Day 279 of our Green Year: Saving Energy With The Monitor

Months ago, we mentioned that you can save energy on your monitor by having your home page as a dark page like Blackoogle. Well, today we are going to raise awareness of another great website that can save you energy with your computer usage. This website is NowBlack.com. NowBlack.com uses Google.com type of template by using simple is better. However, instead of using a white background, they use black. As they say on the website:

"Take at look at Google, who gets about 200 million queries a day. Let's assume each query is displayed for about 10 seconds; that means Google is running for about 550,000 hours every day on some desktop. Assuming that users run Google in full screen mode, the shift to a black background will save a total of 15 (74-59) watts. That turns into a global savings of 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day, or about 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Now take into account that about 25 percent of the are CRTs, and at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, that's $75,000, a goodly amount of energy and dollars for changing a few color codes."

While on an LCD screen there is a small savings in energy, with a CRT larger monitor, there is a five to 20 percent savings of energy, which adds up to a lot of saved energy. It is not much, but it is at least a start.

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Day 278 of our Green Year: Snowshoeing and Recycling Toothbrushes

Today was a fun day with a fun outdoor activity. We took a trip down to the river and went on a nice snowshoe trip with our friends. It was a lot of fun and it was a great way to get close to nature, even during the winter time.

Today, we will also bring up what to do with your toothbrushes when you are done using them. Most people throw them away, but there are plenty of things you can do with them, courtesy of Green Living.

- Scrubbing in between tiles

- Knocking off dust that's caked onto other items.

- Comb cleaning

- As a paintbrush for the kids art projects

- Cleaning a cheese grater

- Cleaning jewelry in conjunction with baking soda

- upholstery and carpet stain removal

- Applying hair dye

- Scrubbing dirt off hard skinned fruit and vegetables

- To clean car battery terminals

- Cleaning mud or dog poop from shoes


--
Do you have a tip for us?
Do you have a picture of yourself going green?
Tell us your story about going green!
E-mail us at craigbaird@wildmail.com

--
We need your help! Our blog has been nominated for two different awards and we need you (if you want to of course) to vote for us to help raise our profile and spread the message of going green. You can vote here and here :) Thanks!

Day 234 of our Green Year: Our Christmas Dinner

Christmas dinner is often the highlight of Christmas for many people. It brings together a family after a day of presents and celebrating, to enjoy each others company and enjoy a great meal. Personally, I love making Christmas dinner, especially when it is turkey. However, for this green Christmas, we are not having turkey, or hens, or ham or any meat whatsoever.

In an effort to be green this year, we are doing what we do for the better part of each week, and that is eat veggie meals. This year, our Christmas dinner will be a vegetarian, and organic dinner for the entire family to enjoy.

I have cleared this with everyone and they all agree that it is a good idea to go with a veggie supper this year. Of course, if we had decided to have turkey, it would have been a free-range turkey, like we had for Thanksgiving.

Instead, there will be organic yams, organic peas, organic potatoes and more for the dinner that is completely meat-free.

Now the effort begins to find some interesting veggie holiday suppers to try.

Day 107 of our Green Year: Learning From The Past

Today, for Our Green Year, Layla and I traveled back in time to learn about the world as it once was. Now, we did not literally go back in time of course, but instead we went to a living history museum to get some ideas for how we can go green. The reason for this is that to really go into the future of going green, we need to actually take a step back into the past. The past holds our future because in the past there was not electricity, gas or anything like that to help people live their day-to-day lives. As a result, they had to essentially find green ways to live their lives, without realizing they were being green.

Through our journey in the living history museum, we learned about putting sod on our roof to help insulate the roof and keep things cool. We learned about things we knew about, like making butter, and we learned about how important it was to have animals on your farm to ensure you always had food.

We also learned all the great things you could do with a wood stove and how people could live for 10,000 plus years without television, so we don't really need it now. One thing I noticed about going through this living history museum is that as more and more people move into the cities, and more and more people are located in one area, they seem to know the people around them less and less. There are many reasons for this, including suburbia, the television, video games and more, but there is something to be said about being able to sit on the grass and watch a performance with the people of your town, all of whom you know.

We have some great ideas now and we have learned to respect the past to find our green solutions in the future.

Also, we received our carbon offset certificate from CarbonFund.Org, and I encourage all of you to do the same. It is literally the least you can do to help mother nature.