CarbonDown

The Wii fares brilliantly, whilst the Xbox 360 uses more watts than my computers. The TV spoils the Wii celebration, just imagine how much a 46″ LCD TV or plasma screen uses.

Its most likely that the energy use of devices Ive shown so far, is pretty low compared to the energy used to heat our homes & water, to travel, and to cook. But it certainly adds up over time. If you can replace a few 100 watt lightbulbs in your home with energy efficient ones, then you’ll be saving about as much as you use for computers and similar gadgetry. If you can use a smaller screen more rather than a big TV whenever possible, then that will help, as will turning down the brightness (though this doesnt work with every device).

Wow, made it through videobloggingweek2007 without missing a day, though time nearly ran out on me on several occasions. Congrats and cheers to everyone else who made videos all week, for part of the week, or just watched some of the videos. It was fun. I probably used a little more electricity than normal by watching more vidoes than normal, making the videos used negligible extra power than I would normally consume, and if I were normally a heavy TV watcher then Id probably have saved power by watching vlogs instead this week.

Tried editing this on the n95, didnt make a very good job of it because Im rushing again. The strange red glow in close-up shots is caused by the red light on the N95. Anyway by replacing those spotlight bulbs Ive saved about the same amount of energy as it takes to run a computer, so buying efficient bulbs can achieve quite a lot. I think they are going to ban old type bulbs within most EU countries in the next 5 or 6 years. Still I fear most of these savings will be wiped out by larger televisions and digital tv/radio/etc decoders using more power than old analogue stuff!

Here’s less than a minute of footage I shot today on the journey home, by crudely wedging the N95 into a convenient location at the front of the bike. The bike doesnt sound quite that bad in reality, the location of the camera makes it sound louder and nastier I think.

Most of the roads I ride on have parked cars on both sides, so I end up riding down the middle of the road and giving way to traffic from ahead and behind, by pulling over. And as Im one of natures great cowards I dont ride on busy roads at all, I get off and walk.

Watching the video it struck me that the height of the camera is approximately the same as the eye-level of drivers of the old Sinclair C5 electric vehicles that failed over here many years ago. Safety was certainly one of the reasons they failed to take off, and its easy to see why, vantage points that low are probably only safe if thats the only sort of vehicle on the road.

Anyway Im off work for Easter now till Tuesday, hoorah, now I can put a bit more time & effort into the last few videos for videobloggingweek2007. Ive nearly figured out the on-phone editing capabilities of the N95 and it seems quite enough for mobile vlogging purposes. Lets just hope I dont waste the next 2 days trying to figure out how to do uploads straight from the phone to wordpress blog without using email.

Unfortunately our house doesnt have a south-facing roof, so at the moment Im not considering investing quite large sums to get a large scale solar electric or solar hot water system. Instead the plan is to experiment with a small panel that ideally will cost < £500 and put it on the shed roof. Need to get a new shed first though.

Wow this is another exceptionally bad use of video by me, a single picture and audio or text would convey better detail than this video, but never mind. Hopefully I’ll be able to spend a lot more time on Friday & Saturdays videos, and it will show.

Short video of the electric bike I got last year (This one… http://www.powacycle.co.uk/Puma-Electric-Folding-Bike.asp )

More detail on this in future, need to find a lot of time to do these sorts of videos properly and supply more information, but thats not going to happen in this crazy videobloggingweek2007. Wow there sure are a lot of videos already, as a result I am confused about what day it is, feels like Wednesday but its only Tuesday! Im also aware that Ive made very little decent use of video in my videos so far this week, no footage of this bike actually moving for example! Bear with me, I’ll get there in the end.

Oh yeah in the video I mentioned being unhealthy and not being able to drive. I cant drive because I never took my driving test, and I have no particular health disorder that prevents me using a normal bike, Im just extremely unfit and have always struggled to do exercise.

Managed to get an N95 today but not had all that much time to explore its features yet. So not a lot of detail here, and the video isnt great quality due to low light level & recompression. Its too early to tell if I can use this device instead of a computer for a good number of things, so as to make a serious dent in the electricity I use for video, surfing the net, etc. Anyway Im rather tired today, more on this stuff later in this videobloggingweek2007

Here is my first video for videobloggingweek2007, an introduction to a device that measures how many watts appliances are using, and an initial experiment adjusting the brightness of the screen on my iMac, with the desired energy-saving results.

I shot about 20 minutes of footage when experimenting, but the results of these tests are the important thing rather than video of them being conducted. On the one hand video can have more impact, but a database of results would be much easier to search and consume, and as we shall see over the coming days, video uses quite a lot of power to capture, encode and watch. Hopefully I will be able to get my hands on a new mobile phone ths week, the Nokia N95, which may work well enough to use as a lower energy substitute.

Its that crazy time of year again, when some people try to post video every day for a week. I think I participated in 2005 but I didnt manage a video every day, nor have I blogged or vlogged much since. But this seems like a good opportunity to try to kickstart carbondown, which will cover my personal attempts to learn more about issues of energy and sustainability, as well as trying to address my own carbon footprint. Anyway Ive got about 5 hours left to post a video before the day expires, so I better get on with it.

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