My challenge and the lightbulb angel
My challenge and the lightbulb angel
First, I started my challenge by observing my behavior and checking my daily energy consumption. Due to the fact that I live in a shared apartment with three other girls, I focused my attention on individual activities and areas where I can have a functional change in the field of energy consumption over time for this exercise. By estimating the amount of energy consumption according to websites measuring the amount of energy use, I realized that my energy consumption during the day is more than 4 kilowatts on average, but If we ignore the usage of the refrigerator, I am a really energy efficient person before the challenge starts because the difference between the limited energy of the challenge and my daily consumption is 1kwatt, i may be capable to control my energy usage in this challenge easily i hope!
(Electricity Calculation) :
3.6+ 0.38 + 0.91+ 0.06 + 0.09 + 0.035 = 5.075
(ELECTRIC DEVICES) :
These are the main devices that I use which have electric energy consumption. I did an observation for 2 days to see how i use energy and the ways and places i may be able to take action about them and here is the result:
Light 0.035 kWh (5 hours per day) :
During these challenge days of reduced energy consumption, I was the guardian angel of all the lights in the apartment.
Fortunately, all the lamps in the house were LED and I did not have to worry about the high consumption of the lights due to their structure, however, there were lights that were on all day and had no use and I had to turn them off all the time.
Refrigerator 3.6 kWh per day :
- Leaving the refrigerator door open for a long time causes a lot of energy loss because it takes a lot of time and energy each time for the refrigerator to reach its desired temperature again. And I considered that all the tenants of the house don’t pay any attention to that. So this would be the first thing to consider about saving energy in the refrigerator.
2. The refrigerator frosting up was the second thing related to energy consumption in this case. In order to use less energy in the refrigerator, my roommate and I scheduled a day to dedicate to cleaning the refrigerator and melting issues….
With a little estimation, it seems that the amount of energy dedicated to refrigerator usage is the majority of my energy usage limit and actually I couldn’t do anything about it so I focus on the rest of the devices instance.
Hair dryer 0.38 kWh per day :
Although I have long hair, because the weather is relatively hot, I use a towel and open air to dry my hair. So energy consumption in this device is totally fine in this way.
Washing Machine 0.91 kWh per day :
Reducing the number of times I use the washing machine and increasing the number of clothes per use is the approach to energy saving for the washing machine. But for these two weeks, I would prefer not to use it in order to balance my usage in the challenge.
Phone 0.06 kWh (8 hours per day) :
Regarding the phone, the only thing I could do was to control the charge level of the phone. For this, I used the programs to automatically adjust the light of the phone according to the usage space, and I also realized that I spend a lot of time using unnecessary programs on the mobile phone. This would reduce the battery charge.
Therefore, replacing some audiobook programs instead of applications like Snapchat was a good option to reduce the energy consumption of my mobile phone.
Laptop 0.09 kWh (5 hours per day) :
Unfortunately, I could not do much about the laptop because there were many projects that I had to deliver by the deadline and it was not possible to delete any activity. Therefore, the only option to control the energy consumption in the laptop was to use the best battery life option to automatically reduce the energy consumption in the laptop.
Fortunately, after two weeks of trying to control my energy, I was able to move more and more through the challenge but it is a bit hard to ignore using different devices because in this case I spend a lot of time doing them by myself.
