There’s a pretty hilarious site called Stuff White People Like that makes fun of many of the views and practices mentioned here at 8 weeks. In particular, posts on veganism, recycling, fancy reusable water bottles, Whole Foods and organic foods hit pretty close to home. I also find the grad school entry quite funny.
I finally had a chance to do a full charge of my electric razor and I have the electricity use figures. To completely charge the drained battery (the razor had stopped) took 0.01 kWh total. The razor seemed to be consistently pulling 4 watts (note: I mistakenly said .4 watts on my previous post, an error I’ve now corrected). To put this in perspective, charging the razor completely takes about as much energy as it takes to run a standard 60 watt light bulb for 10 minutes.
If anyone in San Diego wants to feel what 60 watts is like first hand, check out the global warming exhibit at Birch Aquarium in La Jolla. They have a little display set up where you can turn a hand crank to power both a 60 watt incandescent and a ~13 watt (if memory serves) compact fluorescent. I’m not sure what the efficiency of the hand crank is, but the task takes more effort than one might assume.
I should also mention, now that I’ve become more accustomed to the electric shaving process, that it takes a good deal less time to shave with an electric razor as compared to a safety razor. I would imagine that same relationship would hold between electric and straight razors, and perhaps be even more pronounced. I guess the time savings don’t have a direct environmental impact, but they do free one up to spend more time saving the whales.
The final day of my eight weeks was this past Saturday and I thought I would post a quick update about how I did with my mileage goal. At the end of the eight weeks I had a reading of 166,495 miles on my odometer. That means that I drove 428 miles since starting out the project at 166,067 miles. I carpooled for approximately 292 of these miles (this isn’t quite true since sometimes I had three people in my car, but it’s a pretty close estimate), netting me 146 miles in carpool credit for a final mileage of 282 miles, which is about 40 miles below my goal of 320.
Most of my mileage was spent either going to meet friends at places difficult to reach via public transportation, picking up and dropping off people at the airport, and driving to stores when I planned on buying unwieldy things. I also took some fairly long walks during the eight weeks, including a trek with my sister from Hillcrest through Balboa Park to downtown, and a 10 mile hike with a friend from my house up to UCSD, down La Jolla Shores Drive to La Jolla and ultimately all the way through La Jolla to Pacific Beach. It’s actually pretty entertaining to ogle all the things you don’t normally notice when you’re driving through an area.