I must confess again to letting a lot of time pass between postings to this blog. I fully intended to keep track of all of the little things which make an impact on our planet. I will endeavor to do better at this during 2012, and will start by a recap of 2011.
I completed my carbon footprint calculations, and I did pretty well keeping that to a minimum last year. The biggest single contributor to my footprint this past year was a flight to Chicago last May. That was a trip to the National Restaurant Show with the student group at Valencia College. I really enjoyed the trip, but there was a definite carbon cost to flying. According to Sightline Institute, the 2320 mile round trip is responsible for 2250 pounds. I am glad I only flew once!
Better news from the transportation side of my footprint comes from the van and the scooters. I only drove the van 5941 miles last year and used 252 gallons of gas. The miles per gallon average was 23.5 which was lower than previous years. There was an issue with the starter that made the computer reset too often, and that problem was resolved. I will be replacing the spark plugs soon, and hope to get the average MPG back up above 25. I still can not complain about a 14 year-old van with 156,000 miles on it getting such good mileage while having so much interior room.
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| My van in Nevada in 2009. A full-sized mattress fits easily in the back. This is my mini camper. |
The two Honda scooters did very well. The 1988 Honda averaged 95 MPG for 2595 miles and only 27.3 gallons of gas. The 2007 Honda averaged 108 MPG for 3372 miles and only 31.2 gallons of gas. All the gas total was 310.6 gallons for 6057 pounds of CO2 at 19.5 pounds per gallon of gas. I am happy with this number.
The best news this past year was the decrease in grid power use from 2010. In 2010, power consumption was a total of 4908 KWh. That was a decrease from 6887 in 2009 and 10126 in 2008. For 2011, my total KWh use from the grid was only 2832. This is a 42 percent decrease from 2010, and I am really proud of that number. One of the biggest reasons for this decrease was driving the truck only 1378 miles last year. I also shut power off to the whole house quite often.
The carbon dioxide release from power use is hard to estimate. It fully depends on the type of fuel used to generate the power in the first place. I use power from Progress Energy, and the percentage of power generated from various sources changes monthly. I may go through my bills, and perform the long calculations, and then again, I may not! I am just glad that the overall power and fuel use is down from last year.
What is ahead for 2012? I have some new weapons against power use in use and coming soon. My solar space heater is working well. I still have to see how effective it will be in really cold weather, but early results are good. The interior of the box gets above 160 degrees even when it is only 55 degrees outside. It will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow when 49 will be the high!
There is also more solar power on the way. I ordered 380 watts of new panels and a second charge controller, and the extra generating power will be added to my system shortly. This extra power should allow more days of zero grid use, and more use of the solar powered window A/C in the summer.
I thank you for reading this blog, and hope that it does not bore you too much with all of the numbers; I tend to be a numbers kind of guy.
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