Archive for January, 2007

Measuring my car’s mpg – Ford Fiesta Finesse, 1.4 TDCi

January 30, 2007 at 10:18 pm · Filed under Biofuels, Car, Life style

[Also see my earlier post]

Without specific data being available from the ECU, it’s not completely straightforward or accurate. However, I think it’s reasonable over time.

I kept a record of the fuel efficiency of the vehicle during most of it’s current life using mineral diesel (using a cheap but pretty basic mobile phone app). All I do is record the odometer reading and amount/cost of fuel bought each time – the aim is to always buy a new tank of fuel just after the fuel warning indicator comes on. That way, you can get a reasonably accurate and consistent measure of fuel used since the last odometer reading.

The general conclusion so far is that I’m getting about 5 ltr/100km (or about 47mpg) combined urban/extra-urban. This doesn’t compare well to the Ford spec of around 67mpg combined! No doubt it’s my driving style… (nothing to do with the ultra-conservative simulated driving style of official testing).

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Home resource and energy audit

January 28, 2007 at 6:32 pm · Filed under Life style, energy, home

Many years ago I took part in a school project that involved doing an energy audit. We measured various heat loss parameters for the main building and took meter readings over a period of time.

So I thought I’d do the same thing for my house. I’ve not yet worked out the details of how to calculate heat-loss values for the different parts of the building, but have started to monitor (and graph) my electricity, gas and water usage (now that I’ve a water meter). This Excel spreadsheet template is a first step at monitoring resource usage over time.

It’s possible to also calculate the equivalent CO2 usage but this isn’t straight-forward for electricity (depends upon generation method, transmission losses for your area etc.). I have included a calculation for gas, however. See the Resurgence pages for information on how to calculate CO2 emissions for various energy sources.  Their calculators cover a large range of energy use but offer quite a course resolution (typically one year).  My spreadsheet offers as detailed a look at resource usage in your home as you wish :-)

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Finances

January 8, 2007 at 11:27 pm · Filed under Finance, Life style

Well, this is a somewhat fraught topic and I certainly don’t intend to give out advice regarding how you should use your money in a greener way. Here’s what I’ve done, hopefully there’re some useful/interesting pointers:

Cash ISA with Co-operative Bank – Reasonable balance between social and environmental policy and interest rate :-)

Pension – General mixed share fund. It’s too big a deal to consider experimenting with my pension at the moment…

Investment Trust – I toyed with the idea of a self-select share Maxi-ISA but that can wait. For simplicity and greater spread of shares I bought into the Merril Lynch New Energy Technology Ltd trust.

My mortgage is a regular one. I might consider switching to a green mortgage but early-on (I bought my first house 4 1/2 years ago) monthly payments were the critical factor. Now it’s the pesky redemption penalty that’s the critical factor…

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Furniture – buying a new sofa

January 8, 2007 at 11:10 pm · Filed under Life style, home

Having finally decided to shift our old futon upstairs into the spare room and get a sofa, the next step wasn’t as simple as I thought it might be.  First off, inheriting or finding second hand stuff is more luck than judgement – how long can you wait for the right sofa to come along/become available?  Basically we got sick of waiting and looking and decided to burn some cash on a new sofa.

That brings up it’s own issues.  I’d not realised that the frame is made of hard wood.  Typically I would assume this means tropical hardwood but getting information about sourcing of the timber from high-street shops is very difficult.  dfs in Cambridge hadn’t got a clue and weren’t very interested in looking into the issue for us.  MFI had nothing we wanted but Sofa Workshop were much more pro-active.  I’ve yet to fully substantiate their claims, but apparently their hard wood comes from sustainable East European beech (mainly) and they were keen to discuss the concept (made a refreshing change).

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Stern Report on Climate Change – comments

January 4, 2007 at 8:30 pm · Filed under Policy

The Economist had a few things to say about the Stern Report, positive and negative. Unfortunately you need a subscription to view:

against: http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_RQTNJQP

for: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_RTDRNNT

For a more accessible discussion, look at WorldChanging.

I’m tempted to provide the full text, but The Economist might complain… So I’ll quote some portions and links to other (critical) reviews.

The economic arguments against revolve around the use of two constants, delta and eta, “The characters are Sir Nicholas’s shorthand for two concepts. Delta determines the weight he places on the welfare of future generations that are not yet here to stick up for their own interests. Eta governs his answer to a different question: how much weight should be given to the consumption of the rich relative to that of the poor?”.

The critisism focusses on the choice of values for these constants – the assumptions made will no doubt lead to endless debate and mean that the report is essentially one scenario of many (much like the IPCC climate change prediction scenarios). Depending on how you select values, the burden of costs vary and so do the benefits. Making policy based on the report should certainly take into account the assumptions leading to a particular scenario.

The more pro-angle takes the view that however you might split hairs about the actual costs, these will most likely be small in comparison to future savings – especially when you liken the spending in terms of insurance against potential catastrophic costs.

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Electricity Usage Monitoring

January 4, 2007 at 7:29 pm · Filed under Energy supply, energy

The Electrisave display

I bought an Electrisave wireless monitoring device a while ago (now costs between about £60 and £70). It works by beaming a signal from an induction device connected to my power line to an LCD display in my lounge. I can view the instantaneous (well every 6 sec or 1 min) cost, usage or CO2 output in addition to temperature and humidity (useful heating regulation info).

Although I’d already replaced most of my lights with energy efficient versions and tended to turn devices off, it’s still been a useful guide. In particular, it’s made me think about my baseline energy usage (about 300W) and the huge amount of power that the washing machine, kettle etc. use. Will most definitely be looking for energy efficient versions when replacing (the UK has a reasonable system of labelling white goods with energy efficiency ratings – would be nice to know about the miriad other gadgets too).

Perhaps a campaign to persuade gadget reviewers to test the power usage of the items they review is needed? My PC/server tends to be on all the time (for TV recording etc.) and it would be useful to have readily available info about the expected power consumption of it’s innards.

Knowing your base-line usage may also be useful when deciding if to buy a home generation device – if you know that there will be a consistent 300W requirement then the choice may be easier/better informed.

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