Green Living

CFL bulb from ipaa dot org slash Blog slash question mark p=301

(image courtesy of http://www.ipaa.org/Blog/?p=301)

There’s a lot of kerfluffle around the Interwebs lately about the supposedly dangerous levels of mercury released if you break a CFL light bulb.

I believe the most widely spread story crazy Internet rumor is about a woman in Maine who broke a CFL bulb in a bedroom, was quoted $2,000 for cleanup, and a month later that bedroom is still closed off with tape and plastic.

I did a little research, being the sort of library-law nerd that I am. Before I spring my findings on you, a question: how many times in your life have you broken a light bulb?** Me? Never. Not one broken light bulb in 22 years of living on my own. How about you?

On with the myth busting: The story above about the woman in Maine is only sort of true and blown way out of proportion.

The Maine resident did break a CFL bulb in her bedroom. The Maine Department of Environmental Protection says they told the woman that one option was to hire a HazMat team (at great expense, no doubt). How about that room being taped off for a month after the breakage? The homeowner did that herself.

Read the full report on Snopes.com <here>, which also includes links to the federal Department of Environmental Protection’s guidelines on handling broken CFL bulbs. In addition . . .

**If you’re old like me, you might remember when most thermometers contained mercury too. My Mom broke one once. We scooped up the mercury blobs on a piece of cardboard paper, put them inside a plastic bag, wrapped the bag in paper towels and tossed it in the trash. It was kind of fun to see the little blobs rolling around the linoleum. I actually touched one. And I’m not <very> crazy. Yet.

True, you shouldn’t lie down and roll around in the stuff, but you don’t need to panic and succumb to crazy internet rumors either.


heather

Heather Barr is a Realtor. She's a chow hound, a gym rat, and a political junkie and a happy workaholic.

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The Results are in: We met our energy savings goals!

by Chris Butterworth on October 11, 2008

in Green Living

It’s nice to know that one family can make a difference.

Last year my wife & I decided to make a conscious effort to do a better job of conserving energy around the house.  We didn’t want to do any major home improvements, but we thought we could make an honest effort to do some good.  I wrote a few posts as we identified our goals and built our strategy:

My Family’s attempt to conserve energy – and our challenge to you.

Our energy savings plan.

Energy use of household appliances.

We started the process in mid-November last year, so it’s been almost a year.  I’ve reviewed our APS usage in 4 distinct categories:  Total kWh used, Highest Peak kW usage, Percentage of off-peak usage, and Billable charges.  Here are the results:

Total kWh Used.

This was the single most important goal.  Time-shifting is important, and hopefully all our effort would lead to saving money, but the driving force behind the project was to use less energy.

Result:  We used 15.4% less energy than the previous year, trouncing our goal of a 10% savings by more than 50%!

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Highest Peak kW Usage.

In plain English, what was the most energy you needed at any one point in time, during peak hours, during the course of the month?  Obviously the more appliances you have running at the same time, the more energy you’ll require at that moment.  This is an important number, because APS uses it to calculate the largest percentage of your monthly bill.  (this means that if you have one bad hour, with everything running and the doors open, you’re going to pay dearly at the end of the month!)

Result:  Our average Highest Peak kW Usage was down by over 10%.

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Percentage of off-peak Usage.

This matters for 2 reasons.  A) We have a plan that charges us less for off-peak usage, and B) by shifting our usage off-peak, we’re reducing the aggregate demand for Highest Peak kW Usage, which means we’re helping to reduce the overall amount of energy needed for our city.

When we started this challenge, our average off-peak usage was 57%.  We set our goal of raising that to 67%.

Result:  We exceeded our goal by averaging 70% off-peak usage!

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Billable Charges.

This one was disappointing.  I had assumed that since we did such a great job of using less energy AND switching our usage to off-peak hours, we would have saved a fortune.  Not so fast, my friend (to quote football analyst Lee Corso.)

Result:  We saved a grand total of $124 over the course of 11 months.  (granted, APS had a rate increase at about this time last year, so who knows what our bills would have been like if we didn’t reduce our usage.  But still – I had hoped for better…)

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Bottom Line – it feels good to know that we can have a significant impact on the environment without making significant changes in our lifestyles.  If everyone reading this could reduce their usage by 10%…  Talk about environmental impact!

Your doing his share Realtor,

Chris Butterworth


chris

Chris Butterworth spends more time analyzing statistics and reading economic reports than is healthy. He's also a husband, father, writer, and amateur photographer. In his spare time he trained for and competed in his first triathlon.

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Recycle CFL light bulbs at Home Depot

by Chris Butterworth September 18, 2008 Green Living

Here’s a quick update to an earlier post I wrote about Disposing of CFL fluorescent light bulbs back in February of this year.  In it I wrote “I bet that before too long there will be enough public pressure that the places who sell the most bulbs (WalMart, Home Depot, Target, Lowe’s) will begin collecting [...]

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Pickens Plan goes live today

by Chris Butterworth July 8, 2008 Green Living

T. Boone Pickens opened a website today: www.pickensplan.com. You might not have heard of it yet, but you’re going to hear about soon, and you’re going to hear about it a lot, during the next 4 months. T. Boone Pickens made a fortune in the Texas oil industry. He made another fortune as a corporate [...]

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Rain Gutters are useful – even in Phoenix

by Chris Butterworth February 22, 2008 Green Living

Here is a picture of my old house – the one we moved out of a couple years ago. Regardless of size, style, number of garage bays, or area of town, this is a pretty typical design for most homes built in & around Phoenix over the last 20 years. The garage is on one [...]

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Aura at Camelback: Green Luxury Living

by Chris Butterworth February 14, 2008 Central Phoenix

Coming Soon – luxury living, urban living, and sustainable living will come together at The Aura at Camelback.     I’ve seen lots of residential “green living” options, but they’re generally on the small side, and usually outside of town. I’ve also seen several commercial projects using a sustainable approach (we’ve even written about some [...]

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Disposing of CFL fluorescent light bulbs

by Chris Butterworth February 11, 2008 Green Living

I’ve been a big proponent of conserving energy around the house, and have written about it several times on this blog. One of the easiest energy “fixes” is to switch your light bulbs to Compact Flourescent Bulbs, since they are ultra efficient and last for a very long time. The bulbs say right on the [...]

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Proper disposal of old computers

by Chris Butterworth January 19, 2008 Green Living

We’ve had an old computer sitting on a shelf in the garage for a long time. To give you an idea of how old, it was an IBM PC (remember when people actually had IBM brand computers?) which ran a high-tech operating system called Windows 98. (who knows when that came out…?) At some point [...]

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We’re saving energy – right on schedule

by Chris Butterworth December 11, 2007 Green Living

Last month I challenged us all to use 10% less energy, and then I outlined my family’s plan for achieving this goal. Yesterday our APS bill came in the mail, and I’m optimistic our plan is working. Good news is that our usage is down by 9%, and we didn’t implement our plan until the middle [...]

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Energy Use of Household Appliances

by Chris Butterworth November 28, 2007 Green Living

We’ve been putting our energy-savings plan into action over the last couple of weeks. We accepted the challenge to try and conserve energy, and then we outlined a specific plan of attack designed around getting the most bang for the buck. It took a little bit of effort to figure out where our savings could [...]

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Our energy-savings plan

by Chris Butterworth November 19, 2007 Green Living

This is a follow up to my earlier post about my family’s goal to conserve energy around the house – and my challenge to you to do the same. We’ve had a chance to review how much energy our various appliances use, and we’ve built a game-plan we think will help us reach our 10% [...]

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My family’s attempt to conserve energy – and our challenge to you.

by Chris Butterworth November 15, 2007 Green Living

I’ve said before that one person cannot effect meaningful change by himself. I could stop driving my car, install solar panels on my house, and begin harvesting rainwater, but none of that would make a bit of difference to the greater Phoenix area. The key to change is to have many people make a little [...]

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