Then today Bruce went shopping for nuts and discovered that Coles' cashews were imported from Vietnam and their walnuts from the USA. Both of these nuts are present in the mixed nut selection, so Bruce had to leave those on the shelf and buy Australian-grown almonds, pistachios and pecans instead.