Ben Shephard

Since I’ve switched my energy supplier to First Utility the other week I’ve been wondering where and how I can cut back my energy usage. One of the things I’ve always wondered about is how much energy I use hosting my own website. I have a spare room that I have as a study and I keep my computers in there quietly humming away 24/7. A few years ago I bought a plug in energy meter from Maplin. It was in the sale and I thought it might open my eyes as to how much power I use and where.

Plug in Power Meter

I’ve Left it plugged in the the computer room for ages but I tend to forget it’s there and not look at it before I pull the plug out to move something or there’s a power cut and all my recorded data is lost.

I decided today to see what it had recorded since I last moved the room around about a month ago. It told me it had been running for 836 hours and in that time my kit had used 113 kWh of electricity. This works out at an annual average of 1184 kWh. My total electricity consumption for 2009 was 3627 kWh so hosting my own web site accounts for just under a third of my total electricity consumption. That does seem like rather a lot but what I want to know is would it be worth turning it off and investing in other ways of hosting my stuff such as a VPS. I worked out the cost based on First Utility’s prices which they emailed to me earlier in the week which at the moment is 8.064 pence per kWh so the cost of running my kit for the year works out at £95.48. This pails in to insignificance compared to the cost of my internet connection which is £22.43 a month plus £11 line rental for a PSTN phone line I don’t want. I wish they would just provide the broadband over the line on it’s own but it seems that isn’t possible. This means I spend £401.16 a year on my broadband connection so in total I spend £496.64 a year so now I need to work out what’s cheaper. I worked out my CO2 foot print using the on-line calculator on the National Energy Foundation’s website (click here) which tells me that my kit produces 640 Kg of CO2 every year. Using this I was also able to work out my CO2 footprint for the whole of 2009 which was about 9.25 tonnes over the whole year. This doesn’t include any CO2 produced at work and is just my own personal domestic output. This consists of Electricty 1950 Kg, Gas 3340 Kg and Petrol 1612 Kg but one of the biggest and easiest to solve was the  CO2 produced by my trip to the USA last year which came in at 2393 Kg. I had a miserable time there and it cost me and the environment a small fortune so to save my sanity and the planet I’ll not be going back there again unless I find a really good reason to do so.

So of all the things I can do to help save the planet the best one is to not go on long distance holidays but what else can I do?

If I did move my server to a VPS or some other hosted solution the carbon footprint wouldn’t go away it would just be shifted elsewhere and hidden from me. It may be reduced considerably depending on which option I went for but the trade off is that it would be less exciting for me as a hobby because I like looking after the hardware as well as the software that runs on it as I learn a hell of a lot from it also I don’t think the costs would be significantly less for it to be worthwhile from the adverts I’ve seen. I may be able to make things better by using a less powerful or more economical machine to host things on. Perhaps moving things on to my old laptop would help me save a fairly significant amount.

So my hobby accounts for a third of my electricity usage but what’s the other two thirds made up of I’m wondering. One I can have a pretty good guess at. My shower is a 9 Kw electric shower so for every 20 mins in the shower I’ve used another 3 kWh of electric so that must account for about another 3rd. It’s hard to work out if it’s cheaper to have a bath because gas is harder to measure in the same was I can electric. I suppose solar water heating might help cut down on my water heating costs but the outlay to have something like that installed would be prohibitively expensive. I suppose an interest free loan from the government might help uptake of technology like this but I still don’t think it would give me a nice hot shower first thing tomorrow morning when I get up for work. I’ve cleaned the windows today and I just realised I left the step ladder out with the sponge on the top rung and it had froze to the ladders. Solar is all good if you get lots of sunlight which of course anywhere in the world at night you don’t get any at all so without some really well insulated tanks you wouldn’t be having a hot shower before work. In the day if you get lots of sun then solar is all good but I live in the UK and the only sun that comes out every day without fail in this country is a tabloid newspaper. I suppose the other third would be just general stuff like the kitchen appliances and lighting. Lighting is an area where there is always room for improvement. I use low energy fluorescent lamps all through the house but I think this can be reduced further by using more LED lighting. I bought a set of 120 LED fairy lights for Christmas but I decided to keep them up all year round in my bedroom. They are a nice low level light and only use 3 watts of power. I’d like to get some more LED’s so that I could better light some of the gloomier parts of my house with a minimal impact on my electric bill and perhaps replace some of the fluorescent lamps with LED alternatives if I can.

Other areas I could cut down on are heating by installing more insulation. I don’t know if my walls can be insulated as this house is pretty old but it would be nice if someone who knew about those things told me what was possible with this house. I’ve insulated the loft but perhaps more could be done up there. I’ve got new modern energy efficient windows already so I’m struggling to find other things I can do to the house to keep the heat in.

I could drive a more economical car but the one I have isn’t exactly a gas guzzler and it suits my needs pretty well. I’m quiet a big chap and tend to carry tools and my netbook with me everywhere so a smart car might not be so good for me.

One of the biggest energy using items in my house is the washing machine. I know it’s no turned on all the time but changing habits in how I clean my clothes may make a difference. I just bought a new washer dryer but I try not to use the dryer if I can avoid it. I’ve just measured the energy used by washing my bedding and a few towels. The wash cycle used 0.85 kWh and drying the bedding on it’s own for an hour used 0.93 kWh so drying my laundry on the washing line on a nice day or on the clothes horse in the house could make a tiny dent in my energy consumption but I put the dryer on so I can get it straight back on the bed before I go to sleep tonight.

I think looking at my life style the biggest savings could be made with better switching of my heating. It’s on a timer and thermostat with a manual switch at the top of the stairs. This is all good if your home and want to turn things on or off but the timer puts it on at 5:30pm every day regardless but sometimes I don’t finish work untill late or I go to my parents for dinner so the heating being on then when I’m not home is just wasted because I’m not home to feel the benefit. I really want to come up with a way of remotely controling this stuff from my smart phone that way I can turn the heating on just before I head home so the house is warming up as I drive back and things are only on for the bare minimum.

Anyway for now I’ll be off to bed to dream up how I’m going to achieve this and hopefully some kind of micro generation project too

later

Ben

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