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A company by the name of Hybrid Technologies is taking current production cars, such as the MINI Cooper and the Chrysler Crossfire, and replacing their combustion engines with hybrid or fully electric engines. I think this is an absolutely great idea because people will be able to see themselves in an electric car if the car is already a model that they are familiar with.

That said, the most interesting part of that article is when it mentions that the company will soon be selling some of these cars through Wal-Mart retail stores. What's more is that these cars may be available at Wal-Mart as early as 2008! What a way to bring electric car technology to the everyday American. If anyone can get something proliferating, it will be Wal-Mart.

Unfortunately, the price will be a little steep to begin with. We'll just have to hope for Wal-Mart to put a smiley face roll back sticker on them!

In relation to my last post about the current state of Compact Fluorescent (CFL) bulbs, I thought I'd share this article.

In the new energy conservation bill that has been passed by Congress, is a plan to completely phase out incandescent light bulbs from the market by 2014. The policy will really go into effect in 2012 and it's likely that some manufacturers may drop their incandescent lines sooner than that.

The whole reason is ENERGY. CFLs and other emerging technologies such as Light Emitting Diodes (LED) are much more efficient. CFLs use roughly 20-25% the electricity that an equivalent incandescent uses.

I cover all the other benefits and reasons to purchase CFLs since I just did that in a previous post, but I did want to make sure that my readers are aware that the light bulb as we know it is going the way of the dinosaur.

Recently, I had to purchase all the light bulbs for our new house. Let me start by saying that you never really realize just how many light bulbs a house uses until you have to go buy all of them at once.

Since I was buying a bunch of bulbs, I thought it would be wise to try to stay "green" and get Compact Fluorescent (CFL) bulbs wherever possible. CFLs use roughly 75% less electricity than an equivalent incandescent (standard) bulb. So if they use less electricity and make your electric bill lower, why doesn't everyone have all CFLs in their houses? Comparatively, the technology is still new. Here's some things I have noticed about CFL technology that some people may perceive as a reason not to switch to them. Most are issues from when the technology was brand new, and have been taken care of by the manufacturers already. Others are just perceived problems.

1. CFLs Are More Expensive

Generally speaking, CFL bulbs will be a higher initial investment cost. However, many electric companies will provide cash-back rebates for buying the Energy Star CFLs. When I bought my bulbs, they were on sale and there was the electric company rebate ($2/bulb). I got some standard mini-twist bulbs for about $1/bulb and some BR30 reflector bulbs for about $3/bulb. This is very close to incandescent prices.

Additionally, these bulbs will pay for themselves in electricity savings. Check out this post to see how to calculate your savings for a single bulb. Using this formula, you can calculate that a 15 watt CFL can save you about $7.21 per year per bulb compared to an equivalent 65 watt incandescent (based on 4hrs of usage per day and $0.10 per kilowatt-hour). You can see that the savings can start to add up.

Besides electricity savings, CFLs have a longer life span. At my current home, I had a light fixture that was burning out standard bulbs every couple months. I put a CFL in there and it's been 4 years without burning out.

It is important to point out, however, that not ALL CFLs will be reasonably priced. For example, dimmable CFLs are still a very new technology. I needed six BR30 reflectors for a set of dimmed, recessed lights. The dimmable CFLs were about $11/bulb compared with $2/for the incandescent. I opted not to spend $66 on those bulbs at this time, but will check again for lower prices as the technology progresses.

So, overall, most CFLs are going to be reasonably priced and nearly all will be cost effective in the long run.

2. CFLs Come In Ugly Shapes -or- CFLs Don't Come In The Shapes I Need

It's true that the first CFLs on the market were the mini-twist style bulbs, and these bulbs are not the most aesthetic choice. However, these bulbs are great for fixtures with covers.

For fixtures with exposed bulbs, you may not want to see the twist of a CFL. Luckily, CFL manufacturers have identified this and have begun creating bulbs with covers in many of the standard shapes: Type A, Reflector/Flood, Vanity Globe, and even Candelabra.

With these shapes, you can fit most of your lighting needs. However, some of them, the candelabra bulbs for example, are still bigger and/or give off less light than an incandescent, so they may not be right for all your fixtures.

3. CFLs Produce Ugly Light

Again, the earliest CFLs produced mostly white light similar to fluorescent tube lighting in office buildings. While this is great for task lighting, it doesn't really give you a warm feeling for your house. Again, it should be noted that manufacturers have taken this into account and have begun producing bulbs with different color temperatures. The higher the color temperature in Kelvins, the whiter/bluer/cooler the light. A regular incandescent bulb will have a color temperature of around 2700K and produces light with a "yellowish" hue. A "cool white" bulb will most likely be closer to 3000K and a "daylight" bulb will be upwards of 5000K. You should be able to find the color temperature listed on the bulbs so you can choose one with the light you prefer.

Another thing to note, however, is the Color Rendering Index (CRI) given to each bulb. The CRI is a number 0-100 that describes how accurately the bulb renders color off of other objects. A bulb with a CRI of 100 will cause objects lighted by the bulb to show their true colors while a CRI of 65 will not produce truly accurate colors. I have noticed that most CFLs seem to be in the 80-90 CRI range while incandescent can be in the high 90's. This will most likely get even better for CFLs as the technology comes along.

4. The Mercury In CFLs Is Dangerous

It's true that most CFLs contain some amount of mercury, a chemical which has been shown to cause problems when in contact with the human body. Despite the fact that manufacturers are working to reformulate their products to use less or no mercury, people still hear about this in the media and just to the conclusion that CFLs are bad. It is important to note that most of the mercury dumped into the environment is emitted in air pollution from coal burning power plants. Air emissions are likely more dangerous than a contained break of a CFL bulb. In addition, the amount of mercury in a CFL is so low that is actually lower than the amount of mercury that would be spewed by a coal power plant using an incandescent bulb (remember CFLs use less energy).


Summary

So most concerns about CFL technology have been taken care of by the manufacturers and others are in the process of being fixed. As the technology matures it will only get better, but I think we are currently at a point where the cost of entry vs the benefit makes sense to start using them.

Buy CFLs:

Lately, there's been a lot of talk (especially in the political arena) about energy consumption and Global Warming. Most of this, however, has been aimed at making it less enticing for businesses to pollute or to produce inefficient products. What really needs to happen, is that the American people need to start thinking differently about energy use.

Most people think about the cost of gas because they can easily see the cost vs output, but people do not think as much about other energy uses such as home lighting. This is because you get a monthly electric bill that simply lumps together all the electric use of your house. With a car, you know all the gas is used by your car. On the electric bill, it's easy to look at it and think that a large part of the bill is due to things you "need" like a refrigerator or air conditioning.

While an air conditioner can constitute a large part of your electric bill in peak summer months, it's worth noting that people often overlook the effect of household lighting. Lighting can be a very large part of your monthly bill, especially in the dark winter months.

As I drive around looking at new houses, I notice that some of the more popular trends these days include more outdoor lighting (soffit lights, accent lights, spot lights, etc). Most don't really serve any purpose other than to highlight the house. If people thought about how much it cost to actually run these lights, they may reconsider having them.

The old rule of turning a light off when you leave a room still applies. The fewer lights on in your house, the more electricity and money you will save.

A couple years ago, I decided it would be interesting to find out about how much it was costing me to run my Christmas lights during the holiday season. The calculation is quite simple so I'll walk you through it. Some information you need to find out ahead of time:

1. How many bulbs you put up.
2. How often you typically have them turned on.
3. The cost for a kilowatt-hour from your power company. (should be listed on your bill)

And now for a little background information. A typical mini-bulb Christmas light uses about 0.5 watts per bulb. If you have LED bulbs or the large, old-school bulbs, you'd have to find out how many watts per bulb you ware using.

Let's assume that you put up 3,000 lights (on your tree, house, bushes, etc), and that you typically have them on from 5:00PM till 11:00PM from Dec 1 to Jan 14. Let's also assume that your electric company charges you $0.10 per kilowatt-hour (kWh).

So, here we go.

3,000 lights * 0.5 watts = 1,500 watts when they are all on.

1,500 watts / 1000 = 1.5 kilowatts. So, if you have all of them on for 1 hours, you have 1.5 kilowatt-hours.

1.5 kilowatt-hours * 6 hours per day = 9 kilowatt-hours per day.

9 kilowatt-hours per day * 45 days = 405 kilowatt-hours total usage by Christmas lights during the holiday season.

405 kilowatt-hours * $0.10 per kilowatt-hour = $40.50 to run your lights for the entire season.

You can see that this is no small chunk of change. Might make you consider switching to LED Christmas lights which will use only a tenth of the electricity because they are so efficient (they're also nearly indestructible).



As a side note, this calculation can be used for anything that you know the energy use of. For example, four 60 watt bulbs left on for about 3 hours per day. Or an 1100 watt oven cooking for 2 hours. Some of it will make you sick to see how much you are spending to operate that device.

For the past couple years, complaints about rising gas prices have been met with responses such as "When you adjust for inflation, it's still much cheaper than it was in the late 70's early 80's". Well, we can now say that this is no longer true. Even when you adjust for inflation, we are currently hovering right around the all-time high prices. Take a look at the graph:


Source: http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/Inflation_Rate/Gasoline_Inflation.asp

In the graph (yearly average price), you will see that the previous peak in 2007 dollars was around 1980 when the average price for the year was around $3.05/gallon. Obviously, since this graph is averaged out per year, some of the high peaks we have already seen this year will be smoothed out. But there may have been enough high days in this year to push our yearly average above the previous high.

So, we might end up having to say that 2007 was the most expensive gas year ever.

Lately, with crude oil hovering near $100 a barrel and setting record highs nearly daily, I have been wondering if all of these price increases are simply due to the economic principles of supply and demand or if a large part of it is driven by assumptions that demand is higher (or going to be higher) than it really is. Or for that matter an under estimation in supply could cause the same situation. At any rate, there could be a certain amount of panic being caused that is helping drive these prices higher.

Additionally, with crude being traded on the commodities market, it wouldn't surprise me if the demand is being created simply by traders and investors rather than actual consumers. Normally, with a supply and demand situation you would expect the price to rise if consumers were demanding more of the product. However, in this situation the product passes through a middle-man first. The middle-man wants to make a profit too. People have seen that oil is on the rise. When that happens, they think "Maybe I should buy into that and make some money for myself?" They think they can buy in at $90 and sell at $100 and make a profit. This causes extra demand, not by actual consumers but by people trying to make a profit by trading oil commodities.

So, does anyone else see how this might resemble another situation in the past decade. Let's think back to the late 1990's. Tech stocks were a huge boom. Any little startup company could get funded, go public, and have their stock skyrocketing. The reason is that people had seen the successes being made in the technology sector so they didn't bother to think about real consumer demand. So you had investors buying into a lot of companies that were losing money and had no customer base. What happened? The technology bubble burst around the year 2000. Stocks across the board fell.

Now if we apply the same thinking to oil trading, we could expect to see a peak point before a bubble burst. The bubble burst will be caused by some big holders selling off or some bad news about actual demand. Once some people sell off others will follow suit and prices will fall.

Again, this is one of my things that is totally up for debate. I'm no economic wizard so this seems feasible to me. Let me know if you have other opinions.

Did you know there was a massive section of sea floor in the Pacific Ocean that is literally covered with miles and miles of trash? Until today, I had never heard of the The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Apparently, this accumulation of garbage is as large as a continent and contains garbage from all over the world.

Due to the currents in the oceans, trash is gathered in certain accumulation zones. One of the strongest areas of accumulation is this patch in the Pacific. Unfortunately, a lot of the garbage that accumulates here is made of plastic. And plastic, as we know, is very hard to break down. Actually, I believe I heard that it was chemically impossible to break it down via natural methods (erosion, etc). Since the chemical bonds don't break, all these processes can do is break the plastic item into smaller pieces of plastic. These pieces will often wash ashore on beaches, and in some cases, cover a beach with tiny, multi-colored pieces of plastic.

It's unfortunate that we have this amount of garbage in our oceans. And it's sad to think that a large portion of it was probably dumped in the ocean on purpose. Too bad we don't think ahead before doing things like this.

I recently discovered that the world's best cleaning product is something that almost all households already have: Baking Soda. It's cheap, it's easy to use, it's readily available, and it really works. What more could you ask for? Oh yeah, it helps battle odors too!

It works really good on surfaces that have dirt or grime "caked" on. On these surfaces it's often difficult to wipe the dirt off with a soft rag or sponge. You need something stronger. Here's what I do to clean my stainless steel kitchen sink which tends to get pretty grimy and dirty.

1. Get the bowls of the sink wet.
2. Sprinkle with baking soda.
3. Scrub with sponge and rinse.

After that, your sink will have a clean polished look to it, and you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that you cleaned it with an everyday household product.

Works great on other surfaces too.

Some people may have noticed that there have not been many posts here in the past couple of weeks. Well, I just want to let my readers know that this blog is certainly NOT dead.

It just so happens that I have been extremely busy right now and have not had much time to make posts. I had a week long business trip to Orlando a couple weeks ago. Florida was very nice this time of year. If you find yourself in Orlando, I recommend going to Cocoa Beach on the Atlantic coast. Very nice beach and only about and hour drive.

In addition to my business trip, there have been many many decisions for our new house that have all come up at the same time. We've been spending a lot of our time trying to get these all figured out while at the same time prepping our current house to be put on the market.

All in all, it's been a very busy time for me, but I promise, there will be posts coming shortly.