Green Ideas

I was looking through the SEAI web site and on their SEAI Energy Facts Page I can across the following stats. Mrs. Doyle would be proud.

• Leaving a 60W bulb on overnight, consumes enough energy to make 24 cups of tea.
• Lighting an average office overnight wastes enough energy to heat water for 1000 cups of tea.
• Using the dishwasher once will use the same amount of energy as boiling 7.5 full kettles.
• Leaving on a typical television set for one hour uses the same amount of energy to boil one full kettle.
• Leaving your phone charger plugged in while not in use for one week consumes enough energy to boil one full kettle/to cook one microwave meal/make 4 slices of toast.

How many light bulbs ?

• Avoiding one dishwasher load saves enough energy to power a 100W light bulb for 11 hours or and equivilent CFL bulb (18 Watt) for 60 hours.
• Leaving 1 external light on overnight uses the same amount of energy as lighting 36 living rooms with energy saving bulbs for the same period.

How far would you go ?

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It can be difficult to compare different bulbs energy consumption so I have calculated the cost of running a light bulbs for 4 hours a day over a year based on current ESB rates.

	Bulbs	ESB Cost (Year)	Energy Used	Lasts (Avg)	Saves (Year)	Price
	40 Watt Incandescent Bulb	€9.58	40 Watts	1 Year		.50 Cent
	EcoClassic 30 Halogen (28W/40 Watt Equiv)	€6.70	28 Watts	2 Years	30% less Energy €2.87 in Money	€2.50
	Philips Genie CFL (8 Watt/40 Watt Equiv)	€1.92	8 Watts	8 Years	85% less Energy €7.66 in Money	€2.50
	Philips Tornado CFL (8Watt /50 Watt Equiv)	€1.92	8 Watts	8 Years	85% less Energy €10.06 in Money	€3.99

A CFL Bulb can pay for iteself in less than 3 months using the above calculations. Further details on my calculations as in my blog article – How to calculate Energy Savings by switching to CFL bulbs

1. Automatically Powerdown your PC at a certain time

Tested on Windows XP Professional

Use a freeware product which will schedule the PC to shutdown or hibernate. One which I have used before is PowerDown by Jorgen Bosman. I have used this in our training room as I found that the majority of PCs were left on (and logged in).

You can install this as a service. Below is the command line I use to poweroff the PCs at 19:01.

poweroff hibernate -warn -warntime 600 -msg “Your pc will hibernate in 10 minutes\nPlease save your work” -scheduled -time 19:01 -days m,t,w,th,f,s,su -create_service

Download File from Here

2. Use BGInfo to display a message.

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