GREENer HOUSE

For many of us in South Africa who are fortunate enough to be able to employ people to work in our homes and gardens, saving electricity and water must be a cooperative effort. I have installed the dual-flush toilets, the low-flow shower head and the indigenous garden. But when the garden water taps and kitchen appliances are largely in the hands of people who don’t pay the utility bill, how can we fully control consumption?

Six months ago, I launched an experiment to address this conundrum, and I am happy to declare it a success.

First an anecdote to illustrate how far apart my gardener’s mindset was from mine. Last summer, when we went away for two weeks, I took a chance that good rains would continue and shut off the sprinkler system. (I always shut it off in the summer whenever we have had 25 mm of rain in the past week.) When I returned to Johannesburg, I was delighted to see the city looking lush and green; I knew that my gamble had paid off. As I arrived at my house, however, I was appalled to find my sprinklers spraying full-blast. The next time I saw my gardener, he cheerfully reported that the day I left he had discovered that I had left the sprinklers off “by mistake” and that he had “fixed it” for me.

So when he later borrowed a couple thousand rand to buy materials to build his mother a house, I knew how I could help him pay it back. I showed him my water bills from 2006, and told him that we would follow the 2007 water bills and compare them. As long as the garden remained reasonably green, we would share 50/50 any money we saved on water.

The first change I noticed was that he was using a broom to sweep a brick walkway that he used to hose down. When he washed the car, he used a big bucket, instead of a running hosepipe. And where I had often found him watering parts of the garden that didn’t need it, he now asks first.

My water bills for the last six months have come down by an average of 38 percent, and my gardener’s debt has been cut by R670. I know that some of this is because the garden is more established now and needs less water. The good rains in October also helped. But I am convinced that a major reason is that we both share the same mindset now when it comes to water conservation.

I still have control over the sprinkler system, so the garden won’t go brown, and I know that he is too proud to let plants wither. But I have a hunch that the next time I shut off the sprinklers for a holiday, he won’t be fixing my mistake.

Three aging appliances in my kitchen have been declared beyond repair, which has led me to undertake a lot of research on appliances. A good starting point I have found is Which?, the British non-profit magazine and website that thoroughly tests and reviews consumer products. I will report on my research on dishwashers, etc., when I have completed it. In the meantime, I stumbled upon this page in on the Which? website that has interesting, straightforward, and surprising information on television electricity consumption.

I had always assumed that LCD televisions use far less power than standard CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) televisions, since this is the case with computer monitors, as I reported here in my post on saving electricity in the office.

Which?, however reports that after testing dozens of TVs, it found that a 32-inch CRT TVs use 50-100 watts, similar sized LCDs use 100-200 watts, and 42-inch Plasma TVs (they aren’t made in the 32-inch size) consume 200-300 watts. That’s up to 6 times more than a CRT only 10 inches smaller.

Though I believe the Which? does very thorough and unbiased research, I do think that the full story is slightly more complicated. A revealing chart produced by the Australian government when researching electricity consumption by TVs shows that in the smaller sizes (below 40 cm) , LCD TVs are more efficient on average. This would explain why they are the greener choice for a PC monitor. But CRT TVs don’t experience as great a leap in consumption as they get larger. LCD and Plasma TVs use a lot more electricity with each step up in size. Beyond 60 cm, most CRTs are somewhat more economical, though there is enough variation between models that it is possible to find a large LCD that outperforms a same-size CRT at the plug.

As for Plasma TVs, they are simply energy hogs. The larger ones can draw 500 watts or more. Some guides to televisions will divide the consumption by the size of the TV, which makes plasma televisions look a little better. But I think this is beside the point. One of the most important decisions a television buyer must make is the size, and it is important to know that making do with a smaller television is much better for the environment. If you already own a plasma TV, you can reduce its power usage by turning down the brightness. (Dim the room lights at the same time and you’ll save again.)

And, as I explained in this post, when you’re finished watching, take the consumption all the way down to zero. Don’t put it into standby with the remote; turn it off at the television itself.

I spent the morning meeting with the creator of South Africa’s first Internet carbon-footprint calculator, which will premiere on Greener House in the near future. He is a brilliant young engineer who has just been named the best Certified Energy Manager in South Africa for the year, so you can trust that the calculator will be backed by solid data. Measuring the amount of greenhouse gases produced by a person is a tricky and inherently imprecise task. But he is committed to making the calculator as accurate and as useful as possible.

There are plenty of carbon calculators in the Internet, so why do we need another one? Because the others make assumptions that you live in America, the U.K., or somewhere else that has conditions different to South Africa’s. For instance, if you use a calculator from a country that uses a lot of nuclear power for electricity, the carbon contribution from your electricity consumption will be misleadingly low. And no other country produces significant quantities of petrol and diesel from coal; our calculator will take that into account as well.

We will be glad to consider refinements to the calculator once it is up on Greener House. But we don’t want to just throw up a rough draft, hence the long meeting today. Our aim is to have it up and running by the end of the year. It’s tough, I know, but try to be patient.

Until now, Mondi’s kerbside paper pick-up service has had just one weakness: they collected every other week. It was a bit of a mental challenge to remember whether the last collection date was one week ago or two.

Strain your brain no longer. I just received a notice in my mailbox that starting October 1 Mondi will now collect weekly in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban. (Unfortunately the recycling service does not operate in other cities.) If you don’t know which day of the week they visit your neighbourhood, look for orange bags on the pavement, phone 0800 022 112, or visit www.paperpickup.co.za.

Getting an orange bag takes some effort. Ask for one by phone, and leave a pile of newspapers at the kerb—weighed down by a brick—with a sign begging for a bag. Be persistent. If you’re not sure what can and cannot go in the bag, see this post. The recyclables list is so long that even if you don’t subscribe to a daily newspaper you may be able to fill a bag each week.

The trucks that collect the paper are owned and operated by small businesses, frequently new black entrepreneurs. I traveled around the suburbs for an afternoon with one of them and saw how frustrating it was for him when he would turn his truck down a street and see just a single bag on the kerb—or none at all. With the added convenience of weekly pick-up, every block should now be glowing with orange bags once a week.

Aluminium Roadkill

I can see along my jogging route that Amstel has returned to South Africa. The green cans are starting to litter the road. Until Amstel gets a brewery up and running in South Africa, which could take two years, these are imported from Europe. And they are arriving in aluminium cans.

Two new issues thus face the Amstel drinker. One is that transporting a case of beer from, say, Rotterdam to Durban will send 1.6 kgs of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by my calculations, not to mention another half a kilogram if it needs to be trucked to Gauteng. When bottles arrive in a couple of months, you can double those figures for the extra weight. If that makes you want to check out whether local can be lekker, SAB is pointing Amstel drinkers in the direction of Hansa Marzen Gold. It’s also worth noting that some premium “foreign” beers, such as Peroni Nastro Azzurro are now brewed in South Africa. Heineken comes from next door in Namibia.

The second issue is that making the aluminium cans containing that Amstel probably created more greenhouse gases than shipping it here did. If the cans were made with coal-fired electricity, 24 cans caused 4.5 kgs of C0₂ to be released. I reported about the vices of aluminium and the virtues of recycling it in this post.

Throw away that can, and you throw all of the energy away with it. Recycle it and 95 percent of the energy is saved. With a packet full of aluminium cans (mostly collected on my jogs) I can really light up the face of the scrap collector who rings the bell at my gate each Monday asking for the white office paper I save for him. If you must drink Amstel from Europe, make sure somebody benefits.

Regular visitors to Greener House know that if it has a plug, I like to shut it down completely at night. So I was disappointed to enter my office this morning and hear that my desktop computer hard-drive had been humming all night long. The monitor had switched itself off, but the PC had probably been eating through about a hundred watts for the past 14 hours. The irony is that I had just been reading the night before about PC power consumption and suggestions for ways to reduce it. Leaving the computer on through the night was not one of those suggestions.So I took this as a hint to stop relying on my own good habits and set the computer up to go to sleep even if I’m too dopey to put it to bed. I’m used to computers going to sleep on their own because I mostly work on a laptop. (Laptops use far less power than desktops.) I had assumed that my PC eventually went into standby itself. But like most desktop PC users, I had never set Windows to go into standby if idle. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found that sleep mode is enabled on only about 5 percent of commercially used PCs in the States.

The process is so simple it’s hard to believe it comes from Microsoft. In Windows XP, click Start>Control Panel>Power Options. There, I discovered that my desktop was set—probably at the factory—to turn off the hard disks “Never” and standby or hibernate “Never.” I changed these options to turn the monitor off after 15 minutes, turn off the hard-drive and go into standby after 30 minutes and hibernate after 2 hours.

Standby spins down the hard-drive and puts the machine into power saving mode, but maintains power to your memory so you don’t loose your work and your documents and programs remain open. When a machine hibernates, it saves whatever you have been working on and shuts down more-or-less completely. When awoken—by quickly pressing the power button on my PC—it will return to the state in which you left it, but this takes longer than reviving from standby. On my machine, waking up the CRT monitor alone takes about 7 seconds, waking up the computer from standby takes 12 seconds and from hibernation takes 25 seconds.

At this point you may be starting to remember the advice about computers you once heard from a friend of a friend of a friend. Perhaps you heard that computers use hardly any electricity when they are awake but idle. Or that when the monitor switches into screensaver mode it uses less power. Perhaps the story you heard was that starting up a computer takes more energy than leaving it on, or that hard-drives last longer if you leave them spinning all night.

They are all myths. You will find them well debunked on Michael Bluejay’s page on computers within his excellent website devoted to saving electricity. Walt Mossberg, the personal technology guru of the Wall Street Journal, addresses the last myth here.

Screensavers won’t help you reduce power consumption; the computer and monitor are still working. Screensavers save screens, not electricity. Idle computers use almost as much energy as when doing light work, such as word processing. Starting a computer takes no more power than using a computer, and hard-drives running 24/7 die sooner, not later.If you are about to buy a computer, I recommend Mike Chin’s thorough article Choose an Energy Efficient Computer. His general recommendations are laptops, iMacs and LCD monitors, but he also has specific recommendations for PC processors. Replacing a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) monitor with an LCD model will instantly cut consumption from about 80 watts to approximately 35 watts for a 17-inch model.The most energy efficient computer is one that is off, however, so if you find that a chore, here are some Windows XP shortcuts to make it easier. If you have several windows open, hold down Alt and press F4 as many times as required to close each window and one more time to bring up the Windows shut-down box. Then press the letter U and the PC will turn off safely. If you already have all programs closed, pressing Start-U-U on the keyboard is even faster.

My new power settings are just a backup. I still plan to turn off my PC completely at night—when I remember.

It has always bothered me that South Africans take such an interest in topping off their petrol tanks when fueling. Some have elevated it into a kind of sport. I once watched a man bouncing up and down on his bumper in an effort to slosh the fuel around in his tank and squeeze a bit more in. I’m convinced that petrol attendants have some fancy mathematical formula they use when topping off to get the amount due to a suitably un-rounded number that will maximize their tip when customers say, “keep the change.”

The loser in this game is the air we breathe. Petrol vapours are carcinogenic, and, given a little time and sunshine, they create smog. Overfilled fuel tanks are likely to leak, especially if parked in the sun. Topping off greatly increases the likelihood of a spill, and even a minor spill is bad news. Just a shot-glass (30 ml) of spilled petrol gives off the same volume of smog-forming VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) that a car emits when driving 90 kilometres.

The issue is so serious that in the U.S., nearly every fuel pump you see at filling stations has a “Don’t Top Off” sign on it. Some U.S. States even sponsored a “Don’t Top Off” week, to get the message across. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a whole web page devoted to the subject.

It’s a lot easier to do the right thing if you know it has some direct impact on your wallet, so these campaigns also emphasize that overfilling means paying for petrol your car might never use. Yesterday I read another reason that continuing to add fuel to a tank after the pump has automatically shut off could cost you money. The New York Times ran an article about the tricks some car-owners have used to keep their vehicles going after 200 000, 300 000, and even 400 000 miles. (These are miles, not kilometres.) The Times offered this advice from Toronto mechanic Vladimir Samarin, who has a car-care Web site at www.samarins.com.

Mr. Samarin also warned drivers not to overfill their fuel tanks. “Otherwise you could get fuel into the vapor canister,” he said. If that happens, the charcoal in the canister could find its way into the fuel lines and cause damage. “When you get that first click of the gas pump, stop refueling.”

Of course it would be nice if the government or the petrol retailers could take the lead in this issue. As far as I can tell, they have done nothing. Until they do, tell your petrol-station attendant that his tip will be bigger if he stops at the click.

An article in today’s New York Times highlights a little-known company that is considered one of the greatest success stories in corporate environmental performance. At Interface, a major carpet tile company:

Use of fossil fuels is down 45 percent (and net greenhouse gas production, by weight, is down 60 percent), he said, while sales are up 49 percent. Globally, the company’s carpet-making uses one-third the water it used to. The company’s worldwide contribution to landfills has been cut by 80 percent.

Unfortunately, we can’t buy their carpet here in South Africa. So why do I mention them? Because the story of their transformation is a vivid tale of the power of enlightened consumers anywhere in the world.

What Ray Anderson calls his “conversion experience” occurred in the summer of 1994, when he was asked to give the sales force at Interface, the carpet tile company he founded, some talking points about the company’s approach to the environment.

He looked into the issue and concluded, “I was running a company that was plundering the earth.”

But later in the article, we learn that this epiphany didn’t really begin with his sales staff.

It was questions from customers that prompted the sales force to ask for his environmental views in the first place.

Ray Anderson is now considered a hero for environmental progress. He’s a member of the advisory board of the Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment. I won’t begrudge him that status. But out there somewhere are the anonymous heroes who began the whole process simply by asking their carpet salesperson about the environmental impact of carpet tiles.

It doesn’t cost a cent. Ask the person trying to sell you appliances or office equipment which machine uses the least electricity. Phone the 0800 customer service line on one of those bottles under the sink and ask about the environmental impact of the chemicals inside. You may not get a good answer, but that’s OK. When people are embarrassed because they can’t answer customers’ questions, they start asking questions themselves. Be an anonymous hero.

Winter is a tough time to hold down electricity consumption. Days are shorter so lights burn longer. The cold air begs for hot tea, hot meals, hot water, and hot electric heaters. (See this post on heaters.) Even solar-heated water needs an electric boost in the winter. But there is one easy place to save electricity as the days get colder: the swimming pool.

One of the best things anyone can do to make a greener house is to fill in the pool. Swimming pools waste water, use huge amounts of electricity, and require toxic chemicals. But my kids would kill me if I filled in the pool, and there are ways to mitigate the environmental cost of a pool.

The first priority is to get a pool cover that keeps out dirt and ultraviolet and prevents evaporation. If it’s a bubble cover, it will keep your pool warmer, too. In Namibia the law insists on pool covers to prevent evaporation. A cover will save thousands of litres a year.

Ultraviolet breaks down chlorine, which is why you have to add cyanuric acid to stabilize the chlorine. Put on a pool cover and you can save on both stabilizer and chlorine. Most important, with less dirt and more effective chlorine, you should be able to reduce your pool pump’s running time.

In most homes with a pool, the pump is the second or third largest consumer of electricity, after the geyser. If I followed HTH’s standard recommendation to run my pool pump 12 hours a day in the summer, and if I hadn’t resisted a sales pitch a couple of years ago to trade in my 750 watt pump for a new 1 100 watt model, I would be using 13 kilowatt hours a day to filter pool water, more than half my current total daily consumption.

Ignore HTH’s 12-hour guideline, and rather follow the suggestions of the California Swimming Pool Industry Energy Conservation Task Force:

Reduce filter operating times to no less than 4 to 5 hours per day during the summer and 2 to 3 hours per day during the winter period. This will reduce annual electrical consumption by 40 to 50 percent. Normal and heavier swimming use may require as much as eight or more hours filtration per day. Should water clarity or chemical imbalance indicate inadequate filtration, immediately operate the filter until acceptable water clarity has again been established. If additional filtration is still indicated, increase filter operating time in one-half hour increments until the water remains clear and properly balanced chemically.

I run my pool six or seven hours a day during the summer. Since cold water inhibits the growth of nasties, yesterday I reset the pump timer to three hours for the winter. Eskom struggles to keep up with peak winter demand in the morning between 6 and 10 a.m. and in the early evenings between 6 and 9 p.m., so make sure the timer is not set to run the pump during those hours.

All of this inspired me to do some calculations. A cubic metre of coal can produce roughly 3 000 kWh of electricity. My pool holds roughly 30 cubic metres. So if I kept a 1.1 kw pump running 12 hours a day year-round, as many South Africans do, the coal burned over 18 years to keep that pump going could fill the pool to the brim. Better a green pool than a black one.

Black-throated canary on Eragrostis,
as seen from my office.

Today I looked out of my office window and saw a sight I never expected to see in Johannesburg: bronze mannikins. Just about the tiniest birds in South Africa, these little seed eaters were perched on wild grass stems without even weighing them down. I know some very serious birdwatchers who have never seen a bronze mannikin in Johannesburg. This is just the reason that I have turned the small space outside my office into a patch of bushveld.

At one time, this section of our garden featured kikuyu grass and pom-pom roses. Fortunately the roses were moved before I arrived, so I didn’t have to deal with the guilt of plowing under such pretty flowers. Arthur Mennigke, a.k.a. The Naked Gardener, chose and planted a selection of aloes, acacias, native bulbs and shrubs and wild grasses for the space. My goal was a garden that would require very little water once established, that would feel wild, and would attract birds. He promised bronze mannikins. I didn’t believe him.

In the first year, I was delighted to find black-throated canaries feasting on my wild grasses. These, too, were entirely unexpected, but stayed for weeks and returned again this year. In year two, the mannikins have arrived. Next, Mennigke predicts, I will have blue waxbills. At that stage, I can cancel all further trips to Kruger National Park.

The key drawing cards for these little seedeaters are Eragrostis capensis, or heart-seed lovegrass, and Setaria megaphylla, sometimes called broad-leaved bristle grass or ribbon bristle grass. I won’t pretend that these grasses are particularly beautiful, at least not up close. They tower over my head until they start to bow under the weight of their seed heads. My wife refers to them as “mealie grass.” But imagine the flocks of mannikins, finches, canaries and waxbills that would make Jo’burg their home if more gardeners would restore a patch of the highveld grasslands that once stretched to the horizon.