Ideas for reducing power consumption

[Fluff]

Class D amplifiers for music.

Wear more clothes in winter, so home heating can be reduced.

Girls wear less clothes in summer, less aircon.

Close down supermarkets and have a complete home delivery schedule for delivering food.

Improve the quality of microwave food!

Standardise on GPS routing, traffic avoidance and car pooling, Impose speed limits on cars to whatever the country's maximum speed limit. (But have an emergency override button for eg. pregnancy / family emergency which needs to be signed off later).

Spend more time at the cinema / down the pub, or round friends houses.

Sort out content delivery for homes so that there is no need to physically buy cd's / dvd's / computer games, you just have a licence to play whatever you want anywhere.

Make products that last and are easily repairable. Either that or lease everything.

Home insulation, and wash less clothes/yourself less.

[Jessterw]

Live in caves

Not entirely bad ideas, though I see many interfering with the predominant thinking of being as comfortable as possible.

I'm already helping out, I only rent from Netflix these days

[GT98]

Make products that last and are easily repairable. Either that or lease everything.

I think most manufactures design their products to only last X standard time (i.e. 10-15 yrs for a Frig) so they can keep making money...if they designed something to last 30 years they go out of busniess before someone would need to replace it

[UtwigMU]

Passive houses. Spoken with a friend who's into this: residential buildings consume most of World's energy.

[KvHagedorn]

People will never conserve energy.. they are all too selfish.

[Brian Ellis]

People will never conserve energy.. they are all too selfish.

Cynical but only too true. How many SUV gas guzzlers do you see in mall car parks or used for ferrying kids 200 m to/fro school? In my benign dictatorship, I would put a 200% tax on SUVs, pick-ups and other gas guzzlers, refundable on proof of necessity for professional reasons. I would also put a similar tax on road fuel, also refundable on proof of necessity. Let's see how many Hummers stay on the road, then!

[KvHagedorn]

I would put 100% income tax on all oil executives, refundable if they develop a viable alternative energy source.

[RichL]

Regarding energy efficient houses, the Dilbert Ultimate House is a goldmine of cool ideas, whilst there is a slightly less exuberant design here..

[Dr Mordrid]

Want to save energy? Then start pouring reaources into LED lighting. Once that becomes a major lighting tech. the energy required for home and business lighting will drop like a rock.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7504522/

Just this week, researchers at the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., said they had boosted the light output per watt of a white LED to almost six times that of an incandescent light bulb, beating even a compact fluorescent bulb in efficiency.

Of course following the recommendatios of the Dark-Sky Association couldn't hurt either.

http://www.darksky.org/

Dr. Mordrid

[DukeP]

Cynical but only too true. How many SUV gas guzzlers do you see in mall car parks or used for ferrying kids 200 m to/fro school? In my benign dictatorship, I would put a 200% tax on SUVs, pick-ups and other gas guzzlers, refundable on proof of necessity for professional reasons. I would also put a similar tax on road fuel, also refundable on proof of necessity. Let's see how many Hummers stay on the road, then!

Wow. Youve just classfied Denmark as a benign dicatorship!
(Although theres no refound even with proof of necessity).



~~DukeP~~

[Fluff]

That was part of my idea with the GPS car systems. They could be used for so much more. If essential items such as staple foods were home delivered that would save alot of money free up the roads, car parks coudl be smaller. And save people time. School bus / public transport routes could be optimised

For men clothes shopping could be done online, all you need is to get your measurements / skin hair / eye colour done by a tailor. Which would save the hassles of clothes shopping.

Plus my mileage expense report would be so much easier if my car printed off some kind of mileage receipt / log. Useless journeys would be identified.

Maybe my idea is to save energy by making things easier for the end user, maybe legislation is needed to do this. I hate shopping unless it's for gadgets / fun stuff.

[cjolley]

Huddle for warmth.

And Doc's suggestions too.
And put SUVs on the car CAFE standard.

[gt40]

Make sure you take your showers/baths with someone else of your chosing to save on water/heating costs

[MultimediaMan]

There are lots of ways to reduce power consumption..

Forget hybrid vehicles...more pollutants go into MAKING them than conventional machines. Let's not go into what it takes to "recycle" them as well...Some of the battery technologies used are a witch's brew of hazardous chemicals. And if you ever get into a bad traffic accident with one, there's a good chance the rescue crews will not be able to help you due to shorting batteries.

IMHO: 2 Stroke Diesels with CVTs are the real ticket to efficiency.

Look at your home: as Dr. Mordrid mentioned, the biggest energy wasting devices we commonly use and are apt to leave on are incandescent lights. LEDs are a huge leap forward in efficiency.

Buy EPIA-based machines...17Watts typical power consumption with a 12V LCD monitor...Easily powered by a Solar Panel running a Float charger to a 12V marine battery. (I've actually seen this done with a fellow I correspond with in NSW AUS.) For web browsing, and SOHO, it's all you'll ever need.

Microwave ovens are not terribly efficient, but offer less waste heat than an electric range for some cooking applications.

Gas Cooking ranges are far more efficient than any electric range - certainly when viewed from a energy conversion to utilization standpoint.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Don't get me started on the dark sky thing... around town all the McDonalds (and I'd assume across the country too assuming a national thing) have put spot lights on all the stores. I guess they figure people must have a difficult time finding them at night or something.

Oh, and nuke Detroit. (The auto manufacturing areas and figuratively speaking of course.) I wonder what percentage of the US's energy and resources is wasted on building disposable automobiles for mindless consumers to buy every year?