Cost benefit analysis of energy efficient bulbs

We’ve had six GU10 bulbs in our kitchen for a while now and I’ve never really been very happy with them. They swallow a lot of power, don’t seem to last very long and are pretty expensive to replace. I got hold of an LED replacement some time ago and was less than impressed. It didn’t produce enough light, was really really expensive and then died after a couple of months. So when I popped into Maplin at the weekend, I thought I’d try out their low-energy GU10 replacement. Admittedly these are even more expensive than the full powered version, but they claim to last for 8000 hours and use a lot less power. I’m happy with the amount of light they throw out, although they suffer from the usual problem of taking a while to warm up. Anyway, I thought I’d do a quick calculation of how long it would take me to earn back the money I shelled out for them.

Cost per KWH – 0.15

Old 6 bulbs @ 50W = 300W

New 6 bulbs @ 11W = 66W

KWHs saved = 0.3-0.066 = 0.234 KWHs

Cost of bulbs = £7.49*6 = £45

Number of KWHs required to cover cost = 45/0.15 = 300KWHs

Number of hours required to cover cost = 300/0.234 = 1282 hours

Assuming 5 hours use a day = 1282/5 days = 256 days = 8.5 months

So based on this very rough calculation and assuming I’ve calculated it correctly, this would appear to be a good deal. Fingers crossed they actually last for as long as claimed, which I’m reasonably confident about based on my experiences with other energy efficient bulbs.

Recycling is wrong

Our council finally got its recycling strategy sorted out recently. This means that recycling is collected once a week instead of every other week and they now collect cardboard and food waste which they didn't do previously. I'm quite happy with this since it means I don't have to make regular trips to the tip anymore. Of course there have been some teething problems and I'm seriously bored of all the complaints from my neighbours. It's no wonder that Australians call us whinging poms...

But I do keep thinking there is something wrong with the whole concept of recycling. I buy a bottle of wine, drink it, then the bottle gets taken away and recycled and made into another bottle. But, but... How much energy is being used up in producing a bottle that is only used once? When I was a lad, we returned bottles to the shop (fizzy pop rather than wine in those days) and got back 2p for our bother. The bottle then got sent back to the fizzy drinks company who refilled it and sent it out again. In fact, go to India and many other 'less developed' countries today and you'll find the same thing. When you buy a drink, it comes in a scratched old bottle that has obviously been used several hundred times before. Isn't this the model we should be adopting? It seems a much better use of resources. The thing is the supply chain is already in place, all those bottles get delivered to the shops, so the same lorries could be used to return the empties back to their original source. What am I missing?

The wonders of e-ticketing

If you go to Rail Europe and purchase a ticket, chances are you won't actually be sent real tickets. Instead you'll be sent an itinerary with some reference numbers. Then when you get to the station, you go to a machine and pick up the real tickets. So I was trying to get to Basel In Switzerland and chose the train since I had too much baggage to go on the plane and also felt like going on the train was the right thing, environmentally, to do.

So I got to St Pancras and started typing in my reference numbers. My Eurostar tickets popped out but I was unable to get the tickets for the rest of the journey. I thought perhaps this was because I needed to pick them up from the station in Paris so didn't worry too much.

I arrived in Paris, dragged my stuff to Gare d'Est and tried to type in my reference numbers again and got nowhere. The touch screen computer helpfully had an English option with a button so small that it was almost impossible to hit the screen in the correct place to get it working. Nice touch, SNCF. So I started queuing up in the ticket office but time was running out, so I headed for the train. After all, I had an itinerary that included my seat number, so it was obvious that it was my seat. Unfortunately, the ticket inspector didn't see it that way. I didn't have a ticket. Yes, the train was fully booked and nobody was demanding to sit in my seat but I didn't have a ticket. With the man next to me translating, I tried to argue my case, but got nowhere and ended up paying for my ticket again. Ho hum. The ticket inspector did assure me I could get my money back if I went to the ticket office when I got off.

But at least I managed to get to Basel. So the next thing to do was get my ticket refund and get my ticket for the return leg of my journey. Unfortunately the ticket office in Basel informed me I was now in the wrong country to pick up my tickets for the return journey and would have to go to France. Fortunately Basel is only eight minutes from the border so this wasn't too time consuming or expensive. When I got to St Louis, the lady in the ticket office was very nice and her English wasn't too good (although clearly much better than my French) so after getting my return ticket I thought better of trying to explain why she needed to give me some money due to her jobs worth co-worker.

So lesson learned, trains may be more environmentally friendly but train companies don't seem to be in any rush to actually compete with airlines. They cost more, take longer and make life difficult for their customers. To solve one of these problems, here's a suggestion for you, how about sending the tickets along with the itinerary and then I might be tempted to use the train again in Europe?

What can I do with an LCD screen and a COM port?

There is something particularly gratifying about writing software that drives other bits of hardware. I guess it's the feeling of controlling something in the real world, rather than just making square boxes do things in the virtual world of PCs. .NET 2 made controlling COM ports easy through the SerialPort class, and there is a library available for controlling the USB ports. Then I saw this article about driving LCD screens from .NET, again via the serial port.

So now it's all very easy to control hardware from my preferred development environment, I just have to find a useful application to develop.

One possibility I've been mulling over for a while is some software to monitor electricity usage. Apparently there are electricity meters out there that will do this for you, showing pretty graphs etc, but the electricity companies aren't keen on installing them. Presumably this is due to the cost and also perhaps because it might encourage people to use less power, which isn't really in their interests. You can buy a clamp meter to non-invasively measure power usage but the ones that actually come with any kind of data interface are damn expensive so until I can find a cheap one, this particular idea is on the back burner.

Buy Nothing Day

Today was Buy Nothing Day, which I think is a top idea. I've been aware of this for a few years, but today I only heard about it after I'd popped out to buy some batteries. They are rechargeable so I don't feel too bad about it.

Road trip

It all started when my brother read Trek by Paul Stewart. The book describes the story of four people attempting to cross Africa (including the Sahara) in a Morris Minor during the 50s. Unfortunately it all ended in tragedy. Oddly enough, due to this story, we head out on Thursday on a road trip of our own. Not quite as dangerous as crossing the Sahara (although by all accounts, thanks to GPS, even that journey is much less risky than in the past), we're heading off to Spain to see my dad. The original plan was to go in a Rover P4, but the demands of teenagers mean we have to go in an air-conditioned people carrier.

From a personal perspective, I also see this as part of the slow travel movement. I haven't worked out the figures but I'm hoping this will be better for the environment than flying (although staying at home would be even better of course) and will be much more fun than being crammed on an EasyJet plane.

So move along, there won't be anything to see here for a while.

Bye bye eBay, hello Freecycle

I've sold lots of my old crap on eBay, but I've got a little fed up with it. Most of the stuff I've sold isn't high value so the hassle of eBay just isn't worth it. It takes a long time to put together the sale details, take pictures and package the item and post it. Then eBay takes their cut (whether you manage to sell your item or not) and PayPal takes a cut. Then there are the problem buyers, who fail to pay or have to be chased up. So for quite a lot of work, the returns are pretty slim.

So I've given up on it and I'm going to start giving stuff away on Freecycle. All I need to do is post a message and hopefully get a response. It has the added advantage of working at the local level, so goods aren't going to be transported half way across the world. Apparently there are over 3 million users already, pretty impressive.

A grey water experiment

We are constantly told that investing in a water butt to water our gardens is a good thing, it saves water and hence the planet. What is never mentioned is the fact that when you need it most, your water butt is probably not going to be much use to you. When it hasn't rained for several weeks and the inevitable hose-pipe ban is in place, you water-butt won't have a drop of water in it. Because of this, my water butt isn't getting filled up with rain water. Although the general consensus seems to be that using grey water for watering your garden may not be a good idea, as ever I decided to ignore any advice given to me and hooked our water butt up to the outlet from our bathroom. I'm not sure all houses are configured like ours, but the used water from our sink and bath goes out through a couple of pipes into a drainpipe so using this for the water butt was very simple.

And it seems to work fine. The water can smell a bit, but it doesn't seem to kill our plants and we can water the garden without feeling any guilt. One thing, remember not to wee in the shower... Although I'm sure you'd never do such a thing.

Swimming to New York

I'm not the first person to point out the humorous suggestion from Google Maps when you ask for directions from the UK to the US (see step 36), but it got me thinking.

One of the shortcomings of Google Maps is that it has no knowledge of anything but driving so it won't advise me to jump on a plane if I want to get to the US. For that matter if I ask it how to get to London Waterloo from my house, it doesn't know anything about trains so again will tell me how to drive there. It doesn't know anything about congestion charging or parking charges either so doesn't realise only the super rich or super stupid would ever consider driving into central London.

Transport for London has the opposite problem because it completely ignores the driving option, which in some circumstances might make sense (try taking public transport from SW London to SE London without dying of old age on the way for instance).

A while ago I wanted to investigate transport options for getting to my dad's house in Spain. Here things get even more complicated. There are loads of different websites with information about planes, trains and ferries but I had to find them and then compare prices, times etc.

But none of this stuff is properly integrated. The data is mostly available so it just requires an uber geek to figure how to build a mashup site that takes data from all these different sites and pulls it together in one place. I need to be able to enter a start location, an end location and then be able to get results sorted on which is cheapest or fastest or most environmentally friendly and lets me buy all the required tickets. Presumably if somebody did make such a thing, they could probably finance it by getting commission on the bookings.

And another thought, my guess is one of the reasons people who may be concerned about the environment still take flights rather than taking the overland option is that it is so much easier to book a flight than to book the alternative train and ferry. Oh, and cheaper... Er, and quicker... But at least this site could remove one obstacle.

So, any takers?

Panic Over - Climate Change is a Swindle

I was under the impression that we were all in agreement, that climate change is happening and it's out fault. But according to Channel 4's documentary this evening, we've all been conned. Apparently, although historical rises in CO2 do match rises in temperature, it's the rises in temperrature that drive the rises in CO2 rather than the other way round. I get the feeling that if this were the case, there would be a few more dissenting voices in the scientific community so I won't be going out to buy a mechanical hippo tomorrow. Even if it is true, the fact is fossil fuels will run out one day so we have to find alternatives, and the sooner we start to do that the better.

Is Peak Oil here?

Apparently Saudi oil production was down 8% in 2006. I don't know enough about the subject to know if this is important or not, but it makes for interesting reading. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2325

Well done Ken

Chelsea Tractors are going to be hit by another tax soon, as the London Congestion Charge will be increased to £25 for band G vehicles. Well done Ken!

Crude awakening - Peak Oil

Found a couple of interesting videos about peak oil and some of the possible solutions

Part 1

Part 2

Hurrah for Richmond Council

Richmond Council are introducing increased parking charges for high-polluting vehicles. This brought all the usual rubbish from the 4x4 drivers. Lets go through the points one by one.

4x4s are efficient

If your 4x4 is efficient then it won't be charged very highly. The charge is based on CO2 emissions, not car size.

I need a big car, I've got 4 kids

Presumably it was your decision to have 4 kids. Having kids is expensive, you have to feed and clothe them, house them. You wouldn't expect these to be subsidised would you? It's not like we have a shortage of kids on the planet.

Climate change is just a theory

Even though the vast majority of scientists agree that temperatures are rising and we are at least partly to blame, this line still gets trotted out. Can someone explain why I've still got bees flying round my garden at the end of October?  This isn't normal. But let's assume climate change isn't in fact happening. Cars produce pollution at a local level, are noisy and generally reduce quality of life, particularly in cities like London where there isn't enough space to accomodate them. Not only that, but fossil fuels will run out, some time. So it seems like a good idea to reduce our dependence on them.

It's undemocratic

The motoring dinosaur Jeremy Clarkson claimed the whole thing is undemocratic. How's that then? The council were voted for by the people of Richmond. If the residents don't like it, they can vote them out again.

What I like about this scheme is that it shows we can do something about climate change at the local level, we don't have to wait for the government or, even worse, the international community to do something. Since we live in the neighbouring borough and our council is also run by the Lib-Dems, I'm going to be lobbying them to introduce the same scheme.

Currently listening to Have A Day / Celebratory by The Polyphonic Spree from the album The Beginning Stages Of... [UK]

We are all doomed

There are still people who claim climate change is only a theory, just like there are people who think that evolution may not be correct or the Holocaust never happened, but there seems to be pretty much total consensus amongst scientists that it is happening and we are to blame. But even if climate change isn't happening, there is another problem awaiting us, which certainly can't be ignored. Fossil fuels will run out and, more importantly, we will pass the maximum level of production, possibly quite soon. And once that happens, if demand continues to increase, the price will rise pretty quickly. And oil is fairly fundamental to our economy, due to the amount used to produce and transport goods. I was pretty stunned when I noticed some apples in our local supermarket were being imported from New Zealand...

But running out of oil was bound to happen at some point in the future but unfortunately we have completely failed to address the issue, so we head into an uncertain future where "the Thames estuary is the most vulnerable place in northern Europe to major storm surges", which could affect me fairly directly.

I'd always thought that computers would help out here. I'm doing my part by working from home but unfortunately it turns out that growth of the Internet is actually sucking even more power from the grid, so perhaps that isn't part of the solution either. So, as the post title says, we are all doomed.

Pompous rock star is hypocrite shocker

This is old news but apparently Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay and a man known for mouthing off incessantly about environmental issues, owns a BMW X5. This Chelsea Tractor will be doing approximately 15mpg as he drives near his central London home. Nice one!

Land Rover's misplaced marketing

Today I received a letter from Land Rover, offering me the chance the test drive their latest model. Whilst I'm sure it would be fun, there's no way I'd ever think about buying a new Land Rover so why are they sending it to me? I'm not sure where they got my address from but I think they need to do some better filtering of their mailing lists. First, I can't afford a new Land Rover. Second, I live in the middle of the largest city in the UK, why on earth would I want to buy a car that has 'authentic off-road ability'? Third, I'm concerned about this environment thing. Why would I want to buy a car with a 4.2 litre engine that does approximately 13 miles to the gallon with CO2 emissions of 374g/km??? It's nice to see their letter was printed on paper from sustainable forests, but perhaps they need to sort out their massive gas guzzling machines as well? To be fair, the original Land Rover is a design classic and before I realised the environmental damage owning one would do, it was near the top of my list of cars to own. Any way, the real reason for this post is to point out there is a way to stop receiving all this junk mail. MPS Online claim that they will stop unsolicited mail coming to your door. I only signed up a week or so ago so it hasn't stopped yet but fingers crossed it will do soon.