the home of brian haught, graphic designer, gamer, adobe creative suite lover and all around good guy.
Green Living in a Digital World12-22-08
One benefit of the current economic crunch is people are becoming more frugal and quite frankly it is about damn time. Several years back I didn't think much of sleeping with the TV on or using Styrofoam plates. It is a lot easier than you think to live greener and save your self some "bank" at the same time.
The following list is not all you can do, but hopefully it will get you going in the right direction.
- Use hibernate mode(it is not the same as sleep mode!) or even better turn it off.
- Unplug your seldom used electronics or invest in a smart power strip.
- Go rechargeable on those batteries.
- Pay bills electronically.
This may seem like common sense or maybe even silly, and if you are like some of my friends that leave theirs pc on 24/7 then you maybe able to save a nice chunk of change.
For example you have a powerful graphics card and a crt which requires roughly 300 watts an hour x 24 hours x 365 days a year equals 2,628,000 divided by 1000 x the national average of .1194¢ per kWh equals 313.78 a year. Now if you had an LCD monitor, turn the damn thing off when not in use and a more efficient graphics card that pulls 150 watts an hour based on a liberal 10 hours of use a day that equals 65.37 a year. You just saved enough for a new motherboard or an iPhone.
Even when you have electronics such as: printers, scanners, televisions, dvr's, vcr's, dvd players and stereos unplugged they still use electricity. Granted the amount is not much and varys from product to product it still ads up.
If you have a digital camera, you know how fast those batteries can lose their charge. By getting reparable you save yourself money by not buying batteries frequently and you do your part to help our growing landfill problem.
By doing this you save some trees(receipts, envelopes & checks and lower emissions since there are no mail trucks for you own personal vehicles involved.
To read the article that inspired this post click here.