environmentalist at heart

It may surprise some people to know that I am an environmentalist. I live every day trying to reduce my footprint on the world. It does not always have to be big changes and it does not even have to be changes that really affect one but reducing your footprint on mother earth can be easy and not even affect your day to day life. For myself I have made some simple changes; some that cost money and consumed my own resources J and others cost next to nothing!

In the past my morning use to start at 7 AM when I woke up and had a hot shower to wake my out of my slumber and prepare me for the day to come. Afterwords I would putter around for 10 min and then let my dog out to do her duties. Often I would notice while standing outside, coffee in hand waiting for the pup to complete her task that 10 min after my shower, my gas hot water heater would still be running and made a mental note and went on with my day.

Arriving home at 4 PM the first thing I would do is let my dog outside. I would also make a mental note that the hot water system was running and preparing for the evening usage. Observing the usage on the water heater over time I concluded that a fully heated system would lose its heat over an 8-hour period even though there was no usage. This seemed like a waste to me! Even without using the system it had to reheat the water 3 times a day. Looking at my usage.. I needed hot water about every 8 hours and realized it ran about 6 times a day, 15 min a shot.

The solution.. a 9 dollar programmable timer with a remote control (my gas heater will not ignite unless the exhaust fan is running and that exhaust fan plugs into a standard wall outlet). I then took some time to determine when I needed hot water and how much I needed and how long a burn required to satisfy my needs. When all was done, I had spent $9 and my existing infrastructure and created a hot water on demand system which when refined over 2 years produced a 50% reduction in my natural gas consumption.

For bigger changes.. at my cottage I installed a solar hot water generator which allows me to run 99% off the grid in the summer months and helps preheat the water in the winter requiring less hydro overall. Also swapped out that 30 year old inefficient oil burning furnace for a high efficiency propane (saving me over $1000 a year!) and installed a clean and efficient fire place insert, added insulation to the attic, adding vapour barrier to the ceiling, CFLs everywhere, even the auto sensing outdoor floodlights (I want to see those skunks before I walk out at night!)

So onto my bigger question. Governments are fast to tell us to reduce but what are they doing to help? While driving though the city I often stare in amazement at the number of street lights burning away. I actually get mad at the number of street lights burning away lighting up the highways! The last time I checked, every car was mandated to have functioning headlights that illuminated the high way in front of you. Do I really need 1000 street lights burning to do the same job? 8 hours a night? It is not like pedestrians are walking down the side of the highway so you cannot tell me it is a safety feature!

My only conclusion is that hydro plants have an evening surplus and need to burn it. This is a best-case scenario for the cities but really isn’t there better ways to burn a surplus of electricity?

My first thought is that hydrogen is the fuel of the future. Production of hydrogen requires electricity. Obviously cold fusion is not a reality yet but if there is a surplus in the evening, would it not make sense to burn that surplus producing hydrogen for future consumption rather than lighting up highways for cars with built in lights?

I have often also wondered what is done with the excess gas that sewage plants capture and store. I had wondered why dumps were not used for the resources they give off. I am very happy to see that many dumps now capture the fumes given off by composting garbage to power generators. I have seen where the city of Toronto pulls cold water out of lake Ontario to cool buildings rather than using standard air conditioning. There are all kinds of good ideas around it is just making sure we implement them to the best of our abilities! We are making progress but it seems to be too slow, and I think that governments can be the role model in ensuring that the existing resources are being used to the best of their abilities!