Results of the January, 2009 No-Brainer

The first No-Brainer contest to be posted on this blog was a success. We had 8 people send in pictures of their washers on cold, and 17 participants total. That is a company record. The challenge was to set your washing machine on cold (or cold/cold) and leave it there for the rest of the month. I offered to pay $10 for each entry. And I am also doing a $50 drawing for the people who sent in pictures. All the awards payouts will go out this week.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this very successful No-Brainer.






Here was the impact of the January, 2009 No-Brainer:

Oil
Electricity: ................. 553 kWh
Natural Gas
Water
Paper
Carbon: ...................... 0.37 metric tons
Landfill Waste
Sulfur Dioxide: .......... 1.732 lbs
Nitrous Oxides: ......... 0.630 lbs
Mercury: .................... 0.15691 lbs
Cost: .......................... $170

There are assumptions that go into these numbers. Here are a few: I assume everyone who says they will do it actually does it (for two weeks anyways, though I see that some folks are planning on doing it for another month...); washers comprise around 7% of the total household energy use; around 90% of the energy required for washing goes into heating the water; and I assume the average household electric bill is 1,000 kWh each month. Also, however, this data does not take into account natural gas use (around 20% of clothes washers run on natural gas). The actual electricity saved will be a little less, and we will have saved some natural gas, but the emissions will be roughly the same. Nevertheless, I wanted to give a rough report on the impact of this contest as soon as possible. The full report will be posted on the new website sometime soon.

Putting this into terms that make sense (i.e., I'm not going to talk about hot air balloons), 520 kWh is a lot of energy compared to a person. Since I am a light bulb running at 100 Watts, this contest saved enough energy to run me for a little over 7 months. There are many other wonderful things to say, but I want to keep it simple for now.

As I go along, there are many other intuitions I want to develop, such as how much mercury this is compared with how much mercury is toxic to a plant or a person, and also how these numbers compare not only to a person, but to a small company like Oil is Dumb. But that will have to wait for another post.

By the way, the cost I just paid per kilowatt-hour was around 30 cents. This is about 3 times the cost of traditional electricity, and roughly the same cost as solar power.