Palm | Kelapa Sawit

Selecting the type of stove for your home can also be a difficult task especially if you have never had one before.
The stoves differ on the type of fuel they use: wood, wood pellets, natural gas, propane gas, coal, fuel oil or electricity.

On stoves-only.com website I found very good comparison of different types of stoves based on fuel type and cost of fuel used to produce 1,000,000 BTU. This information can help any homeowner to make the best decision while choosing the best cost-effective or environmentally friendly stove.

I will give you only part of information which is posted on their website so you can see which type of stove is the best for your home and your needs.

Fuel Type~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Cost to Produce
______________________________ 1,000,000 Btu

Electricity................................... $29.31

Propane Gas................................ $27.00

Natural Gas................................. $18.75

Fuel Oil...................................... $18.00

Wood Pellets............................... $17.60

Wood........................................ $14.40

Coal......................................... $10.00

From this table you can easily see that the cheapest fuel is coal. Still, the coal makes the biggest impact on environment, and requires most maintenance.

The next least expensive fuel is wood and wood pellets. This website is recommending the wood pellets as the most optimal type of fuel because they are affordable enough and very efficient.

The most expensive fuel types are propane, natural gas and electricity. The electric stove is the most convenient one that is clean and doesn't require buying fuel and delivering it home. Whether electric stove is environmentally friendly or not depends on how that electricity is produced: using coal, hydro dam, nuclear reactor, solar panels or wind turbines.

In case of emergency, wood, wood pellets or coal stoves would be the best choice.
My friend has natural gas stove down in his basement and he used it during two day power outage last winter.

To read the whole article about different stoves comparison you can go to:

http://www.stoves-only.com/fuel-comparison-table

-Peter Y.

Often homeowners need to choose between water heaters based on fuel type and costs.
In order to make a wise dicision we need to look at several factors, such as:

1. Availability of fuel: gas, electric, oil or solar
2. Installation Cost
3. Annual Operational and Energy Cost
4. Efficiency

Here is the table where all of these costs are added over 13 years of life:


Water Heater Type ~~~~~~~~~~~~ Installed Cost~~~~~Total Cost
___________________________________________(Over 13 Years)

Demand gas (tankless)................. $1,600 .............$5,008

Condensing gas storage................. 2,000 ...............5,170

High-efficiency gas storage ............ 1,025 .............. 5,220

Conventional gas storage ................. 850 .............. 5,394

Electric heat pump water heater ....... 1,660 ............. 4,125

High-eff. electric storage ................. 820 ............. 6,528

Minimum eff. electric storage ............ 750 ............. 6,769

Solar with electric back-up .............. 4,800 ............. 7,072

Conventional oil-fired storage .......... 1,400 ........... 11,299


If you look at all of the gas water heaters you can see that they are the cheapest ones based on total cost including installation. Only electric heat pump water heater is cheaper that gas ones, but usually gas water heaters are more efficient and cheaper. It usually takes less time to heat the water using gas fuel than electricity.

Solar water heaters have the cheapest yearly energy costs but also - the highest installation costs.
Solar water heaters are usually installed where there is a lot of sun available and gas lines are far away.

Oil-fired water heaters are the most expensive ones and if possible, should be replaced with gas or electric water heater.


To read more about different water heaters and to see the whole table with all of the information such as annual costs and efficiency, please go to the following website:

http://www.aceee.org/Consumerguide/waterheating.htm

-Peter Y.

By Brianne McCleary

Rebecca Clarren wrote an interesting post on Vampire Energy for Salon.com in January of 2008. The full article can be found here but I will summarize the main points below.

- Half of our appliances, including microwave ovens, computers, TVs, electronic equipment and associated chargers that suck down power even when they're turned off, in sleep or standby mode.
- A typical house hosts around 50 such insomniacs, and though individual devices use minuscule amounts of electricity, in the aggregate they're an astonishing and pricey burden.
- This "vampire energy loss" represents between 5 and 8 percent of a single family home's total electricity use per year, according to the Department of Energy. On average, that's the equivalent of one month's electricity bill.
- Taken across the United States, this adds up to at least 68 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually; that's the equivalent output of 37 typical electricity-generating power plants, costing consumers more than $7 billion.
- This wasted energy sends more than 97 billion pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; on a global scale, standby energy accounts for 1 percent of the world's carbon emissions, according to Alan Meier of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, based in California.

"When a consumer thinks the device is off, it should be using as little power as possible," says Meier. "But in their haste to get products onto the market, manufacturers don't make those modest design improvements, and we, the consumers, pay the price in unnecessarily high standby power use."

New gadgets that can help

- Smart Strip. By monitoring power consumption, the strip detects when computers or stereos are off and powers down, eliminating energy usage in all peripheral devices such as printers.

- Isolé power strip, which uses a motion sensor to turn off six of its eight outlets if it hasn't detected anyone in the room for up to 30 minutes.

- Kill a Watt power meter, a nifty gadget with a wall outlet that measures the watts, volts, amps and kilowatt-hours of a given device when off or on.

- Energy Detective. Measures whole-house electricity consumption. It costs around $190 and provides cost estimates of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. Like a scale, it doesn't help you lose weight or cut back on power. But by providing immediate feedback of how much money you are spending each day on energy, and how much you are likely to spend next month, it's a solid motivator to unplug appliances and turn off lights. Consumers who used such monitors cut back their energy use by around 5 percent, according to a July 2007 report by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

A dual responsibility

A major solution to vampire energy, say experts like Meier, will arrive when manufacturers design more efficient appliances. Even so, by using power strips and maintaining vigilance about unplugging the TV and devices that get little use, we can help save energy and put a stake through these energy vampires.

Posted by Ellen Milich

With the economy in the state it’s in, my husband and I have been looking at ways to upgrade our home rather than moving. The first order of business has been the windows, as we realized how much money and energy we were likely losing out of them. I began researching the various options to see what the best course of action would be, repairing or replacing them with argon-filled windows. Turns out replacement is far the better option and now is a great time to do so because under the new economic stimulus plan homeowners receive a tax credit of up to $1,500 for upgrading their home with energy efficient building components and reduce their income tax by up to thirty percent of the purchase price on qualified products installed in 2009 and 2010 (1).

Moreover, it’s staggering the amount of energy lost out of substandard windows. According to one website, “Windows represent the single largest opportunity for improvement. 39% of all emissions are tied to building operations, with 38% of that for heating and cooling. Up to 40% of that energy – and cost – literally goes out the window. This wasted energy results in over 250 million tons of emissions per year” (2). 250 million tons!!! And that’s only considering homes within the United States. Consider the amount that must be wasted if we take into account all industrialized nations.

It’s tougher to estimate what it costs per home to replace old windows as each home size differs as well as amount and size of windows, but generally a consumer could expect to spend a few thousand dollars, an amount that will (again depending on home size and climate) pay itself off in savings in a two to ten year time range.
The only setback I see to this form of upgrade is one we see often with “going green” and that’s the upfront cost. For lots of homeowners paying that amount of money is out of the questions regardless of the long term savings. As time goes on and new construction picks up again this problem will become less prevalent since building codes are constantly being revised to require builders to use more efficient products. For those of us with older homes and lower quality windows the savings is undeniable and if it is within your price range the long term benefits are well worth the switch.

(1) http://www.efficientwindows.org/TaxCreditforEfficientWindows2009.pdf
(2) http://www.seriouswindows.com/html/thinkgreen.html

Posted by Mary Kelley

I was reading up on Phantom Energy and came accross a startling statistic, apparently an estimated 5% of the energy drawn from a cell phone charger is actually used to charge the phone according to the website Buildinggreentv.com. Which got me thinking and out of the corner of my eye as I write this blog I see my cell charger plugged into the wall next to me of course, and the battery charger for my video camera, I may as well have a hole in my pocket! So curious to find out just how much energy is used by my various electronics I sought out a handy calculator that breaks it down for you. I was amazed particularly on the numbers for the DVD players, Video Games and Home Theater Systems, there's very little difference between idle and on! In addition to the calculator there was also some tips on energy use reduction , and what it all gets down to as many before me have stated, is awareness and power strips......This might just be the motivation I needed to go invest in some power strips.

Blog posted by Jonathan Elliott

I've had an ongoing "debate" with my wife for some time about who wastes more electricity. Her habit is to leave the lights on, mine is to leave the computer on, and we've gone back and forth on this matter about who's habit is worse. Now, only recently did I ever take the time to investigate this, to settle once and for all the most offending culprit.

According to Michael Bluejay, leaving my laptop on in active mode could use up to as much as a 45 watt lightbulb, and leaving a desktop on could use up to as much as four or five 60 watt bulbs. So in theory, my usage of the laptop has worked in my favor these last few months (and I won't speak of how many years before that I was using my desktop, leaving it on all of the time).

But for those of you who are especially concerned, as we all should be, with this very prevalent and constant use of energy, there is a great little feature called the "sleep" mode. In actuality, there are several modes to this, depending on which OS, or even which version of windows you are running. Prior to Windows Vista, you could "standby", or go into full-on "hibernate". The problem with these was that the first method was often unreliable and still used some electricity, and the second method would cause rather serious hard drive fragmentation over time.

Well, Windows finally got on the right track (yes, Mac has been heading in the right direction for a while, I have to give them credit for that), and in Vista has combined the speed of standby, with more reliability, and the low power usage of hibernate. In the new "sleep" mode, the current state is written to RAM (and only if desired to the hard drive), and the only electricty then used is what it takes to keep the RAM powered enough to store that memory. This uses only 1 - 6 watts, a scarce fraction of what it used to.

While this is still wasted energy, it is a nice compromise for those of us who absolutely refuse to take the time every day to reboot the computer. It is a baby-step, if you will. A step in the direction of energy conservation, while losing us no time, since the startup from "sleep" mode is almost instantaneous.

Who knew there are countless ways we can increase energy efficiency in our homes while at the same time saving precious dollars. While researching this topic I found “A Consumer Guide to Buying Energy Efficient Products for the Home” published by The Consumer Federation of America. This document and website is dedicated to promoting awareness and information about how we can make more environmentally friendly purchases for our homes that ultimately saves money. There is an excellent list of the different ways people can become involved with community outreach in their respective locations to support energy efficiency. If you are interested in different ways to save money while providing your home with energy efficient products, check out this site.

http://www.buyenergyefficient.org

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http://sites.google.com/site/ecomerge2008/