Wow, I didn’t realised I made the last post to this blog exactly one month ago, and for that matter, it wasn’t even my own writing! I took a much needed break from too much Peak Oil talk – taking good advice from Matt Savinar, himself only thinking and writing about PO once a week.

A month has passed but I’ve been busy changing my lifestyle. The focus of which is to lower my personal carbon emission.

Turning Off Appliances
First off, I started to practice of switching off home appliances at the source, leaving all of them totally off, not on some standby mode. I do this when I’m out to work or off to sleep. I did this for 2 months and got a savings of 7.5% off my electricity bills.

At work, I rolled out a similar exercise for colleagues to turn off everything after work and over weekends. The savings are similar but due to the bigger bill, we were able to give a couple of hundred dollars less to Singapore Power.

Less Airconditioning

Riding on this little victory, I decided to tackle the biggest guzzler of electricity at my household – airconditioning. For about 10 days now, I’ve stopped using airconditioning when I work at night. In it’s place are two 38W fans that circulates fresh air into my study for an average of 3-4 hours a night. I did a little math and found that in a month, I might save up to $80 per month doing this.

Carbon-Free Day (for the car)

I’ve set Saturday as the day we don’t drive the car. Mathematically, it’s a 1/7 savings on fuel, but given that we drive more on Saturdays, I would say it could be as high as 25%.

Walk It If You Can

I recently reorganised my songs on my iPod into various lists and started to take them wherever I go. That way, I have ‘good excuse’ to take a walk instead of the usual 2-stop train ride. It’s a little time consuming but I’ve got lots of that to spare on weekends.

Riding to Work

I just started this today. The usual 8-minute commute is now a 20-minute bicycle ride. Because I perspire so much, I can only do it on days I don’t meet my clients.

Lower-Power Servers

I just realised that my Dell rack servers are 350-500W machines. And the Mac Mini just takes in 100W at peak. Starting next month, we will be swapping out those racks and moving the Mac Mini’s in. A nice little surprise is that because the Mini’s are so small and quiet, we might not even need to house them in a room that airconditioned 24×7. This saves us even more energy.