Our progress
Baseline carbon (pp): 20,149 lbs
12-month carbon (pp on 11/16/08): 10,181 lbs
Percent change: -50%
How we are doing it
Reducing our carbon output has always been important to us, and we have been trying to make a difference for a long time. Before the Smackdown started we had replaced a few lightbulbs, set up rain barrels and started composting. We've always had a garden because we love gardening. We thought that we had done just about everything we could do without spending large amounts of money on things like new windows, a new boiler, insulation and hybrid cars. During the past months we have learned that there were many things we could still do, that add up to a lot.
The Smackdown asked us to start tracking many aspects of our life and challenged us to do many small things to reduce our carbon out. Jon is very competitive, so it was important to him to try to complete as many nuggets as possible, whether or not we thought each one would make a difference to our carbon output. Each nugget has made us think about a different aspect of our carbon output. It has been amazing to us how so many little things can really add up to significant change.
Electricity
We finished replacing out all the lightbulbs that weren't CFL. In some cases we experimented with LED lights, such as for the children's nightlight and for some dimmable recessed light fixtures in our living room. Some of the experiments have been great, like the LED in the children's nightlight, but others did not work out as well. The lights in the living room were so dim, we often couldn't tell if they were on! Alicia has insisted that we get better quality LED or CFLs for the living room.
We used the kill-a-watt meter to determine how much power various "optional" things were using in our house. We had a UPS (uninteruptible power supply) that our home network was plugged in to, so we wouldn't lose the network if we had a power outage. We found out that while the network equipment was drawing 12 watts, the UPS was drawing 40 watts at all times! We determined that it wasn't *that* important to us to have the network up at all times. Another surprising power hog was the cable box. We moved that and the DVD player & VCR to a power strip, so we only turn them on when they're needed.
Heating Fuel
We've turned the heat down in our house. We've made the rule that you should put on a sweater and slippers before turning up the heat. Jon's realized that it's worth it to him to go look for a pair of slippers to save the money on the heating bill. While last year we were concerned about keeping the children warm at night, they are old enough to stay under blankets now. We often come into their room to find our son with his whole body, head and all, under the blankets. Alicia has even been known to ask if he's gone downstairs, only to find that she didn't notice the tiny lump under the blanket.
Since Alicia is looking for a new job, she's home during the day. She's been trying to not use extra gas and electricity that we wouldn't be using if she was working. To this end she has found a few tricks: Herbal tea and hot chocolate help her keep warm from the inside out, as well as hydrated!
Also, one of our kitchen windows gets a lot of morning sun. Sitting in the window makes her toasty warm, much like a cat would do. Another trick she uses is keeping her laptop on her lap, so her body absorbs the heat from the computer!
We've been trying to avoid spending a lot of money right now, but one of our windows broke upstairs, so we're having four windows replaced. Alicia has made an effort to learn about replacement windows to be sure that we're getting a good quality window for a reasonable amount of money. We're hoping this will also help with the heating bills. It's too early to have results back on the heating, plus it's been colder than usual this year, but we're hopeful that we will see a major reduction there as well.
Auto Travel
Gas usage - We bought a minivan after we had twins, because it was practically impossible to haul everything we needed in our Passat, especially while Alicia's sister was our nanny and we were three adults and two children. We became very comfortable with our minivan, driving it everywhere. When we started the Smackdown however, we realized that many of our reasons for using the minivan for every day driving, and even for weekend trips, didn't exist anymore. 3.5 year olds have a lot less gear on a daily basis than infants do, so we switched to using the Passat every day. The Passat got better mileage around town, 18-20MPG, vs 12-15 MPG for the minivan. We were very happy driving the little car on a daily basis.
However, it's very important to keep hidden vents cleaned on your Volkswagon. We found out the hard way that they can clog up, flood your car, and rot out your electrical system without having the car in any standing water at all. When this happened to us in August, we tried living with just one car for a while, but quickly found that we were actually doing *more* driving with one car, than we had with two. It was less efficient for us. We ordered a Camry Hybrid, and we've been enjoying the increased fuel economy so far, though we would like our MPG to be even better. We understand that there is a break-in period, and that it doesn't get as good mileage in the cold weather. So far we've been getting about 28-30MPG around town.
The Camry has also taught Alicia how to get better mileage driving any car. There is a gauge that tells you if it's using the gas motor, the battery, neither, or charging the battery. This helps us remember to back off the gas to encourage it to switch over to the battery and to do a lot more coasting than Alicia had been doing previously. The Camry Hybrid also has an MPG gauge instead of a tachometer so you can always tell what fuel efficiency you are achieving. We've seen that there is a noticeable MPG difference going 70MPH vs 80MPH. (You get better mileage at 70MPG.)
Water
We reduced our water usage by almost half with a variety of activities. We started timing our showers, and just the act of timing them resulted in shorter showers, even without really trying. It took some practice, but we determined that if we wake up rested, it's not hard to have a shower under 5 minutes.
While we have water barrels for the garden, we always filled the children's pool with water from the tap so we didn't risk getting them sick from anything that might have washed off the roof (like bird poop). However, when we would empty their pool at the end of the weekend, the children often helped Alicia carry buckets of water from their pool to water the garden. We also started a policy of not flushing after pee, but only when there was poop or a lot of paper in the toilets. This made a dramatic impact on our water usage, cutting it nearly in half, even though we had twice as many people using the toilets at home this year (our twins potty trained last winter).
Hot tips
- Having fewer cars isn't necessarily better. When we had one car Alicia had to drive in with the family, then drive home to run errands and do things at home, then back to MIT to pick up the family, netting 2 trips back and forth to MIT, plus errands. With two cars Jon and the kids drove into MIT at the start of the day, and back home at the end, while Alicia did errands locally from home. This netted 1 trip back and forth to MIT, plus errands. In this case two cars were more efficient than one.
- Everything that has a remote uses some amount of power when not on. Newer appliances use a lot less than old ones. Our cable box was using 30 watts all the time, whether in use or not. We plugged it into a power strip with the DVD player and VCR.
- We tried our dishwasher with heated dry turned off and we were very surprised to find out ceramic dishes and glasses just as dry as when it was on, and our plastic containers were no wetter than usual. We run the dishwasher as soon as it is full, then before we go to work or to bed, we open it up so the plastic containers (we use a lot!) will dry off before we get around to emptying it.
- Use google to learn things, compare results from a few sites to feel confident about facts. For example, I searched on "How to recycle styrofoam" and reviewed several pages until I was confident I had a correct answer. Try it.
- Children are never too young (or too old) to learn to turn out the lights. We've explained to our children many times why it's important to save energy, and they have gotten great about not only turning out lights they don't need, but coming to us to ask us to turn off other things when they're done, like the CD player and the TV.
- It's better to let the house get really cold during the day and warm it up for when you get home, because then the furnace runs steadily when it comes on, rather than cycling on and off while you are away. It's much more efficient to run it steadily.
- You can compost hair and dryer lint. Pretty much anything organic that is not protein or grease can be composted in a typical outside compost bin.
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