Combine Solar Energy With Conservation
By Kathy Burns-Millyard
If you’re like most of the world, you’ve been watching the news about the global economy and financial crisis. And you already know that many people are worried about how they will be able to heat their home this winter. The biggest concern is being able to afford to pay the electricity bill or gas bill. The good news though is that it’s very easy to combine free solar energy power with energy conservation. Let’s look at a few ways to do that.
The first step is to try and reduce how much energy you’re consuming on a daily basis, so that your electric and gas bill will not be so high. It only takes the few simple steps to conserve energy and reduce those bills.
1. Turn off any lights that are not being used in your home. If no one is in the room, there’s no reason for the lights to be on.
2. Change your lightbulbs. There are two changes you need to make with your lightbulbs: the first one is to buy what are called pigtail lightbulbs, or energy efficient bulbs. This might seem very hard for you to believe, but you can actually reduce your electricity bill by as much as $50 per year for each light bulb you change. I have literally knocked off $100-$200 per month from my electric bill just by changing to these types of bulbs. The second thing you need to do is use a lower wattage bulb. If you normally use a 100 W light bulbs, try reducing to a 75 or 60 W bulb instead.
3. Lower the temperature on your water heater. It doesn’t matter if you use gas or electric to heat your water, you need to lower the temperature on that water heater to help reduce your bills.
4. Change your thermostat. Instead having your thermostat set to 72 or 75° this winter, try reducing it to at least 65° instead. If possible, lower it even further to 60°. This will feel chilly to most people, but you can wear your favorite winter clothing, or snuggle up in blankets to help offset the difference. It will be well worth it when you see how much of a difference this makes in your heating bill.
Besides helping to conserve energy, you can also utilize the power of the sun and tap into natural solar energy too. On sunny days for example, even in the winter time when there’s snow on the ground, you can help heat your home using the sun’s light and power. Simply open the curtains and let the sun shine through in every area of your house that you can.
Flashlight Energy Conservation
By Ian Pennington
Flashlights are handy, hand-held devices, which can provide light when the power goes off. They run on batteries. So, for flash bulbs to be useful in times of emergency one needs to store batteries also. Flashlights came into use in the last decade of nineteenth century. At that time, it was used for providing fancy light arrangement. Later some suave businesspersons suddenly realized its potential as a source of light when electric current is not available and marketed flashlights in the form that is found today. In those times, the form of flashlights was very crude. The battery did not have that much charge storage capacity as of today and the bulb consumed more power. As a result, most flash bulbs in those times only provided a flash of light for a short duration and then went dead. Hence, the device got the name “flashlight.” This name got really struck in North America. In other continents, especially in commonwealth countries, it is known as torch light or electric torch.
As already mentioned, the source of energy in most of the flashlights is a battery. It may be normal batteries, rechargeable batteries or solar powered batteries. Even with the technological advances of this age, there is a limit to the amount of power can be stored in the battery that can be fitted into a hand-held flashlight. So the efforts to conserve energy in a flash light have been focusing on reducing the energy utilized by the flash light. Traditionally incandescent bulbs were used as source of light. Such bulbs are still in use. But it has been found that the energy-spending rate of incandescent bulbs is much more than that of some other forms of light source, say light emitting diodes (LEDs). But the problem with LEDs was that the brightness and intensity of light emitted by LEDs were very low comparing to that of fluorescent bulbs. Scientist did extensive research on this subject and conducted numerous experiments to enhance the brightness and intensity of the light produced by LEDs. Finally, they succeeded and a new form of flashlights was born.
There are many advantages LED bulbs have over incandescent lamps. The main advantage in energy conservation is that they utilize less energy than conventional types because they do not contain a filament. LEDs are basically a transistor and work on electronics principles. The life span of LED bulbs is much more than that of incandescent bulbs. LED bulbs can be controlled electronically so as to maintain a fixed level of light intensity irrespective of the amount of power stored in the battery