So, the technical details first – the installation was a snap. Just like the 2.0 series, a quick unzip and point your browser to a particular page, and minutes later the blog is up and running. From the admin perspective it feels like an incremental improvement – things seem a bit snazzier and smoother, but its hard to put your finger on any one “knock-your-socks-off” feature.

One item worthy of note is that the editor is much improved, so you can do your posts in the WYSIWYG editor reliably (I found the earlier incarnation a little flaky – so much so that I turned it off, and did my posts “manually”).

In terms of the new blog, this setup was all about bringing the latest incarnation Low Impact to life. A while back, I’d noticed that more and more of my posts had an environmental leaning which, while not clashing particularly, were starkly different from my tech-related posts. So, as an experiment, I setup a blog on Blogger called Low Impact.

I got a lot out of the experience – enough to know that:

• I liked the setup of having a specific blog for environmental topics, freeing up dasman’s World for more tech-related postings, and
• While Blogger is a great site, nothing beats having full control of your own website!

So, the domain was registered, a webserver setup, and WordPress 2.1 installed.

Low Impact’s purpose is to provide postings specifically about reducing our impact on the environment. If that’s a topic that interests you, you might want to check it out!

Part of the blame (or thanks?) has to go to the centameter – a device telling you your current household power consumption, which I’ve blogged about before. The old adage “out of sight, out of mind” was never truer than for electricity consumption. I turn on the electric wall heater (I know, I know, don’t get me started), and the centameter tells me my power consumption has shot up from a modest 0.3 kW to a planet-destroying 5.9 kW. Eeeek!

But I’ve found the power tyrant lifestyle requires surprisingly few concessions. When I had the urge to make this blog entry, I fired up the laptop. Even when plugged in, it only uses 50 to 80 watts or so. In the past I would have fired up my high-powered “beast” PC – gigs of RAM, masses of harddrive, and around 200 watts of awesome processing power….none of which is needed when typing in a few paragraphs of text into a blog!

Never one for self-sacrifice, I still use my planet destroying electric heater (I live in Canberra after all – anyone who knows Canberra will understand the heating requirements!). But the heater no longer gets turned on by reflex just because I’ve walked in the door after work. I come home, I get changed into reasonably warm clothes, look at the temperature guage and actually think about whether I’m cold. And whether, perhaps, a pair of daggy slippers wouldn’t do the job just as well!

There are other examples too – like not filling my 8 cup kettle to the brim to boil water for one cup of tea. Or, after my centameter smugly pointed out my climate-change-inducing 3.8kW power draw when the hot water heater goes on, making sure my washing machine was doing cold washes. All easy stuff, and requires next to no lifestyle-sacrificing either!

There’s no rocket science, obviously. And (having undeservedly acquired the “hippie” nickname at work much earlier ), I was already aware of all these little power-saving tips. But its amazing what incentive you have to improve when there’s a little white digital meter metaphorically tsk-tsking at you from the kitchen bench.

Turns out, its pretty good!

As background for those who haven’t heard about LPG conversions, it is possible to convert cars to run on Liquid Petroleum Gas, rather than petrol. LPG is available in most large petrol stations, and is substantially cheaper than petrol. On the downside, you do use more than standard petrol, and the conversion process typically costs between $2000 and $2500. Because of the relatively high cost of conversion, the more your drive, the more cost-effective the conversion is – Taxis, for instance, are often converted to run on LPG. Subsidising the cost of conversion, as the Government is considering, would make this attractive for people who drive shorter distances too.

The Australian National University seems to have done a feasibility study on converting their fleet to LPG. They found that using LPG resulted in between 12 to 24% less CO2 emissions over unleaded petrol. Or, to look at it another way, its like taking the car off the road 1 to 2 days a fortnight.

Thats not bad. Its worth pointing out though (as a card-carrying Prius fan!) that driving a Prius gives a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions! And cycling….well, thats better again!

The kit apparently replaces the NiMh battery with a (greater capacity) Lithium Ion one, and also allows the car to be plugged in to a power point to charge it up. (For the Prius newbie’s, this is not the way they normally work – Priuses (or Priii? ) charge themselves up when breaking and coasting, or by diverting power from the petrol engine).

Great idea! Some of my car-mad friends with hotted up cars have long delighted in buying modified engine management chips that squeeze more power out of the engines. This guy is modding a car to be more fuel efficient!

Obviously, some of the “green points” are lost if your house gets its electricity from a coal-powered generator plant – whenever you plug the car in to charge it up, you’re still polluting…indirectly. But if you subscribe to one of the green programs on offer, where your electricity provider sources your power from renewable sources like wind, its all good.

Interestingly, the story has Toyota being quite supportive of this kind of thing. Makes sense – as the manufacturer you want to encourage your customers to build a community around your vehicle and take it further.

I should warn that its probably not for little kiddies – its only claymation animation, but some of the language is rather… earthy (pardon the pun)!

Enjoy!

They did some testing of the power consumption of common consoles and made the discovery that the latest consoles use between 5 and 10 times more power in standby than their predecessors – so, an XBox uses 0.4W in standby, but the new XBox360 uses 2W. The Playstation and Playstation 2 is a near identical story. They have an interesting discussion about why these figures may make you switch off your Playstation 2 when not in use, but not your XBox360 – worth the read.

Well, stumbled across something at digg.com today on the first whispers about the next model. I’ve googled a little further, and this URL has a decent summary:

http://www.greenhybrid.com/discuss/2008-prius-lithium-ion-and-94-mpg-us.6729.html

To spoil the surprise, they’re talking about a lithium battery (instead of NiMH), fuel economy roughly twice as good (which is pretty mind-blowing itself), and shaving a second or so of the 0-100km/h figure. Nice……

Only downside? The net gossip is talking about 2008 as a release date – and thats for the UK/US! Past experience has Oz getting their models another year after that. Sniff….

As you can see by the mouse sitting next to it, it’s a reasonably small, neat unit. And, a little less obviously – its wireless! This is a great feature! It means (as well as being able to mount it semi-permanently somewhere), you can also carry it around as you check out your house’s (and its appliances) energy characteristics.

The way it works is with a neat white sensor unit installed either at your switch box, or meter. A sensor clicks on to the outside of the wire, and the sensor unit transmits this data wirelessly. The transmission is powered by a few AA (or AAA, I can’t remember) batteries which apparently last a year. The display unit picks up these signals and displays it.

You can configure the display to update every 6 seconds or 1 minute, and it can show current kilowatt consumption, current amount of CO2 production due to your energy consumption, and cents/hour. Additionally, the unit shows you the current temperature and humidity.

All up, it cost me around $200 to have installed. This included an electrician to come out and do the install – this is required simply because a licensed electrician is required whenever you’re dealing with switch boxes and metres.

And, after a day of use, I love it! Its better than TV – in fact, energy wise its a lot better; I’ve discovered that turning my TV on uses an extra 150 – 200 watts! But in all seriousness, some of the discoveries you make can be quite eye-opening:

• When my house is pretty much “off”, it uses around 250 watts – thats TV’s, etc on standby, the usual collection of digital clocks and (most significantly) 3 PCS that are on 24×7. These PCs were all selected as being low power consumption models
• When I turn on my “actual” work PC, consumption jumps by another 150 watts or so. This PC is a standard PC – not a low power model and that shows!
• The biggest impact is my (electric) hot water heater – when its running, around 3.6 kilowatts are drawn! I was quite surprised to see this, and was able to confirm it by turning the hot water off at the mains, and seeing the drop immediately on my centameter. Obviously, the hot water unit doesn’t run that often. Thankfully.
• And from the biggest to the smallest. I have a power board full of those little black plugs. You know the ones – phone chargers, camera charges, laptop. Nothing’s being used – they just sit there waiting for me to plug something in. Now, I’d heard that these things waste power when not being used – turns out they were collectively going through 30 watts. Or $26 a year. They’re all unplugged now!

End of the day, I can’t rate this highly enough. If you are even the faintest shade of green, this thing is a must have. But even if environmental issues bore you to death, being able to see how much your house is costing you in electricity bills is fantastic.

Whats not to love?

At purchase time, there were few options in the “environmentally friendly” space (is that an oxymoron when it comes to cars?). But a few months later, the Honda Civic hybrid became available. When the specs came out, I was still happy with my decision. The main factor was that the Civic’s fuel economy was noticeably worse (a number of small, non-hybrids do better, from what I can tell).

Well, its a new year, and Honda have brought out a new Honda Civic Hybrid. The styling looks great, they’ve increased the power, and electric-engine capability, and it seems to have more of a nod to fuel efficiency (in particular it can now, like the Prius, run on electric power alone at low speeds).

I came across the following review comparing the new Civic Hybrid to the current Prius, which might be of interest to people looking into Hybrids (or current Prius owners who want to check out the next generation of hybrids!):

http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/Drives/Comparos/articleId=108445

Non-US people (like me) should be aware that this is a US review, so some details may vary between what they’re reviewing and what is available to you. Also note that the Prius they use for comparison is 2004, but apparently the 2004 model is virtually identical to 2005.

In short, the review says that the Honda Civic is greatly improved, but that the Prius retains its edge. Its close, and the review goes on to say that the Civic may be better for certain people (especially those doing a lot of highway driving) – so, when it comes time to look at upgrading, I’ll certainly give the Civic a test drive.

In summary, still feel great about my original Prius purchase decision! And, if such things interest you, I’d really recommend checking out the review. Even if you’re not that interested in the upshot of the comparison, it’s educational to see the current state of hybrids, and what can differentiate one from the other.

This may need explanation in some quarters of the world (if my American friends are to be believed!). In Australia, most toilets are dual flush – one option for “Number Ones” and one for “Number Twos”! The advantage is that you can use a lot less water to flush liquids than solids.

(I should apologise at this point – this post is a little more “earthy” than my usual fare!).

The water savings I achieved are even more dramatic, though, due to improvements in the design of toilets in the last 20 years. Whereas my old toilets used 11 litres per flush, my new toilets use at most 4.5 litres (and only 3 litres for the “number ones” option).

The total cost was $1300. $700 for two new toilets, and $600 for installation.

So, I’ve done a few back-of-the-envelope type calculations and worked out how much water I’ll be saving. Care to guess? Go on, I dare you!

16,000 litres a year.

Wow.

Kind of impressive. So I quickly moved on to figure the dramatic saving this would have on my water bill. Turns out this depends on whether I’m a big water user or not, but it works out to be between $8 to $16 a year.

Wow again. But this time, its the other sort of Wow…..

Now, I didn’t go into this to save money – I did it because it was the Right Thing ™. Glad I did it, and I’d urge everyone to do the same. 16,000 litres of water per household is a lot of water. But there’s a lot of people out there who are either unable to afford the cost of upgrading or (to be less generous) to self-focussed to do it unless theres something in it for them.

Full credit at this point to the ACT Government – they have a rebate program that gives you $100 rebate for doing the upgrade – there’s a few rules and conditions, and you can get all the details at http://www.thinkwater.act.gov.au. That amounted to a 15% discount, which is great.

Of course there are cheaper toilets out there (there are also way more expensive ones – do you know there are toilets that cost $1500 each?! How good can using the bathroom be?). And there may be cheaper plumbers. And many people may only want to upgrade a single toilet. Still, householders need to expect to pay at least a couple of hundred dollars.

Wouldn’t it be nice if water was charged at closer to its actual value? Imagine if, for instance, households were allocated some subsistence amount of water for free (or some small fixed sum), then a much higher cost for every kilolitre above that. I’m sure I’m grossly oversimplifying, but I imagine you could come up with some figures that match the average households current water bill. The difference would be that there is suddenly a big incentive to save water.

I’m sure this isn’t a new idea (although I haven’t seen any extensive discussion on it during my travels on the Net). What do you think?