8 weeks of clean living

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.

A couple of days ago, I took the MTS Route 30 down to La Jolla and went for a pleasant snorkeling trip at the La Jolla Underwater Park Ecological Preserve. The Preserve has a bunch of really cool fish, including tons of large phlegmatic orange ones, and accordingly there are many people in the water at any one time, so it’s also a fairly safe place to swim around.

The trip made me think about the environmental impact of how we entertain ourselves. It seems to me that activities appropriate and unique to one’s region can have a smaller environmental footprint (and cost less) than those activities that attempt to be as general as possible. For example, movies are the quintessential generalizable entertainment experience. No matter where one is or which theater one sees a movie in, the content and overall experience are essentially the same. On the other hand, going for a walk or a swim can take on vastly different dimensions depending on one’s location. In order to create a movie experience, gobs of energy and resources must be used in the production and the subsequent display of a film. In contrast, going snorkeling or bodyboarding or taking a hike in the mountains has no real energy cost outside of transportation, and if one lives nearby there really is no substantial energy cost to the activity (except for the up front costs of fabricating a snorkel, bodyboard or backpack).

In a way, these thoughts remind me of the native gardening trend, where only native plants are used in one’s garden in order to reduce water and pesticide use. By exploiting the properties of one’s region, one saves time, energy and effort while creating something unique compared to more idealized (and generalized) cookie-cutter lawns and gardens.

For these reasons, over the next few weeks I will continue to explore entertainment possibilities that are low-environmental-impact and appropriate to the San Diego area. I’ll mark them under the “Local” and “Entertainment” categories along the right hand side of this page.

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.

UPDATE: Green Options has a nice piece on a similar topic with some more tips for hosting green gatherings.

A couple of days ago I took the NCTD 101 up to Solana Beach to visit one of my favorite spots in North County, Pizza Port. Besides having great pizza, Pizza Port is an excellent local brewery with a wide variety of beers to choose from (my favorites include Old Viscosity and Hop-Through-It IPA). Unfortunately, the traditional six pack of longnecks is a somewhat wasteful packaging for beer (though the box and bottles are certainly recyclable), especially if one is enjoying it with a few friends and intends to finish it. Luckily, an alternative and reusable beer transportation device exists: the growler.

Growlers hold 64 ounces of beer in a completely reusable glass container. Besides reducing packaging waste, growlers encourage one to seek out local craft breweries and save the energy required to transport the beer. (Of course if one is driving to the brewery the savings might not be that substantial depending on how far away it is compared to one’s local grocery store.) Also near UCSD (just a few miles east on La Jolla Village Drive/Miramar Rd), we have one of the top craft breweries in the world, AleSmith, with three beers in RateBeer.com’s Top 50. Unfortunately, unlike Pizza Port, AleSmith is very difficult to get to by bus so driving is required. Cheers!

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.

One of the often overlooked benefits of the digital music era is its total elimination of packaging, storage media and physical transportation. CDs themselves are a pain in the ass to recycle, and standard jewel cases are not recyclable. Some effort has been made in the realm of packaging, as in the package for the recent Squarepusher album Hello Everything, which uses a fully biodegradable case, including the CD tray. Nevertheless, digital music avoids basically every environmental pitfall of traditional physical media music. Unfortunately, the vast majority of digital music has been hobbled by digital rights management (DRM) restrictions, which make the digital product less compelling than its physical counterpart by restricting where and how one can listen to one’s music.

There are a few great DRM-free music stores, but none of them currently carry any major label artists. Emusic is the largest, with an excellent selection of independent music across many genres. Bleep, developed by British electronica label Warp, also has a pretty good selection and includes the option to download CD-quality recordings (most digital music is compressed and therefore lower quality than what you’d find on a CD). Another DRM-free service that I have not tried is Magnatune (with the tagline “we are not evil”).

Recently, Apple’s iTunes Music Store started offering high-quality DRM-free downloads from EMI, the first major label to make DRM-free downloads available. (These DRM-free albums and tracks are advertised under the iTunes Plus moniker, so be careful: not all iTunes music is DRM-free.) Amazon is also planning to open a DRM-free music store with major-label participation later this year. If EMI’s experiment is a success, hopefully the other major labels will follow. Due to the environmental considerations outlined above, I intend to never buy a physical CD again (unless it’s used, I suppose) if it is available in a digital, DRM-free form. Hopefully all albums will be available in this format in the very near future.