Chris82's blog/

Since I am very interested in global warming and climate change discussions and in this area very green politically, I want to write down a few ways how to save a lot of energy and as a result also save quite a lot of money. In the examples I will use my personal price per kWh which is 19,8 Euro Cent for green energy by Greenpeace Energy e.V. :-) Naturstrom AG energy is a little cheaper but I prefer giving my money to Greenpeace because they reinvest all money into new environment friendly plants.

1) Stop buying 60W lamps or 30W halogen lamps and get a decent 10W energy saving lamp. I know they need a few minutes to reach their maximum brightness but you get used to that and with some age they reach their brightness almost instantly.
Example calculation: You use a light 4 hours a day and 340 days of the year. With a 60W lamp this is a total power consumption (TPC) of 81,6 kWh / year. With a 30W lamp your TCP is still 40,8 kWh / year. With the energy saving lamp you just need 13,6 kWh / year. Now when you look at the cost you don't pay 15,99 EUR or 8 EUR but only 2,67 EUR / year. This also clearly shows that the 4 EUR you pay for a energy saving lamp is totally worth it compared to the 1 EUR standard lamp.
Saving Potential: 83%.

2) Buy at least energy and efficiency class A products for your kitchen. A+ and A++ products are usually too expensive compared to the little energy you save. If you have well working B products which are not older than 10 years buying a new stove, dishwasher, freezer etc. will not be immediately worth the money but after a few years you will start saving money. If you have a class C or worse product it's probably time to change or return it if you just bought it. Since especially fridges may contain hazardous material don't just through them away, they require special garbage treatment.

3) Buy energy effienct PSUs if you use a Personal Computer. An average low cost OEM power supply for a Personal Computer like it is in many premade PCs has a power efficiency of around 75% (assumption). This means you put in 100% while your PC only uses 75% of that energy, wasting a quarter of the energy you use up! An energy efficient high quality PSU like the Corsair HSX has an efficiency of around 88% with an average PC.
Example calculation: Your PC requires 100 watts in idle and 160 watts under full load (you have that with a mid-range Core 2 Duo and a mid-range graphics card with intelligent power management) so with the inefficient PSU you actually use 133,5 watts in idle and 214 watts under full load while the high quality PSU only requires 114 watts in idle and 182 watts under full load resulting in savings of 19,5 to 32 watts. Assuming your PC is turned on 6 hours on 300 days of the year and runs 90% in idle and 10% under full load (a normal system is in idle mode most of the time) your bill with the bad PSU would be: 50,45 EUR for 254,79 kWh while with the good PSU you'd only pay: 43 EUR for 217,44 kWh. The "little" savings here show you that replacing a PSU is not necessarily a good thing, you should rather buy the components on your own and put the computer together yourself, you save money this way and only get the components you want and no 50 in 1 card reader nonsense that just crashes your system ;-).
Savings Potential: 14,8%.

4) Even better don't use a personal computer but use a notebook. They are so cheap already that they can easily compete with PCs and they require only 60-80 watts under load even for highend models. In idle they are even more efficient because the mobile CPUs and GPUs have better power management.

5) Turn off your TV damn it! I really mean it, you might think it is turned off but I bet that 98% of you just switch it off using the remote control instead of the TV power switch. This wastes a good 10 watts for your "turned off" TV resulting in costs of 16,48 EUR when your TV is turned off 95% of the time besides that you waste 82,22 kWh which is around 7,5% of the power consumption of a single household in an appartment. By the way, did you know that if all people in Germany would do this we could immediately shut down a complete nuclear plant wasting our environment for thousands of years?

6) Don't be an internet junkie. There are modems, routers, switches, cables, servers all around the world and all of that requires more or less energy to work. It's not easy to calculate how much energy is consumed by a website visit but it's more than you think. Especially things like Google Searches are a power hog as Google uses thousands of servers to achieve such fast search results. So what do we learn from that, use small topic based search engines and don't hit refresh 20 times on your ipernity frontpage to see what's new within 5 minutes ;-). I know this isn't your energy you waste there but you do good to our environment by saving some more and the title to save the energy just to buy a new lens isn't that serious anyway!

7) Use public transport or a bike if possible. I know some people need a car because they live far away from the next train station or city, so they have an excuse. But what about someone living in Berlin who drives 10 minutes to work every day by car? It's a waste of fuel which is very expensive, you have to pay taxes for your car, and it also has to be checked by the vendor every year or so which isn't free either. Since I sold my car I didn't only save 300 EUR of fuel costs I had every year but also around 1500 EUR the checks and repairs had cost every year. You can never ever pay so much for public transport in any city unless you do it on purpose :p. In Berlin there are few places where you can travel a lot faster by car than you can by train, bus, subway or bike.

8) Hmmm what else, well make your suggestions and post your thoughts about this topic. Feel free to tell me why saving energy is complete nonsense as well if you think so :-). I showed some rather special and some more or less general ways to save energy here so let's see what you can come up with :-)