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The SRP (Salt River Project), who delivers power to the Phoenix-Metro region has posted a website of simple things that you can do right away to combat Energy Vampires. They are well known energy vampires and ones that everyone should be fighting against in their home, because they are simple fixes, many which have been talked about before on this site. Something very cool though, is a energy vampire calculator that tells you just how much energy and its cost is being drained from your home. Well worth the visit to hear there advice and plug some numbers into the calculator!
Sometimes we want to take conservation very serious, because to be truthful, it is a serious matter. There is a lot at stake for our future and our childrens' future to want to reduce energy consumption. Sometimes though, something comes along that is just fun! Here is one of those things! The good people over at TreeHugger.Com compiled a list of unexpected and fun things that use solar power. I just wanted to share that list with you, because I found it interesting, and it brightened my day! Who know you could solar power a bee hive! Here ya go!
So, Meatless Mondays is not quite ready to get back up and going (don't worry, I haven't stopped doing meatless Mondays, I still eat meat free every Monday, and I actually have about 4 months of documentation and articles written almost ready to go). In the future Meatless Mondays will include 2 recipes and experiences with them, they will all be old at first but eventually, they will eventually be an old one, and the one I had the week before, and then eventually the one I had the week before. They will also be posted very early on Monday, so you can try the recipes that day! So, stay tuned.
Today though, we are going to have a brief conversation about toilets. Toilets (next to showers), are the most water using device in most people's homes. First off by just replacing a 3.5 GPF toilet with a 1.6 GPF toilet can save a family of four 16,000 gallons of water per year. That is a lot of wasted water, and wasted money. I have heard many times about replacing toilets, or making sure new toilets that you buy are low flows, but the truth is, many of us are not in a position to buy a new commode, or really can't (you rent).
A reader brought this product to my attention, and I did some research on toilets and new waves of toilets (I will be honest, I am not a toilet expert). The new thing is toilets (or relatively new), is the dual flush system. You have two flushes, one for paper and water, and one for "when you need a full flush" as the demonstration video put it. The flush for just paper and water is just half the tank. The second flush uses the whole tank. Seems pretty reasonable to me. Here is the demonstration video:
The MJSI HydroRight Drop-In Dual Flush Converter is available over at Amazon.com for less than twenty dollars, and is sitting at a four star review right now from almost three hundred customer reviews. Has anyone tried this, or a similar product? What are your thoughts? It might be something that I invest in and play around with and see how it works (hard to judge my water usage, because I don't get charged per gallon like normal people). Let me know what you think?!
Hello all! Justin here, and I am pleased to announce the return and reboot of Slay Energy Vampires. I am sorry for leaving all of you hanging, I took a quick break for the holidays, but when I returned I found that my computer was on the outs, and after many weeks of battling the computer, and other issues I finally started gathering information and idea for the return of Slay Energy Vampires! We are back in complete operation now, hoping to provide you with tips and tricks on reducing your footprint, plus local businesses trying to make a difference, and yes, Meatless Mondays, and my own adventures to make my house just that much energy conscious. I thank you again for the patience, my own person New Year's resolution this year was to make this site 100,000 hits...please help me out, spread the word, send me some links, or heck, even write an article, this is a community here, not just me...
Now with the news!
Coming out ot Tempe, Arizona, there is a new business in town called EcoScraps. EcoScraps offers to takes unusable rotting fruits and vegetables from local restaurants and grocery stores and uses them to turn into nutrient-rich compost and which they then sell back to local nurseries and landscaping companies. This is removing the need to ship in other compost from out of town, and keeping the whole decomposition chain local. According to the press release from the City of Tempe:
This month alone, they will likely create enough compost from what would otherwise go into a landfill to offset the emissions of 13,000 cars for a month.
That's a lot of cars to offset. I applaud companies like this that take the initiative to bring green farming, and sustainable practices to a city and community.
EcoScraps started as a brainchild of Dan Blake who noticed that so much of his food was getting thrown out in restaurants. He started dumpster diving for food from local restaurants and composting at home as an experiment with different methods of composting. EcoScraps is currently in Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. You can find EcoScraps on Facebook: here.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 7:46AM 