8 weeks of clean living

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.

Way back when I was first thinking about starting a blog (called On Efficiency, with some similar themes but a less environmental bent) I wanted to tackle the subject of optimal (male facial) shaving. At the time, I was convinced the answer would be a straight razor, given that one never throws away blades, but now I realize the calculation is a bit more complex.

My grandfather gave me an electric razor for Christmas noting that he felt it was a good fit with my environmental goals. At first this seems unintuitive—shouldn’t something that uses electricity be worse for the environment than something you power yourself? After thinking about it for a while, however, I think one can make a pretty strong argument for an electric razor. Here’s how I see it breaking down.

Electricity: The electric razor obviously has a disadvantage here, but the amount of power it draws is quite small. Charging the razor after taking it out of the box only drew 4 watts from the outlet. After completely charging, the total power draw didn’t even show up on my Kill-A-Watt’s meter (it still read 0.00 kWh). The razor may have come partially charged though, so I’ll update if the subsequent charge produces different results. My grandfather says he gets about a month’s regular use out of a charge.

Water: Here both straight and safety razors have a substantial disadvantage—they require quite a bit of water (normally hot) to get the job done. Besides just the use of water (which in San Diego we’re always trying to conserve), heating and pumping the water probably takes more energy in one shaving session than the electric razor takes for a month’s worth of charge.

Shaving Cream: Electric razors don’t use shaving cream, a product that takes materials and energy to produce and ship.

Waste: Electric razor blades are supposed to be replaced every year (though my grandfather says he’s never replaced his, but I’ve also heard he had a cavity filled without anesthetic…). This replacement rate is much less than safety razors, but the item replaced is slightly larger. Straight razors just need to be sharpened and maintained. Both straight and safety razors create waste through discarded shaving cream canisters, a problem electric razors avoid. The real stinger for electric razors though is the replacement of the whole unit. Obviously there’s quite a bit to electric razors, including a toxic battery, which is a knock for them in this category (though highly dependent on how often you replace them). Due to the battery they should probably be disposed of as household hazardous waste and not just thrown in the trash.

Cost: This isn’t an environmental factor, but one to consider. Up front a high quality straight razor and a nice electric razor can both be around $100, with the electric razor having greater recurring costs for occasional blade replacement (vs just buying shaving cream for a straight razor). Safety razors are normally very inexpensive or free up front, but as we all know, the blades can be pretty expensive. Lifetime I’d guess the straight razor has the advantage.

I looked in to getting a straight razor during my first eight weeks and ran in to lots of horror stories about people cutting strips off of their faces due to nicked or bent razors. That and the high cost for a quality kit dissuaded me from taking the plunge. I still haven’t fully adjusted to the electric razor, but I think when you take into account water, shaving cream, shaving cream canisters and blades, electric razors actually make more environmental sense than safety razors.

In addition to some of the larger changes that I’ve been making, there are a host of little things I try to do that also have environmental consequences. Time for my first list!

I:

• Turn the water off while soaping my hands, brushing my teeth, and doing dishes (and generally try to waste as little water as possible)
• Turn the lights off whenever I leave a room
• Shop for groceries with a reusable bag, and when I do end up with a plastic or paper bag I use them as trash and recycling bags, respectively (I never have to use actual trash bags)
• Recycle everything that is recyclable, including electronic waste
• Unplug chargers and other electronics while not in use (also, I’ve turned off the circuit breakers for my electric heaters, since they draw power even when not in use)
• Use my cell phone in lieu of having an alarm clock
• No longer initiate or renew subscriptions to magazines or newspapers (they are painfully wasteful and obsolete these days)
• Never buy non-rechargeable batteries (they are awful for the environment, classified as household hazardous waste, and way more expensive in the long run than simply using rechargeables)
• Collect any extra unused napkins given to me at restaurants, etc. for later use, and use cloth napkins for dining at home (I never have to buy napkins)
• Take the stairs
• Reuse packing materials myself, or take the peanuts back to UPS/FedEx stores for reuse
• Pay bills online, and cancel all paper statements from financial institutions
• Try to stop as much junk mail as possible (see this helpful article)
• String as many trips together as possible if I have to use the car (and carpool when possible)
• Let my dishes air dry instead of using heated dry
• Buy environmentally friendly personal care products such as 100% recycled toilet paper, paper towels and facial tissues that are whitened without chlorine bleach, phosphate free dishwashing soap and laundry detergent etc.

There may be some small things that I should be doing that I’m not doing. Feel free to share some small green tips!

After rearranging my entertainment center, I kept my Kill A Watt plugged in to discover what the resulting energy consumption looked like. Over the course of 215 hours, my new set up consumed only 1.49 kWh of electricity. This is in comparison to 7.3 kWh of electricity over 164 hours previously. The 215 hour period included watching several movies and playing lots of music through my speaker system. In between uses of my equipment, however, I used my power strip to turn off all the components and prevent idle energy use, which seems to have made a substantial difference (along with ditching the cable box).

I have a floor lamp that I have always thought might be an energy offender. Last night I plugged it into the Kill A Watt to see what I could find out. Astonishingly, over a 2 hour and 24 minute period, the lamp managed to use .75 kWh, or approximately half of the energy use of my entertainment system over the course of approximately 9 days. Upon further inspection, it turned out that this floor lamp draws over 300W when switched to its brightest setting (it has one other setting at which it draws over 180W). To put this in perspective, if I turned on every single CFL in my house (which essentially means every light in my house) I would still be drawing less electricity than if I had all the lights off and this single floor lamp on. By my calculations, I’ve already spent more than twice as much on electricity for this lamp than the lamp itself cost (it costs me approximately two dollars per month to run it, and I got it off of craigslist for $10). Needless to say, I’m going to be looking for an alternate floor lamp.

UPDATE: This short article gives some good everyday examples of how much energy a kilowatt-hour represents.

My roommate Marci told me about a series of lightbulb exchange events being hosted by the City of San Diego and SDGE. I was able to go to one yesterday and trade in five incandescent bulbs for five compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). Check out the schedule for future trade-ins here (the events at Scripps seem pretty cool since one can also get a 2-for-1 pass to the aquarium at the same time).

CFLs have been covered to death as one of the easiest ways to save energy, as well as a little bit of money (Lighter Footstep has a good article about them here). Normally the savings on one’s electric bill far outweigh the higher upfront cost of CFLs (let’s say you pay $.10 per kWh and replace a 60W incandescent with a 13W CFL, over an 8,000 hour lifespan one would save around $35). When you can trade in incandescents you already have for free CFLs, however, it’s all profit.

CFLs do have a couple drawbacks compared to incandescents. They take about half a second to actually turn on, and then another 30 seconds to reach their full brightness. During this warmup, they use approximately as much energy as an incandescent, so it’s not really worth putting a CFL in a closet or somewhere where one doesn’t use the light for more than a few seconds. In the majority of use cases, though, they are preferable and indistinguishable from their incandescent counterparts.

I switched over most of my lightbulbs to CFLs back when I moved in, and now every fixture in the house has a CFL, except for the one in my closet and one out on my porch whose devious enclosure I haven’t been able to penetrate…

Recently I reported on the idle energy use of the various components that make up my small entertainment center. Over the past few days I’ve kept the Kill A Watt plugged into the power strip that supplies electricity to all of my entertainment devices to see how much energy they consume under normal use. Over 164 hours of testing, the devices in question consumed 7.3 kWh of electricity. By my calculations this is equivalent to approximately 32.5 kWh per month or 390 kWh per year. In other words, about a month and a half’s worth of my electricity consumption per year is used solely for my entertainment devices. As before, these devices included my TV, Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 2 and DVR/cable box. Additionally, I use the power strip for charging my MacBook from time to time and powering a Klipsh 2.1 speaker sound system.

This is only tangentially related, but I recently canceled my cable service for a few reasons. First, my DVR/cable box was a prime suspect for substantial and necessary idle energy consumption. Second, the value proposition for cable seems to be getting weaker. In order to get cable internet, HD, HBO and DVR I was paying approximately $135 per month. For comparison, now I am getting 3.0 Mbps DSL for $35 per month, Netflix for $18 per month and buying TV shows as needed (and à la carte) off of iTunes for two dollars apiece or around $30 a season. The only real losses are HBO and live sports. Not having HBO on cable essentially introduces a time lag until the shows appear on Netflix. Live sports are harder to replace, but services like MLB.TV for baseball might be a good replacement (or, especially for baseball, listening to live shows on the radio). Finally (and this is a super fringe benefit) I now have enough room in my TV stand to integrate the power strip and make its on/off switch easier to access (see bottom-leftmost device below), allowing me to more frequently prevent idle power consumption. Now that I’ve made this change, I might do another round of power consumption testing to see what kind of impact better idle power management and no cable makes on my entertainment center energy use.

I put my Kill A Watt to use in order to find out how much electricity my home entertainment devices were drawing while idle. To measure them all at once, I connected them all to a power strip, then connected the power strip to the Kill A Watt. I have four devices (pictured below) that continually draw power in an idle state: a Samsung 32 inch LCD television, a Nintendo Wii, a Sony PlayStation 2 and a cable box/DVR. Over the course of 15.3 hours of testing (during which the devices were not turned on) these devices used .34 kWh of electricity. By my calculations this equates to approximately 195 kWh of electricity use per year. On a monthly basis, I use approximately 270 kWh of electricity, which means that almost 1 month’s worth of electricity is used up every year simply by leaving my electronics on idle.

One easy way to cut down on idle power consumption is to connect all of one’s home entertainment electronics to a single power strip which can easily be turned on and off. I use an APC power strip similar to this one. If I ever leave for a couple days, or otherwise know that I am not going to use my TV, I can just flick the power strip off and save a little energy. One cool feature of my power strip is that it includes “always on” plugs. These plugs continue to operate even if the power strip is switched off. I have my DVR attached to one of these ports so that I don’t miss taping a show just because I’ve shut off power to my other electronics.

I’m continuing this investigation by leaving my power strip plugged into the Kill A Watt for a couple of days under normal use. In this way, I hope to gain some insight into the hidden cost of entertaining myself with TV and video games.

Green Wombat has a couple of cool articles up concerning large-scale solar power projects. The first concerns a 500 MW plant being built in New Mexico with cooperation between San Diego Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison, among others. The article also mentions a 1.75 GW plant based on solar dish technology from Stirling Energy Systems. One drawback of these larger scale projects is that they are often located far away from the cities they supply, causing inefficiencies in the transmission of generated electricity.

In order to avoid these issues, Pacific Gas and Electric has two smaller projects up near the Bay Area in Fresno and Tracy. These projects should be able to supply power to Fresno and the Bay Area, respectively, without having to transmit over substantial distances. With all of the activity surrounding solar power from California’s major utilities and the abundance of potential solar energy in the region, it’s no surprise that San Diego and San Francisco/Berkeley are two of the Department of Energy’s 13 “Solar America Cities.”

These developments are good for someone like me who lives in attached housing, and therefore cannot easily generate individual solar power. Beyond conserving, the only other obvious option for reducing my in-home energy carbon footprint is purchasing carbon offsets, which are fairly controversial in terms of impact (and will no doubt be the subject of a future article).

The very first guest writer here at 8 weeks of clean living is my good friend Lauren. Lauren is about to start a PhD at UC Davis in the ecology department, with a focus on environmental policy. Hopefully she’ll be a recurring contributor, and to start she’s going to consider the environmental impact of bottled water.

Last time I dropped off my recycling at the local center there was someone ahead of me in line depositing a strikingly large number of empty plastic water bottles. As suggested by this thirsty person (or perhaps her thirsty clientele), bottled water has become a very popular drink choice. Unfortunately, it comes with its share of environmental problems. Purifying bottled water takes large amounts of energy, as does transporting full bottles thousands of miles to be sold. In addition, the fossil fuels required to produce enough plastic bottles to satisfy America’s annual demand for bottled water could fuel 100,000 cars for a year. Finally, once bottled water has been consumed, as few as 14 percent of the bottles get recycled.

Early this summer San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order banning the city government from using city funds to buy its employees bottled water. This is a smart way for the city, whose municipal water is readily drinkable, to save the approximately $500,000 it spends annually on bottled water and reduce its generation of waste, in addition to helping wean its city employees from bottled water. The city of Los Angeles has instituted a similar policy.

Anyone who lives in an area with safe water can make the switch from bottled water by acquiring a reusable, washable water container such as the environmentally friendly ones made by Klean Kanteen. I like to keep my bottle in the fridge–the cold water tastes better and I get the added refreshment factor. In places with suspect tap water, one can get a water filter that fits in the fridge. Switching from bottled water to tap water is an easy change to make that saves money, energy and the environment.

I received a new toy in the mail on Tuesday: P3 International’s Kill A Watt. It is essentially a one outlet electricity meter that allows you to monitor the power consumption of any appliance. I’m planning on using it to calculate the real cost of activities like cooking and watching TV, and to get a better idea of how my energy use breaks down into different categories. For starters, I measured how many kilowatt hours (kWh) it takes to charge my MacBook from about 20% charge. According to the Kill A Watt, the MacBook required only 0.08 kWh to reach a full charge, costing me approximately a penny. Nevertheless, according to my most recent SDGE bill, I’m using approximately 270 kWh per month. Certainly the majority of that energy is wrapped up in my refrigerator, dishwasher, washing machine and dryer, but it will be interesting to see the supporting role that TVs, rice cookers and electric toothbrushes play.