The Essentia Blog

The heavy snow that we’re getting right now can mean problems for the efficiency of your furnace.  Many furnaces shut off in the winter when their air intake pipes are blocked by heavy snow.

Before panicking and calling a technician for what is sure to be an expensive call, here are the steps to take yourself.

Locate Your Air Intake Pipe

Look for a black or white pipe coming out of your furnace and trace where it goes to the outside wall.  Then go outside and look for the pipe.  Knock the snow off of the top and build a small shelter out of wood or sheet metal to keep snow from accumulating over the top.  Be sure to look down the pipe to see if ice or snow are clogging it - if they are, heat tape will clear up the problem quickly.  This is available from your local hardware store and it is advisable to install this on all outside pipes just to be safe in the winter.

Restart Your Furnace

Once the pipe is clear, most furnaces will restart in a few minutes.  You may have a model that requires you to manually relight the pilot.  If this is the case, instructions for doing this are usually printed right on the furnace.  If you are unclear on this, contacting a service technician to relight your furnace is a lot less expensive than paying for them to clear snow out of your pipe as well.

Change Your Filter

Changing a dirty furnace filter can save you 5% on your energy use from your furnace.  For more see this helpful article from Green$avers.

Even more helpful is this video which explains how to take care of your furnace vents from The Backyard Man.

Canadians set up the first solar-powered community in North America in the small town of Okotoks, Alberta. The Drake Landing Solar Community consists of 52 homes all powered by solar energy.

800 solar panels distributed through the community generate 1.5 megawatts of power in the summer and store energy for use in the harsh Alberta winters. The typical household in the community will only generate 1-2 tons of carbon per year as compared with the typical Canadian generation of 6-7 tons per year. More on the project over at ENN.

According to Business Week, computers and e-mail have increased rather than decreased the amount of paper used in offices.  Remember how we thought the office would go completely paperless?  It still can if you follow some of these handy tips:

1.  Please Don’t Print
If you add “Please don’t print this e-mail, save a tree” or something similar to your outgoing e-mails, your colleagues will probably be less likely to print out e-mails that they may not need to from you.  Since they know you, it doesn’t sound preachy.

2.  Cut and Paste
If you get orders in off of e-mail, don’t print them out for the order entry department.  Instead, show them how to cut and paste.  You’ll not only increase productivity by saving keystrokes, you’ll save paper.  Many office workers don’t know the simple window commands that allow them to cut and paste between applications.

These are:
- Ctrl-A - Select All in e-mail or document
- Ctrl-C - Copy selected items in document (you can also select with the cursor if you don’t want everything)
- Ctrl-V - Paste copied items into another program or window

Those three commands alone may save your office reams of paper while making your staff feel just a little more computer savvy.

3.  Train Management
Some members of management prefer to have an e-mail printed out rather than forwarded to them.  If your boss is one of these, try to reason with them to see if you can convince them to accept forwards for environmental reasons.

Explain that you don’t feel comfortable printing off e-mails when they can simply be forwarded and offer to help them organize their inbox if they are experiencing problems organizing their e-mail flow - this is the most likely reason for their request.  They may just need some quick lessons on how to create folders or flag their e-mails.

4.  Campaign for Recycled Paper
Talk to your purchasing manager about looking for more eco-friendly alternatives to the paper that you are currently using.  They may be surprised to learn that eco-friendly paper costs the same or less than “regular” office paper.

A solar car has completed a first ever round-the-world trip for a solar car without using any gas.  The trip was designed to end at the UN climate talks on December 4th.  The car chauffered the UN climate official Yvo de Boer to the talks in Poznan, Poland where 190 delegates from all over the world are meeting to discuss climate change.

Louis Palmer, the 36 year old schoolteacher who drove the car, is eager to showcase that the technology is here, it is clean and it is accessible.   Palmer’s trip took 17 months and it took him through 38 countries and 52,000 kilometres.  He only lost two days to breakdowns during the journey and claims that the car runs “like a Swiss clock”.  More on the story can be found at www.solartaxi.com.

Jim Merckel’s story is a fascinating one.  After inventing a computer for the military that was capable of transmitting military secrets and fitting in the palm of your hand - in 1989 - he saw the Exxon Valdez disaster on TV and decided to reevaluate his life and his carbon footprint.

After selling off most of his stuff, Jim put his engineering degree to work in developing a new formula for his life, a formula where he could live off of $5000.00 a year.  He wrote a book about it in 2003 and started a website - www.radicalsimplicity.org.  He has also traveled all over the world to distribute humanitarian aid and volunteer.    You can read more about him on his website.

A $1 Billion dollar project is planned for San Francisco in order to install a charging grid for electric cars.  The company incentive funded project will be put in place by a company called “A Better Place” in partnership with Renault-Nissan.  They will distribute the cars under a subscription based program which will offer the cars at a discount and people who purchase them will subscribe to a certain number of miles.

Better Place hopes to expand the plan to Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and the three highways connecting the Bay Area and the Los Angeles area.

The first ever green billboard is going up in Times Square courtesy of Ricoh Americas Corp. The wind and sun powered sign will save $12,000 a month in energy costs. 16 wind turbines and 64 solar panels will give the sign the necessary power to avoid drawing energy from the grid.  A Ricoh spokesman says that the sign should work for four days without any sun or wind.

The Green Revolution has come up with a device that fits onto most exercise cycles which allows the human power being used on those cycles to be harnessed.  The energy generated goes straight back into the building’s panel with a grid-tie inverter.  While the output from a single cycle is only enough to power a laptop for an hour, the more people that use the equipment the more power is generated.  This has the potential to save health clubs thousands a year in energy costs and reduce the carbon footprint of both the gym and its members.

If you happen to be in the Ridgefield, CT area you can test drive the device at the Ridgefield Fitness Club, a partner in developing the technology with Green Revolution.

Prisons in the United States are implementing eco-friendly programs that will save them money and help with prisoner rehabilitation. At the Cedar Creek Corrections Centre in Washington state, prisoners compost, farm, and recycle shoe straps that are made into playground turf. Cedar Creek successfully composts 100% of their food waste.

Ironwood State Prison in Blythe, California uses 6200 solar panels, enough to meet the prison’s needs and to sell power back into the grid. The Oregon Department of corrections replaced inefficient appliances with energy efficient ones and a combination solar water heater and geothermal well to heat water.

Through their composting and other practices, Cedar Creek successfully avoided a $1.4 million sewage plant upgrade.

GE and other appliance manufacturers are testing out appliances that can communicate with electric utilities to run during off-peak hours.  This way a fridge can run its defrost cycle in off-peak hours and other appliances could perform similar functions at off-peak hours.  The appliances being tested to run this way by GE also include stoves, dishwashers, microwaves, dryers and dishwashers.

The only catch to the system is that the utility itself must be able to correspond with the “Smart Meter” on the appliance.  If utilities don’t properly upgrade to meet the communication needs of the appliances, the program may be all for nothing.  As long as the utilities get on board, the new appliances may help consumers save money as many utilities move to tiered pricing systems where consumers pay less for energy at off-peak hours.