(Image link goes to Amazon)
Read any collection of energy tips, and you’ll get pretty much the same thing. Turn off lights behind you, unplug your cell phone charger, put your AV center on a power strip, etc. The problem with these ideas, IMHO, is that you have to remember to do them, everyone in your family has to do them, and you have to keep doing them indefinitely to keep getting any benefit. And face it, it’s hard to change behavior. Continue reading
Ok, this is a pretty utilitarian post. I did finally get my 18W Server up and running; in fact, it’s serving this post! But I can’t really get to 18W unless the 2x 2T WD20EARS [amzn] drives I have in it for media storage spin down when not in use.
And I had a heck of a time making that work. hdparm -y would quickly spin them down, but using hdparm -S to set an idle timeout seemed to have no effect; I had been trying to use hdparm -S 241 to set a 30 minute spindown time, and I had no luck whatsoever. With the drives spinning, the server used more like 30W.
Mostly through trial and error, I found out that if you set a lower spindown timeout, i.e. hdparm -S 3, the drive will spin down in 10 minutes. Continue reading
I wrote about Opower almost 2 years ago, a company which is working to reduce energy use by simply making people more aware of what they use in comparison with others. At the time of that post, they seemed mostly focused on working directly with utilities, and sending out reports to customers showing them how their energy use compared to similar homes in their area. The idea seems to be that if you are at all conservation & efficiency minded, seeing where you are in relation to others may actually encourage you to do even better. They track the results, and apparently, it works. However, that method works only if the utility is on board to provide the data. Continue reading
In my last two posts I talked a little about our utility usage for electricity and for water; last up is natural gas usage. (I don’t think I’ll ever start weighing my garbage, but who knows). Continue reading
In my last post, I talked about how I keep track of our electricity usage, to be sure that our efforts at efficiency & conservation are staying on track. But that’s just one of 3 utilities; water has been another focus in our house. Continue reading
Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Efficiency — power is ever stealing [into your home]. — Me, with apologies to Wendell Phillips, Thomas Jefferson, or whoever said it first.
Almost exactly a year ago I posted about switching my kitchen to some PAR20 LED bulbs, talking about the economics of them, given their very long (50,000 hour) expected lifetime, and 5 year warranty.
The bad news – last night one quit on me. :( Continue reading
I’ve done everything I can to eliminate incandescent bulbs from my house, relying largely on CFLs. This has helped me dramatically reduce my power bills – but with some drawbacks. Continue reading
I read an article over at Green Building Advisor.com, with the title/subtitle “Is the Green Movement Just Spinning Its Wheels? Can individuals make a real dent in climate change, or does our future hinge on government intervention?”
It was a fairly gloomy take on things. Continue reading
Can you build a Linux server for web, email, printing, and 4 terabytes of media serving purposes from commodity x86 parts, and come in under 20W? Absolutely! Continue reading
