Bikes and Style

Nice writeup in the NY Times about women making bicycle riding stylish. This may seem like a bit of gloss, but for bikes to become widely adopted as a primary mode of transportation, they have to go beyond being merely utilitarian and green and become part of people's identity. Cars are advertised for their style and associated in commercials with character traits having nothing to do with the car itself. The more that bicycles can compete with cars on that level, the better.

E/Z on the A/C

The first thing to know about central air conditioning is that turning the thermostat way down doesn't make the house cool down faster. The thermostat is not like a throttle or an accelerator pedal in a car, but instead simply turns the A/C on or off. It matters to know this, because the tendency otherwise may be to turn the thermostat way down in an effort to cool the house quickly, then forget to adjust it later on. The A/C ends up running and running, attempting to cool the house to a temperature lower than you actually want or need. The best thing to do is set the thermostat at the temperature you want. The house will cool just as quickly.

A central A/C unit typically draws a whopping 3500 watts of energy while on. I've come to associate the hum of the A/C with the blowing up of mountaintops in West Virginia, which may be the source of coal used to generate those watts. Most people are oblivious to such dramas hidden behind the facade of everyday domestic life.

The second thing to know is that ceiling or floor fans, which only use 20 or 30 watts of electricity while running, can help you cut back on A/C use. What we've found, as we progressively try to trim the use of A/C in the house, is that it's possible to gain enough comfort on hot days by using a mix of ceiling fans and A/C, with the A/C on just enough to lower the humidity in the house. Of course, when the A/C is running, all the windows have to be closed. Otherwise the heat and humidity from outside just pours right back in.

Our central A/C system, while not the worst, is not exactly state of the art. It pushes coolish air through a labyrinthine system of ducts, and sometimes labors to bring the house temperature down below a certain point. With the thermostat set at 81 on a 95 degree day, it cuts the humidity nicely, then turns off. The fans do the rest. Set it at 78 and it may lumber on for long periods without achieving much gain in comfort. Some may think 81 sounds a tad high, but fans are said to make it feel 4 degrees cooler, and over time our bodies have grown accustomed to a broader range of temperatures. A little bit of adaptation now could save a lot of adaptation later on.

A couple degrees adjustment of the thermostat, then, can make a big difference in how much the A/C runs. If it's running constantly, try nudging the thermostat upwards to give the A/C, and the planet, some relief. Wear shorts and t-shirt, or something similarly light, and let the fans do the rest. Stimulate the local economy by spending the energy savings at the ice cream store.

Staying Cool With Raw Beet Salad

We're back in the kitchen here, for another segment of Climate Change Cookery.

For most of my adult life, I have been a passive lover of beets. Passive in the sense of eating them only when they present themselves in a prepared form--at a salad bar or in a pickle jar. I took their red color to signify the presence of important nutrients not necessarily present in other foods.

It never occurred to me to cook them myself until recently, and immediately a serious obstacle presented itself. They take a long time to cook, and in the middle of summer, in the middle of the unfolding climate change debacle, it's hard to contemplate boiling anything on the stove for long periods, or firing up the oven. Hot house, hot planet.

All of this was solved by friend Dorothy, who served a delicious raw beet salad at one of her dinners. Recipes can be found easily on the internet, but an improvised approach involves peeling and grating the beets, adding some olive oil and an acid like vinegar, lemon or orange juice, and throwing in some chopped parsley, ground nuts, and something oniony like chives. Some recipes call for goat cheese. Another friend added corn and grated carrots to expand the nutritional aspect.

Remote Control Energy Thermostat

Here's an interesting innovation that could help bring homes into the modern age. If you think about it, houses have remained stubbornly primitive in their inability to tell us about themselves. Unlike a car--a far less expensive item--a house can't tell you how much energy it's using, has no remote control features, no sensors to tell you if something's amiss, etc., etc.

I recently heard an ad for some sort of remote control feature by Schlage. An internet search yielded a link to a $150 thermostat, and some reviews at amazon.com. From reading the reviews at amazon.com, if becomes apparent that the device can be just as easily used to increase one's use of energy (e.g. turn the A/C on before you arrive home) as to reduce it. But just as people are asked to turn off their cell phones at the beginning of a concert, the concept of a room full of people being able to turn down their homes' energy use via cell phone remote control is appealing.

Savings From Composting Food Waste

A few local businesses are starting to discover how much money can be saved by recycling more of their waste stream. Priscilla Hayes of Rutgers University tells us that the Hyatt Regency of Princeton saved over $10,000 recycling food waste in 2009, its first full year of recycling. I've heard that, at McCaffery's Supermarket, they saved some $40,000 by diverting their food waste from the landfill.

A Strategy for Efficiently Lighting Your Home

Recessed lighting can be a wasteful way of lighting rooms in your house. If they are on dimmer switches, and/or use halogen lights, they can be expensive to retrofit with compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs). A friend recommends the following approach to reducing dependence on recessed lighting, while still having a pleasing light.

"My solution at home is to keep the halogens dimmed and use large CFLs in torchiere style lamps for the primary lighting in those rooms. Perhaps something like this:"

http://www.scienceclarified.com/Ga-He/Greenhouse-Effect.html

The link provides detailed info on torchiere lighting. Read down a ways to learn about torchiere lamps that use compact fluorescent bulbs rather than the potentially dangerous and less efficient halogens(they get very got and could start a fire if the lamp is knocked over).

Snow, Climate Change and National Debt

What matters a snowflake? Minute and delicate, blown this way and that, it's surely not worth a second thought. And yet, given enough of them, they can shut a city down.

Last week, the late night news reveled in the danger of snow. A tree landed on a parked bus. A falling limb nearly hit a pedestrian. The camera lingered on a roof line, supposedly imperiled by the weight of six inches of snow. Don't go out, whatever you do.

The news anchors act like they're watching out for us, but they don't seem too concerned about the other gathering storms, the depositions of CO2 and debt that will never melt away.

Numbers, like snowflakes, accumulate, each one of little import, but together transform the world we thought we knew.