Energy Efficient DC Cooler

If you go on many picnics or if you love taking road trips, you know that taking along a cooler full of food or drinks is a necessity.  This is especially true if you don’t want to make many stops along the way or don’t want to pay the high prices you often find at gas stations.  It’s much cheaper to buy drinks at the grocery store in six or twelve packs, for example, than it is to purchase a single drink at a gas station.  However, this means you have to deal with ice, and then you have to deal with all of that water in your cooler when the ice melts.  However, if you want to keep your drinks cool for hours without dealing with this watery mess, all you need is the energy efficient DC cooler.

The energy efficient DC cooler gives you two different options.  If you set it to cold, it will chill your food and drinks to around 40 to 45 degrees below room temperature.  On the other hand, you can set it to hot and it will keep your food nice and warm until you’re ready to eat.  This gives you many new picnic options.  No longer will you have to rely on cold sandwiches or other types of cold food.  Now you can take a nice, hot meal with you wherever you go.  The cold setting makes it great for keeping those drinks nice and chilly, as well, and it can hold up to twelve standard sized soda cans.

Want more?  The energy efficient DC cooler also features an AM/FM radio to keep you entertained during your picnic!  You can listen to your favorite music while eating a great meal or enjoying a cold drink, making this one of the best coolers around.

Kill-A-Watt Review

Have you ever wondered just how much energy that lamp was using?  Maybe you’d like to see how much power your computer pulls even when it’s in sleep mode.  If you’re curious or if you want to start charting your power consumption patterns in an attempt to cut down your electric bill, you may want to invest in a few of the Kill-A-Watt products.  These handy little monitors make it possible for you to see exactly where all of that energy is going.

To use the Kill-A-Watt, all you have to do is plug it in to an outlet.  The device has another plug on the front that you plug your actual device (lamp, computer, etc.) in to.  Once you’ve done that, use the device as you normally would.  Kill-A-Watt will monitor how much power your appliance draws.  Knowing this information is the first step towards assessing how energy efficient your appliances and devices are.

So what can you do with the information Kill-A-Watt provides?  A lot.  You can see just how much energy something draws even when it’s not turned on, which can tell you what appliances you need to unplug when they’re not in use.  You can also see which of your appliances aren’t as energy efficient as they should be, so you know what to replace first.  Finally, you can get an idea of how to save power.  Maybe it’s worth running your laptop off its battery more often than you’ve been doing.  Perhaps there’s a better lamp out there that provides more light but uses less power.  You never know until you see exactly how much energy your appliances actually burn.

Shipping Container Box Offices Save Resources

No, these aren’t offices made out of small shipping boxes or other cardboard boxes.  Instead, they’re created from the huge shipping containers that are used on ships, trains, and other vehicles.  These giant metal containers are often discarded after being used multiple times or after the company that uses them goes out of business.  However, people have found a use for them—they build offices from them.

One of the most recent shipping container box offices is being built in Providence, Rhode Island.  This office space is being created entirely out of used shipping containers.  These tiny cubes, which are more or less small buildings by themselves, are being combined into an office space that will use about 25 percent less energy than a standard building will.  Part of this is because the building is going to be very well insulated and will have a very energy efficient heating and air system.  It will also use no fossil fuel to power its heating and air.  The building will also use lighting that features response sensors.  These sensors will measure how much light is coming in naturally and adjust artificial light as necessary.

The entire building will use 32 different shipping containers that have been reclaimed from US ports.  The building will be three stories high and will be home to twelve new offices.  In addition to saving money, the building will also reduce water run-off by over 65 percent by using rain gardens.  These gardens will help storm water get back into the earth and provide nutrients to plants rather than simply be wasted.

While construction is underway (using completely green techniques), the final shipping container box office won’t be completed until March of 2010.

IBM Building New Eco-friendly Data Center

Many computer companies are doing what they can to both cut costs and go green.  For some, this means changing the materials they use in their computers.  For others, it means figuring out ways to use less power.  That’s what IBM and Syracuse University are doing.  The two have joined forces to build IBM a new data center that will use 50% less power than similar data centers around the world.

The company and Syracuse have put a lot of research and effort into designing a building that will need only half the energy of current data centers.  This includes looking at everything from insulation techniques to energy generation methods to much more.  They plan to send six months on building this 6,000-square foot facility at a cost of $12.4 million US dollars.  While that may sound like a lot of money to spend on a building, no matter how energy-efficient it is, there’s no question that this new data center will completely change the concept of energy efficiency in the computer industry.

The IBM/Syracuse building will have a number of new systems to help make it so power efficient.  It will actually have a computer infrastructure that will shift applications and workloads to servers that are not being utilized to increase the efficiency of both computing and power.  The cooling system, something that uses a lot of power, will now only target those servers that need to be cooled down.  Sensors built into every room will detect when people are using various parts of the facility and, when they aren’t, will turn off the lights and other items.

These new approaches to improving energy efficiency are quite ambitious, and many of the things IBM and Syracuse have planned have never been done before.  If the new building truly does use 50% less power, it will be a major accomplishment.

Non-Energy Efficient Goods Banned by the EU

The European Union has recently made a rather shocking announcement: they’re going to set a number of environmental standards on household goods that could, in the end, ban the sale of any products that aren’t termed “energy efficient” by these standards. This includes things like showerheads, faucets, toilets, windows, and more. If they don’t meet these standards, they won’t be legal to sell or even imported into EU countries. This has both its ups and downs. On one hand, it means that energy will be used better and that people will end up using less power and paying less for what they do use. On the other hand, it will force people to purchase energy efficient products, which may give certain companies a near-monopoly on some markets.

The new standards come from the desire to reduce energy consumption by EU member countries, with a goal of increasing energy efficiency by 20% by the year 2020. A precursor to these standards were set back in 2005 by the EU, but they aren’t nearly as comprehensive or cover as much as these new standards do. The 2005 legislation only affected electronic devices, electrical equipment, and heating equipment. Now, it covers any and all “energy-related” items.

Europeans are, apparently, embracing the resolution and are ready to make their homes more energy efficient. Several governments have already agreed to fast-track the standards through Parliament, so it won’t be long before these standards are formalized and goods banned from sale.

Low Power Computer Memory

Researchers at the University of Cornell are working on creating low power memory for computers.  This memory would have a number of different benefits.  For one, it would make it so that computers didn’t really require any boot up time at all, allowing nearly instantaneous access to memory.  This memory would use only a fraction of the power that current RAM uses, making it very energy-efficient as well as work-efficient.

According to Cornell, researchers have created a thin ferroelectric film that may help in the creation of an instant-on transistor, something researches have been working on for decades.  If this research pans out, it could allow manufacturers to build a solid state computer that does not require any boot time and would save power.  This would lead to yet another computer revolution, cutting out something (boot time) that has long been an issue with computer users around the world.

Over the years, manufacturers have greatly reduced the amount of energy a personal computer uses, but as more and more people purchase computers, their energy use continues to be an issue.  With many people now owning a desktop and a laptop and every member of the family needing their own computer, these devices draw a lot of energy.  However, if the Cornell research leads to a low-power yet highly efficient form of memory, we may find our electric bills dropping a bit.