GREENer HOUSE

95 right? More likely wrong.

The conversation after Sunday lunch somehow migrated to the topic of octane in petrol. A woman was complaining that her husband makes her buy premium 95 petrol even though it costs more. The husband, who drives a Prius, was defending the extra expense on the grounds that the extra octane makes the engine run more efficiently, reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

I had never heard this before, and any idea that might reduce C0₂ emissions catches my ear. Was I unwittingly damaging the atmosphere by my frugal habit of buying the cheaper petrol? I had to look into this.

One of the best sources of information available was an Engen FAQ on octane, which confirmed, as I had suspected, that we cheapskates are right. “The great majority of vehicles inland . . .  are satisfied by 93 octane,” the website explains. “The use of octane grades higher than your vehicle actually requires will cost you more, cost the country more and have a negative environmental impact.”

The FAQ explains that this is because:

“There will be no additional benefit to driveability or performance of your vehicle if you use a higher grade than it requires. Petrol with a higher octane requires more severe refining and greater energy use in the production process. If not offset by greater fuel efficiency of the vehicle using the fuel, this extra energy use is wasted energy. This wastage results in higher emissions of greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide), which harm our environment.”

What the Engen website did not explain is the relationship between octane and altitude. Octane is purely a measure of how petrol reacts to pressure. Higher octane fuels will not ignite prematurely under higher pressure, which could cause engine knocking. But the Highveld altitude has a low ambient air pressure, which reduces the pressure inside most engines and thus reduces the need for octane. I spoke to John Fitton, an independent petroleum industry consultant, who said that most engines requiring 95 octane at the coast—as is recommended in the manual for my Honda Jazz—only need 91 octane in the Highveld.

South African regulations allow for three grades: 91, 93 and 95. At low altitude, 95 is the only grade available. Highveld petrol stations offer 93 and 95, but 91 isn’t sold at all in South Africa. Fitton told me that this is only because the petrol retailers are trying to satsify ill-informed customers. “Consumers think octane is power,” he said.

Fitton pointed out that the lower octane requirements at higher altitude do not apply to turbocharged engines and a minority of newer engines with gasoline direct injection. (These engines are sold under a variety of brand names such as Mercedes-Benz’s Charged Gasoline Injection, VW’s FSI and Ford’s EcoBoost.) Owners of these cars should obey the instructions in the car manual whether they are in Lesotho or Lambert’s Bay. For the rest, Fitton said, “There’s no advantage to using the higher octane; you’re just going to spend more money and emit more C0₂.”

White lies, palm-free

The other day, my daughter asked for help with a school assignment that required her to write a list of things she could do to prevent deforestation. Her list already included some obvious items to do with saving or recycling paper, but she needed more. I explained that because tropical forests are being ripped up to make way for palm-oil plantations, some people are avoiding products made with palm oil, such as Dove soap. “But Dad,” she protested, “then why do WE use Dove soap?”

Why, indeed? Lacking enough knowledge about the alternatives, I had allowed our family to stick with this old habit. I knew that the main culprit in the expansion of the palm-oil plantations was biodiesel for the European market. But significant quantities go into soap and foods, so it was worth looking for alternatives. These proved to be difficult to find. In my local Pick n Pay, every bar of soap had either sodium palm kernelate, sodium palmate or sodium palmitate on its list of ingredients. Liquid soaps never have these ingredients, but they come in wasteful, disposable pump packaging. (They also probably have other unsavoury ingredients, but I already steer clear of antibacterial soaps and I’m just trying to save the rainforest for now.)

The trick seemed to be finding a bulk refill liquid soap so that I could keep reusing the pumps that are already in my house. Single-use refills invariably come in unrecyclable pouches, so they’re not particularly helpful. I never found bulk hand soap in any ordinary store, but a factory shop near my home carries five-litre containers of Plush Pearly Lotion Soap. It has no list of ingredients and I have no way to verify the “biodegradable” claim on the label. I am confident that it contains no palm oil, however. It may not have a particularly exotic scent or produce the most luxuriant lather I’ve ever come across, but it works very well. I quietly placed it in every bathroom and shower in the house, and no one has even noticed. And at R94.50 for five litres, I calculate that it costs one-quarter the price of single-use pumps by volume. So saving the rainforests is saving me a few rands to put aside for a rainy day.

Lights out for cold

When the water began pouring out the door of our ancient washing machine onto the kitchen floor, I finally accepted that it was time to buy a new one. During a previous, failed round of shopping for a washing machine, I was put off by all of the conflicting claims about the efficiency of different washing machines and the confusing range of options. Did I want steam cleaning? Would a hot-water inlet save electricity? But I relaxed when I realized that none of these complications really matter. Any washing machine with an A rating from the EU will be relatively efficient in its use of water. And if you wash in cold water, electricity consumption is practically a non-issue.

I discovered to my surprise, however, that this revelation does not suddenly make choosing a washing machine simple. At the first appliance store I visited, the basic Bosch washing machine that I wanted to buy did not have a cold-water option. The lowest temperature allowed was a warm 30 degrees. To buy a Bosch machine with a cold-water option, I would have to pay R2,700 more. The basic machine is efficient, with an A rating, but even at the lowest temperature setting, I would at least double my energy consumption compared to my old, inefficient machine on cold.

I also encountered a lot of resistance from salespeople about cold-water washing. The usual line is that the washing powders work better in warm water. This may be technically true but practically irrelevant. What I know is that in any line-up at school, my children’s white socks and white shirts look brighter than most of the others. My theory is that any advantage warm or hot water may have in removing grime is countered by the grey tinge that the whites pick up from colours that bleed, even if the wash is largely separated into light and dark loads. Besides, the latest Skip packaging says “works just as well in cold water.” The fact that our washing dries in the Highveld sun also makes it brighter than tumble-dried laundry.

At another store I did find LG and Samsung machines that allowed independent temperature settings, including cold. Both LG and Samsung get top marks for their washers in recent quality ratings by J.D. Powers. I chose the Samsung because its dimensions fit better under our kitchen counter.

I wish I could say that my new Samsung washer (model WF8500NHW) is the ultimate choice for cold-water washing, but I have encountered two disappointments in using it. The first is that each time I turn the appliance on, it resets to 60 degrees. I must remember to change it to cold before each wash. The second is that on one useful wash cycle, synthetics, it refuses to go to any temperature other than 40 degrees.

These obstacles are surmountable. We have become accustomed to washing on the longer, cotton cycle and resetting the temperature each time. My Watts Up meter tells me that I’m using less than 0.2 kilowatt hours per wash, which is a fraction of the consumption for a hot wash in the most efficient machine available. But I would advise anyone in the market for a cold-water washing machine to ask a lot of questions or watch a machine in action before handing over your money.

The new view from my lounge

Regular GreenerHouse readers know that I believe a closed-combustion wood stove is one of the greenest ways to heat your home. (And that burning wood in an open fireplace is perhaps the worst.) Early this year, I finally decided to put my funds where my flue is. I kept quiet about this at first, because I thought I should experience a winter’s worth of cold weather before reporting on the results.

First, the numbers: I already had a fireplace with an inefficient Jetmaster in it, so rather than a stove that juts out into the room, I opted for a fireplace insert. The Danish-built Scan 3-5 insert I purchased from Cosy Heating cost a steep R27,000. There are less costly stoves and inserts out there, but these high-tech wood-burners are never cheap. Running costs are a different story. A cubic meter of wood cost me R600 and lasted the winter, though we did escape Gauteng for three of the coldest weeks. Since buying that first load of wood, however, I have suddenly become aware of all the free firewood suburban homeowners leave on the roadside. My kids tease me about this freeloading, but I’m only saving my neighbours the cost of hauling the wood to the dump. Long before the next heating season begins, I have at least a year’s worth of wood that didn’t cost a cent. Since we used our Rinnai LPG heater much less, mostly in the morning, our gas consumption fell from about 2½ 48kg bottles for a winter to less than one bottle, saving me about R2300. A rough calculation, ignoring the cost of capital, suggests that it will take me about 16 years to recoup the R27,000 outlay. If I had been relying primarily on the gas-guzzling Jetmaster to warm my lounge, I would be confident of a relatively quick payback.

But my reasons for switching to wood were more psychological than financial, and I’m happy to report that the emotional payback was instantaneous. The romance, beauty and warmth of the fire drew my family out of their rooms to congregate in the lounge. The children repeatedly asked to eat supper in front of the fire. I usually found the 15 minute task of preparing and lighting the fire to be an earthy pleasure that carried me back to my childhood. Knowing that all of these benefits were fossil-fuel free heightened my enjoyment immensely. Since the burning wood is close to carbon neutral, my reduction in LPG consumption cut my household annual carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 300 kilograms. If I had been heating with electricity the figure would be even higher.

At times I was tempted to kick myself for not installing a wood stove years ago, but one blistery burn on my hand reminded me that little children and wood burning devices require careful thought on safety issues. My burn was a result of hastily ignoring the cardinal rule to have both hands gloved when restocking the stove. A small child could be burned just by touching the glass, which reaches hundreds of degrees. Still if I had to start from scratch, I would have a wood stove and a Rinnai gas heater, using the wood stove sporadically and only when I felt comfortable about safety while our children were young and relying on it more heavily as they became old enough to understand the risks.

Even as the heat of summer approaches, I take comfort every time I walk past my woodpile, knowing that I have evenings in front of the fire to look forward to when winter returns.

Since this blog is dedicated to finding everyday solutions for environmentally-concerned South Africans, I don’t usually stray into political issues. But my comments on the new carbon tax on automobiles, which appear in the latest issue of The Star Motoring, are relevant to the decisions car buyers make. Starting in September, the government will be adding a tax to any car that emits more that 120 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre.

At 75 rand per gram above 120 g/km, the tax can add up. So check the website of the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of South Africa for the carbon emission of the vehicles on your list before you head to the showroom. Despite the howls of protestation from the auto industry, I found a surprising number of cars that will attract no tax. Here’s the list:

Audi A4 2.0 TDi 100kW, Citroen C1 1.0i and C3 1.6 HDi, Daihatsu Charade 1.0, Fiat 500 1.2, Ford Fiesta 1.6 DV6, Honda CR-Z  Hybrid, (as well as the anticipated hybrid Jazz), Peugeot 107 and 207 1.6 HDi, Smart fortwo, Toyota Prius (the cleanest of the lot) and the VW Golf 6 1.6 TDi, Polo 1.6 TDi, and CrossPolo 1.6 TDi. BMW’s 320d Dsl comes so close to the mark that the tax will have no noticeable impact on the sticker price.

And in case you missed the latest Star Motoring, here are my thoughts on the tax:

The “debate” over the carbon tax on new cars is hardly a debate at all. The Retail Motor Industry’s opposition to a tax based on vehicle carbon dioxide emissions receives plenty of publicity, and the government fails to rise to the defense of the new tax, due to be implemented in September.

But there are plenty of good arguments for taxing CO₂ in the car showroom that are not being heard. The decision made at the point of sale is a fateful one, and not just for the new owner of the car. Should the buyer naively choose a thirsty vehicle without calculating the lifetime fuel costs in advance—a common occurrence—the environment will lose regardless of what happens after he drives away from the dealer.

We do not live in Japan. Cars do not head for the scrapheap after 100,000 kms. They are passed down the economic ladder to poorer and poorer drivers until they literally fall apart. So if the new owner of this vehicle suddenly turns green or tires of paying dearly at the pump, he will sell it on to someone else to do the polluting for him.

Similarly, if he decides to drive less to compensate for his fuelish vehicle—the alternative suggested by the motor industry—the car will last longer. He may be delaying its ultimate output of CO₂, but if the car will last 300,000 kms and emits 200 grams of CO₂ per kilometre, it will eventually send 60 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

If, however, the new tax prods him to save R5250 by purchasing a vehicle that emits 130 grams/km instead, the planet will be spared 21 tons of CO₂ in that single decision.

The auto retailers do have some reasonable proposals to protect the environment. They are correct that a carbon tax on fuel gives drivers of both new and used vehicles a flexible incentive to save by driving less. They argue convincingly for stricter fuel guidelines that will give South Africans access to the cleanest new engines and improve the emissions of existing cars as well.

But global warming will not be stopped by drivers cutting back on kilometres. It will not go away because our fuel is cleaner. Nor will it be fixed by a carbon tax on inefficient new cars. It will take all of these approaches in combination and many more.

Many eminent scientists believe that to keep the earth from warming into the danger zone of higher than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, greenhouse gases will have to cut by 80 or even 90 percent in the developed world. We don’t need to choose the single best solution among many; we need to adopt all reasonable solutions.

The carbon tax on new vehicles is not perfect. It addresses only one facet of the problem, and the tax is calculated into the sticker prices instead of staring consumers in the face. But we consider it entirely acceptable to fund the government with imperfect taxes on such virtues as saving (interest tax), earning wages (income tax) spending (VAT) and running a successful business (corporate profits tax). Compared to these, a tax on the polluting capacity of new vehicles smells like a rose.

His                                          Hers

I received an email today from someone asking whether Jetmasters use a lot of gas. It’s a question that I answered best a few years ago when I wrote about heaters for Fairlady magazine. So I’m reprinting that article below.  Other GreenerHouse posts on heating can be found here and here.

Warm House, Cool Planet

The battle of the sexes erupted in our lounge one recent winter when our creaky Westpoint oil heater finally conked out. To replace it, my wife demanded something that flickered yellow, glowed orange and suggested romance. I insisted on something calculated to maximize efficiency, easy on my green conscience and not too hard on my wallet over the long-term, either. In the end, there was only one way to keep the peace: His and hers heaters.

Chilly consumers today are faced with a wider range of home heating options than ever before. You can plug in convection heaters, oil-filled radiators, or fan heaters. You can light anthracite in a fireplace, a convector, or an airtight stove. You can install electric heating wires underfloor, undertile or undercarpet. Gas heaters may be radiant or convective, flued or unflued, rollabout, built-in or freestanding, and any combination of the above. To add to the confusion, what looks cheap today may cost more down the line. And more importantly, what appears clean may force the environment to pay a price for generations to come.

South Africans have made electricity their first choice for home heating, encouraged by some of the cheapest kilowatts in the world. But Eskom derives 88 percent of its power from the dirtiest of fossil fuels: coal. Think of the electric main arriving at your house as a little pipeline of coal slurry. For every 100 rand on your electric bill, more than a quarter tonne of carbon dioxide has been pumped into the atmosphere on your behalf. The Australian Consumers’ Association has calculated that in equally coal-dependent Sydney, where winters are a little cooler than Cape Town’s, but considerably warmer than Johannesburg’s, warming a house with electric heaters can contribute 3.4 tonnes of CO2 toward global warming each year, far more than any other energy source they investigated.

In the resulting global greenhouse, the last of Mt. Kilimanjaro’s glacial ice will melt in 2015; South Africa’s drought-plagued maize crop will fall by a fifth in the next 50 years; and rising temperatures will trigger massive extinctions of sensitive fynbos flowers. It may be too late to stop some of these catastrophic projections from becoming reality, but I would rather not have them on my conscience. I moved down the list to other heating options.

Ironically, burning anthracite coal at home can produce far less carbon dioxide than heating with electricity. It depends on how you burn it, however. Throw the nuggets into a hole-in-the-wall fireplace, and up to 90 percent of your heat and coal-budget goes up the chimney. This black option makes electricity look positively green. Modern, tapered fireplaces and convectors improve the heat output, but the cleanest, most efficient option is an airtight heating stove. These pricey heaters—nearly R8 000 for Franco Belge’s popular Belfort stove—combine high-tech inner construction with an old-fashioned, cast-iron exterior to convert 65 to 85 percent of coal energy into heat for the room. In contrast, three-quarters of the coal energy that goes into electricity is lost in generation and transmission.

(more…)

Our morning got off to a curious start, to my mind. When my 17-year-old finally awoke, my wife asked if she wanted to come along for a jog.

“No,” she replied, “I have an extra maths lesson in one hour.”

“That’s fine,” I said, to my wife. “You run, and I will walk her to maths.” (1.8 km away)

“Walk?,” exclaimed my wife, “She doesn’t have time for that; she has tons of homework.”

If the humour of this conversation does not immediately occur to you, perhaps you should exercise your mind. Our culture has compartmentalized each aspect of our lives so completely that exercise is a specialized activity done purely for its own sake and worth the time it requires. Traveling to school, work, shops, friends or errands is a separate activity, to be done as quickly as possible, by car. Using a slower mode of transport is a waste of time, even if it involves exercise. But my calculations show that traveling more slowly actually saves me time, in two ways.

I jog for exercise and pleasure and cycle to get around and also for pleasure. It horrifies me to see people who will ride a bicycle all the way to the Magaliesburg on a Saturday morning for fun, get home, shower and hop in the car to get to the post office. I’ve seen this happen.

My longest regular ride is to a weekly voice lesson. It’s a 7.5 km trip by car that takes 15 minutes, or a cycle of anywhere from 25 to 35 minutes. On the morning of my voice lesson, I skip my usual one-hour jog, saving the same time that it will take me to cycle in both directions. Jogging and then driving would together take an hour and a half. Cycling takes one hour. 60 + (15 x 2) – (30 x 2) = 30. I save a half hour.

That’s not all I save. I don’t keep track, but I figure that sometime this year I will have made my hundredth cycle to my lesson. 100 x (7.5 x 2) = 1,500. That’s 1,500 kms of driving I have saved—farther than Johannesburg to Cape Town—and 150 litres of petrol worth well over a thousand rand. The environment has been spared more than 350 kg of carbon dioxide.

Let’s exercise our maths some more. A health study following more than 5,000 people over 40 years concluded that exercise equivalent to walking for 30 minutes a day for five days a week adds 1.3 to 1.5 years to your life.  Do those regular walks for 30 years, and you will spend 234,000 minutes walking, (30 x 5 x 52 x 30 = 234,000) but will have added 735,840 minutes to your life. (1.4 x 60 x 24 x 365 = 735,840.) So the averages tell me that the 20 minute stroll to her maths lesson added perhaps an hour to my daughter’s life. 735,840 ÷ 234,000 x 20 = 62.89. And, she later reported, “It was a pleasant walk.”

1 + 1 = 2.

After two weeks of municipal strikes, the wheelie bins lining the roads are starting to bulge . . . and smell. There’s one plus to this, however. Since the surplus of refuse is literally lifting the lids of the bins, I’ve been able to get an easy look at what people are throwing away. To a large extent, they are throwing away greens. And there’s nothing green about that.

One of the most dangerous myths about the environment is that it is better to send something biodegradable to a landfill than something that will last a hundred years, like a plastic bottle. Quite frankly, that’s a load of garbage.

The last thing you want to happen in a landfill is biodegradation. Deep in a landfill, in the absence of oxygen, bacteria break down plant material into methane. This gas is 21 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. If garden waste is composted or left to decompose in the garden, it will give off some carbon dioxide, but not more than it absorbed when it was growing. So sending plants to the landfill is at least 21 times worse for the atmosphere than composting them.

Grass clippings are the worst, since they decompose much faster than, say, twigs. It is impossible to precisely calculate these things, because of the many variables in landfills, but a reasonable estimate based on a thorough scientific report, is that 1 kg of garden waste in a landfill will give off 77 grams of methane. This means that a full, standard black refuse bag (750mm x 950mm) containing  14 kg of grass clippings will give off as much greenhouse gasses as burning 9.5 litres of petrol by driving nearly 100 kilometres. Recycling the equivalent quantity of plastic—the same bag filled with 3 kgs of empty PET plastic bottles—would save less than a sixth as much greenhouse gases as composting that bag full of grass.

Our lawn space is considerably smaller than many suburban gardens. But my gardener says that in the summer, he mows about two bags worth of clippings twice a week. So in some months, our grass clippings would be causing as much damage to the atmosphere as the electricity consumed by our house, if we were throwing these clippings out with the garbage.

But we don’t. I don’t have much energy for composting, so just a fraction of the clippings go into a somewhat neglected compost pile, which nonetheless manages to produce some good compost in time. The rest is stored in reusable large woven polypropylene bags until we have a carload. Then I haul them a couple of kilometres to the nearest Pikitup garden refuse transfer site, so the municipality can compost for me. It’s a small inconvenience to keep my grass truly green.

I keep track of my fuel economy with every fill-up. It’s a little obsessive, I know, but I’ve learned quite a lot from seeing the differences in economy between cars, drivers, seasons, tyres, etc. There is good research to show that when people are aware of consumption, they tend to reduce it. It’s also good to know whether the fuel economy gauge in your car is accurate. In my experience, the gauges always make your fuel consumption look better than it really is.

I’ve made the process very simple for myself by creating an Excel spreadsheet that instantly calculates kilometres per litre and litres per 100 kilometres, with a running average for the last ten fill-ups. Now I’m making it simple for you, too, with a downloadable blank spreadsheet that has all of the formulas to make those calculations. All you have to do is reset your trip odometer at each fill-up, record the number of kilometres on the till slip—which already has the litres printed on it—and enter those two numbers on the spreadsheet.

To have your own copy of the spreadsheet, click on this link:

FuelEconomy

You should then be offered the option of opening it directly in Excel or saving it. Either option works, but if you choose to open it directly and then wish to save it—using Save As—you must be very careful to save it in the folder where you keep spreadsheets. It will not automatically opt for the My Documents folder.

After using it, if you’re not pleased with the fuel economy you see, try my 10 Unconventional Tips for Saving Petrol.

Note: FuelEconomy.xls was scanned with a fully updated version of Norton AntiVirus 2009 immediately before it was uploaded to GreenerHouse. No viruses or other security risks were found. That said, GreenerHouse promises not to take credit for your improved fuel economy if you promise not to make GreenerHouse responsible for any troubles with your computer or your spouse arising from the use of this file.

For years, I have tracked my household electricity consumption, sometimes on a daily basis. Knowing my daily kilowatt hours has taught me much about the impact of heaters, oven, clothes drier, and especially my solar hot water system, and how it is affected by usage, weather and seasons. It has helped me set targets for conserving electricity and to monitor my progress. And it has helped me to catch problems quickly. If I see a sudden leap in my kilowatt hours, I know I will find that the pool pump has been left on override, or the geyser is drawing electricity when it shouldn’t.

There are fancy devices out there—not available in South Africa—to bring all of this information into your home. One day I would like to own one. But I do this all with my ordinary municipal meter and a simple, but effective Excel spreadsheet. I have now created a downloadable blank version to make tracking your electricity consumption incredibly easy, even if you know nothing about Microsoft Excel. All you do is fill in the date and your current meter reading. (The final digit on the meter is normally a decimal, which I ignore or round off.) The spreadsheet will calculate the average daily consumption since you last took your reading. To try it out, click here:

ElectricityMeterReadingsBlank

Your computer should ask whether you wish to open it directly in Excel or save it. Either option works, but if you choose to open it directly and later save it—using Save As—be very careful to save it in the folder where you keep spreadsheets. It will not automatically opt for the My Documents folder.

I hope it helps you save electricity, or at least gives you some ammunition when fighting the municipality over outlandish readings.

Note: ElectricityMeterReadingsBlank.xls was scanned with a fully updated version of Norton AntiVirus 2009 immediately before it was uploaded to GreenerHouse. No viruses or other security risks were found. Still, GreenerHouse can take no responsibility for any consequences arising from its use.