Kate's Blog

Earth Hour

Last Saturday evening, from 7:30 to 8:30 pm, most of Sydney turned off their lights (and other electrical devices) to mark the first "Earth Hour". The Sun office in North Sydney turned off its neon signage, as did most buildings in the city. We went outside, hoping to see more of the evening sky, but although it was clear, the sky looked much the same as usual. The moon was too close to full and the street lights were left on, "for safety reasons".

We sat together and read books, did puzzles, etc. The kids were excited to be using candles, and I realised that while spending the evening reading is not unusual in our family, we normally use four separate rooms to do it (and of course we often are using computers as well as the lights). Before 7:30pm, we went around the house, turning off appliances. We turned the network off - which is a bit of a change, since we're used to being able to get a network connection by simply opening up a laptop. We usually leave our ADSL modem and Apple Airport Express turned on - yet it only takes a few minutes for the network to stabilize when it starts up. I know my previous ISP actively discouraged users from turning off their cable modems, and I wonder if the ISP had problems when they were suddenly hit by a wave of DHCP requests at 8:30pm. Ours stayed off until Sunday evening when I couldn't wait any longer to read email. It took me a day to get around to turning the microwave back on.

Attempting to reduce your energy footprint does raise some interesting questions. Why doesn't the LG digital settop box / hard drive have a dimmer on its display - and in fact, why does it need to display the time even when it's turned off? The Onkyo A/V receiver and DVD player are much less intrusive, and probably use much less power. How many clocks do you have in your house? The microwave, the clock radios, the stereo, the home theatre, the battery operated clocks, alarm clocks, watches... just about all of them powered by batteries or mains power. Does a Sony PlayStation 2 really need to display a red LED when it's turned off? All those transformers get very hot, even when the devices they power are off... more wasted power. At least here in Australia we have a switch on each power outlet so you don't have to physically unplug a device to turn it off.

Next year the organizers hope Earth Hour will be global. It's a symbolic act rather than a solution - to solve the problem, we'd have to change how we live and work as well. But it's a reminder that reducing the world's energy usage takes small steps from many people (and companies).

Posted at 12:55PM 04 Apr, 2007 by Kate Morris in Personal  |  Comments[1]