Gadgets for Green

Energy Conservation Manual

I have been collecting several books on energy conservation.  Of all of these books, for larger operations like a commercial building, the "Energy Efficiency Manual: for everyone who uses energy, pays for utilities, designs and builds, is interested in energy conservation and the environment (Energy Efficiency Manual)" by Donald R. Wulfinghoff is a great resource.

This is a how-to and source book for energy conservation. It lets you improve efficiency and save money in all types of buildings and plants, ranging from individual houses to commercial buildings to large institutions and industrial plants.

It's for everyone who uses energy, pays for utilities, manages property, operates energy systems, designs, builds, and values conservation and the environment. It provides a comprehensive set of critical factors:

• "Ratings" and "Selection Scorecards" identify your best conservation opportunities.
• "Traps & Tricks" ensure success.
• "Economics" estimate savings and costs.

If you operate or own a building/residence, use this book to help you....

• Cut Energy Costs and Protect the Environment
• Improving Comfort, Safety, And Reliability
• Find the Right Improvements for Your Building or Plant
• Reference Notes broaden your knowledge of utility rates, high-efficiency motors, variable-speed drives, environmentally safe refrigerants, lighting technology, energy management computers, people sensors, and many other vital subjects.
• Avoid Expensive Mistakes. Each Measure includes Traps & Tricks to guide you around pitfalls that can spoil your work. You get tips gained from practical experience that minimize effort, save cost, and protect your savings in the long term.

Energy Efficiency Manual

Measure twice cut once

You cant fix what you don't measure.  I believe we need to understand where waste is before we attack it.  Why put a big solar array on a facility to meet an energy load that comes from waste?  This video explains how Battery Wharf is using information technology to monitor their own performance. 

EarthLED

It seems a reality that compact fluorescent lights and conventional lights will ultimately be replaced with LED.  So, I am constantly looking for great LED products that are bringing this technology to market.  EarthLED makes a range of LED lights that replace the traditional light bulb.  I am really keen on finding a dim-able bulb that is a replacement for 75 watt and 100 watt incandescent.

I bought their EvoLux R with EvoDim bulb recently.  Based on their website, they suggest it is as bright as a conventional bulb and similarly colored.  I just received the bulb and installed it.  The bulb provides a nice bright light, though I am unsettled with the coloring.  It has a tinge of the classical LED color, which is fine with me, but not my wife.

Priced at around $99-$119 the payback makes sense.  Clearly the price will go down.  This is a great product for early adopters, but probably the next generation will be better for early majority/late majority adopters.

Smart Thermostats

Every home uses somewhere between 30%-50% of its energy to provide heating and cooling.  Heating and cooling is controlled via a thermostat.  For years DOE and others have advocated "Set Back" thermostats, to adjust temperature through the day depending on real occupancy - i.e. gone during work hour, make let the temperature go up during the summer and down in the winter.  Interesting 4 out of 5 people with one of these thermostats don't really use them because they are too hard to remember how to set the parameters and controls.

A series of new thermostats are now on the market that let you use a web page to control settings.  More advanced ones even let you change the settings from your phone or other locations.  Having looked at several of the vendors out there, I don't really like any of them very much, at least for the average user.  But one that works well for those of us that are really a big more geeky is Proliphix.  They offer a range of thermostats for light commercial and residential.  These thermostats can also be powered with POE (Power over Ethernet). 

Energy - Sources and Uses

To understand the energy problem, it is probably best to first understand what energy we use and where it comes from.  The Department of Energy does a good job tracking energy usage, and has published their data in a series of websites.  Most interesting is the "Energy Flow" charts published at Lawrence Livermore National Labs.

What I find most interesting from these charts is how much of what we produce is ends up as "Loss".  Nearly 2/3 of the energy produced ends up being lost in the transportation of that energy to an endpoint (heat dissipated in power lines, fuel moved by rail cars and trucks, etc).

Another key point is how little energy comes from alternative sources (i.e. Solar and wind).  Listed as "Biomass and Other", sources like solar and wind have a very small impact on total energy production.

So, what does this say?  To me, it says that it will take a long time before Solar and Wind make up a sizable component of our fuel mix in the United States.  It will be years.......  Alternatively, reducing demand has a huge impact.  Energy not used is energy that does not need to be produced, distributed, or lost.

Hence the need for Green gadgets - the devices, software, and tools needed to help us improve our behavior and use less energy.