Coding Grasshoppers new RSS feed

As well as changing the blog over to a domain I've also changed my rss provider to feedburner. The new RSS feed can be got from here. You can also click on the link on the side bar or let your browser auto detect the feed for you.

Help reduce junk mail coming to your house

Recycling is all well and good, but it's probably better in the long run if we reduced the amount of waste we created in the first place.

One quick and easy way of doing this is to reduce the amount of junk mail you get through your door. All you have to do is go to the Mailing Preferences web site and sign up, they can take your details off around 95% of mailing lists within about 3 months. It is also a criminal offence for companies that are associated with mailing preferences to send you mail once your details have been removed.

I signed up some time ago and also signed up some of the people who used to live at my address who still got junk mail (they have a special section for signing up people who no longer live at your address) and now I don't get any junk addressed to myself at all.

The only junk mail I now get is restaurant menus and the odd bit of post that royal mail gets paid to distribute. All in all it's pretty good.

Another way of stopping yourself from getting onto the mailing lists in the first place is to exclude yourself from the publicly accessible electoral role. This version of the electoral role can be bought by anyone that wants it and it has all of your details on it, well your name and address at least. If when you next fill out your electoral role forms you tick the box to remove yourself then you are making it harder for junk mail senders to get hold of your details. This won't effect things like credit searches etc as banks and other companies buy special copies of the role that you can not be removed from, these usual cost a reasonable amount and their not given out to just anyone.

One last way to reduce the amount of mail coming through your door is to change all your bills to online only billing. At current I've moved all of my utility bills and bank statements over to paperless billing. There are still a few companies that aren't offering this option however they are starting to catch up and soon everyone will provide the option.

Coding Grasshoppers new home on the web

Just a quick announcement. I've now bought myself a domain name for this blog, you can now get to the site via http://www.codinggrasshopper.com

Blogger is handily doing all of the forwarding etc for me so all the old links you have will still work it'll now just forward everything to the new domain.

I'm still working on tweaking a few things so the new domain might drop off the Internet a couple of times in the next day or so, but hopefully everything should be up and running properly before the end of the week.

Energy Saving: Finding where you're wasting energy

After changing all the light bulbs in my house that I can to power saving light bulbs, I've started to think about other things in my house that could be taking up a lot of energy.

Obviously you can't save energy if you don't know how much you're using, so I got myself a Plug-In Mains Power & Energy Monitor. This little bit of kit allows me to monitor the power consumption of any device plugged into it. As well as telling you how many watts something is using, it also has a timer that can calculated how many KW/H an appliance is using.

As an experiment I started connecting it to different things around the house to get an idea of where I'm using the most power.

My PC with monitor came in at a reasonably good 125 watt, while it's not as good as some of these more modern low power PCs it's still not really that bad. The KW/H soon starts to rack up though beings my PC can be on for nearly 5-6 hours a day on average.

My TV downstairs comes in at about 90 watt. Because of where the plug for the TV is and the lengths of cables it wasn't that easy to place the power meter somewhere, where it was easy to see even with the use of extension cords, so I just took a quick look every so often and I'd say the average was around 90 watt. As you may or may not know, standard CRT based TVs and monitors vary the amount of power used depending on what colour pixels they are displaying (article), as far as I know this also happens with LCD and plasma screens but not to the same degree.

My kettle came in at 2 KW. Yes that's right 2 KW and that's a reasonably under-powered kettle, if you have one of those fast boil ones then it can go up to 3.5 KW just to boil some water. You could give the argument that a kettle only uses the power for a few minutes, but over the space of say a year that's going to soon add up.

By far the worst offender however was my tumble drier. Now the only reason I originally got a tumble drier was because I live in a small house and in the winter it's an absolute nightmare getting things dry properly because I have no room to hang anything. In the summer I always use the clothes line in the back garden to do all my drying so the tumble drier only gets used in the winter and weighting in at over 2.5 KW it's a good thing. I can easily polish off 4 KW/H worth of electricity a week drying clothes if not more.

My tumble drier is by far not the most energy efficient, but at the same time even a top quality tumble drier which can cost you more than a good washing machine sometimes, isn't that efficient either.

Just from the quick tests I did you can see that a lot of energy goes into heating of some kind in the home. Irons can be around 2 KW as well as things like hair driers and washing machine elements.

Beings I have gas central heating I won't be able to tell how much energy has gone into heating my house and water until I get my next bill, however I assume it will be a reasonable amount.

I think one of the best technologies that someone could come up with at the moment would be to make a highly efficient way of producing heat that could be scaled to fit all kinds of household devices. That truly could make a huge difference to energy consumption around the world.

1/2 Price Energy Saving Light Bulbs at Tesco Direct

Just a quick post.

While looking on Tesco direct I noticed they are currently having a 1/2 price sale on a selection of Energy saving light bulbs.

If you don't already know the potential benefits of using these bulbs then check out my article "Power saving light bulbs: How much can you actually save" and then head on over to Tesco direct and get yourself some.

At prices of less than £2 a bulb for nearly the entire range it's an absolute bargain.

Solar power to undercut gas and oil soon

According to a post on the telegraphs web site cheap solar power is poised to undercut oil and gas by half.

This article is about a Swiss company FLISOM who are currently predicting that there new solar technology will be commercially available by 2009 and it will provide solar power at under the holly grail of $1 per watt.

FLISOM aren't stopping there though, they claim that within 5 years they will have reached 80 cent a watt and within 10 years they will have further reduced the price to 50 cent a watt. If this could be achieved it would have amazing benefits to the solar industry. With those kinds of prices it would make solar energy on every roof top a viable option without it having to be subsidised by the government.

Lets hope that FLISOM can make good its promises and provide us with the technology to create our own power cleanly and cheaply.

Virgin Earth Prize

I was reading this article on Sustainable Log about how Virgin and Al Gore after just having announced Live Earth have now released a $20 million competition to find a way of removing billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere.

All of a sudden I feel very worried. While this has all the right intentions it just feels like it could go horribly wrong. Last thing we want is our atmosphere being filled with chemicals that would supposedly reduce CO2, but could also do all kinds of other damage.

I feel instead they should have taken more of a prevention rather than cure approach. If we could stop putting more and more CO2 into the atmosphere and plant more trees etc that could take care of the current CO2 we would be in a much better position.

It just feels like they are trying to find the silver bullet for global warming, and I just don't think it will be as easy as that, at least not without some potential repercussions.

All the same, anything that encourages people to start thinking more about the environment and ways to solve the associated problems is a good thing.

Make all light bulbs in the UK power saving and other environmental petitions

After hearing on the news about the petition against pay per mile road tax, I decided to check out the petitions web site and see what else they had on there.

As you know I'm an advocate of the power saving light bulb, so I was pleased to see that someone had already started a petition to ban the use of non power saving light bulbs in the UK.

At current it only has 252 signatures, which unfortunately probably isn't going to make the government sit up and listen. So it's time to push the benefits of power saving light bulbs and show to people what a difference they can make.

So if you too feel the way I do about these things, pop over to the site and sign the petition, it only takes about a minute and most importantly it's giving you a voice.

Another good petition for power saving light bulbs is to levy a tax on energy inefficient light bulbs so that their long term financial and environmental cost is visible in their retail price. This has way more signatures on it so far, and would be a good start towards the total banning of non energy efficient light bulbs.

One last one, make solar panels compulsory on all new build houses & to subsidise fitting of solar panels & other proven forms of energy conservation on existing housing.

Remember there are many ways you can make a difference, even something as simple as changing a single light bulb can contribute to lowering C02 levels and saving you money.

My first week biking to work

After having a rather unfortunate accident in my car about 3 weeks ago, I have now been forced to find an alternative method to get to work everyday until the insurance company sorts everything out.

For this alternative method of transportation I have chosen my trusty old bike as I'm not really within walking distance of where I work and as far as I know none of the public transport services go anywhere near it.

My work is quite close to where I live as the crow flys, which is useful because there is also a bike route between my house and work that is near enough the same distance. In the car I think the trip would work out to be about 5 miles, where as on my bike it's probably nearer 2-3.

The first day was most definitely an experience. I currently do no exercise what so ever, some people say this and what they really mean is they do a little but not as much as they should. When I say it however I really mean it. Up until this week the most exercise I've done is walking from my car to the office and back again, so as you can probably guess cycling into work was somewhat of a shock to my body.

The route to work is perfectly fine it's just the route home that's painful. There is what in my eyes is a mountain to climb on the way home, I wouldn't say it's a particularly long stretch of road but one thing is for sure it's damn steep. So steep in fact that my highly unfit body requires me to add at least 5-10 extra minutes onto my journey time to get up it. Apart from that though everything else is fine.

Because of the more direct route I can get into work in a couple of minutes over what it took me in the car. I must say that it isn't as stressful as driving, and it's quite nice to get a bit of exercise in the morning before work.

Most importantly though is it's both saving me money and having less of an impact on the environment and it's for these reasons that I'm thinking of making it a permanent affair.

I was spending roughly £50 a month on petrol with slightly more than that on insurance, which now after the accident will have risen sharply. If you also put the cost of tax, servicing and other eventualities on top of that it soon starts to add up.

On the environmental side of things, I used to drive about 6000 miles a year with probably around half of that to do with work. So if we just take my getting to work mileage, if I keep cycling in I'll be saving just short of a tonne of CO2 a year. Also the other half of the mileage will be done in my girlfriends car which has a much lower CO2 output.

The big question is though even with all the savings I could be making will my body and my mind stand up to cycling to work everyday? I'd like to say yes, but we'll just have to see what happens when I'm up against some really nasty weather. Currently I'm still nursing some slightly arching legs, hopefully it'll get easier next week.

Live Earth: What will the environmental impact be?

I posted earlier today about Live Earth a series of concerts that are being arranged by Al Gore to promote environmental issues.

While I think it's great they are putting on the concerts, it also occurred to me that wouldn't the concerts themselves have an environmental impact? Well thankfully Live Earth have already thought of this.

Instead of ending up with egg on their faces because they forgot that a concert actually requires power and that the crew and artists to travel to them, they have set out a plan with the U.S. Green Building Commission to create a "Green Event Standard" for a more environmentally friendly concert.

The rough details of the standard make quite inspiring reading. They propose to obtain all power for the events from renewable sources as well as work with specialist lighting companies and designers to reduce lighting energy usage with the use of LED technology.

Recycling will be used throughout the events from the cups drinks are served in to the hotel rooms the artists and crew will be staying in. They even require the hotels they use to change all of their light bulbs to power saving bulbs.

Travel requirements have also been covered by making sure that carbon from Air travel is offset and that all ground travel is done using hybrid vehicles.

All in all they have really thought this through well. Hopefully the "Green Event Standard" will become something that other concert arrangers take up.


Live Earth after the concert update (10/07/07)

Live Earth

Today over in the US Al Gore announced a series of concerts around the world called "Live Earth", these concerts are being put together to emphasis the need for global environmental change.

The concert will be 24 hours long and held on the 7/7/07 across all 7 continents.

The current confirmed venues are

• Shanghai
• Sydney
• Johannesburg
• London
• Brazil TBD
• Japan TBD
• United States TBD

MSN has secured the online distribution rights for the concert and have already launched a web site in preparation. It has all the information about the concert and some links to sign up to news letters and alerts.

Sounds like this could be really good, as long as the money raised goes to the right projects.

So get over to http://liveearth.msn.com/ and sign up to the news letters and alerts and see you all on 7/7/07.

Follow up article Live Earth: what will the environmental impact be?

Power saving LED light bulbs

As you already know I'm into my power saving light bulbs power saving light bulbs well today while looking through my usual web sites I found this, a 9 watt LED based light bulb.

Now I know it's very expensive at around $60-$70 (£30-£35), but it shows that the technology is getting there. For a long while LEDs have been a bit of a pipe dream as far as standard home lighting is concerned due to the fact that they couldn't quite produce enough light, however this bulb is the equivalent of a standard 70 watt bulb which is easily enough to be used in a day to day situation. All we need to do now is wait for production to go up so prices can go down.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find out who the actual manufacture of the bulb is or any British suppliers, so looks like we're just going to have to stick with our standard power saving light bulbs for a while.