Something you can do to help renewable energy....

Today’s post: Wednesday, 1-28-2009

We CAN have more renewable energy & jobs SOON.

Some of the things that impact our ability to have more renewable energy are out of your direct control.

But here are three things you can do.:

1. Write all of the politicians who are in your various districts and support feed-in tariffs and other kinds of financing for renewable energy installations. (See our last post on Weds, 1-21 for why that will also create up to 5,000,000 jobs and has been PROVEN to result in sharp increases in the amount of renewable energy actually installed and giving us energy.)

This is a bit more time consuming to do. But a lot of politicians don’t know this information yet; and some that do will only act on it if they think the voters will notice if they do or do not.

They also note personal letters more than mass efforts sometimes. So your one letter or email might actually work.

2. Do something little to save energy where you live, such as weather strip just ONE window that now either leaks a lot of cold air in the winter or hot air in the summer. You’ll not only save energy, you’ll be more comfortable too.

Or turn off the power on your TV by doing it at the power surge strip each time you leave or go to bed. Believe it or not, that cuts the total power your TV uses at least in HALF. Just remember to turn it back on at the power surge protector’s switch a few minutes before you want watch it.

If you can think up and do 20 such projects, by all means do. But it’s been proven over and over doing even ONE thing will help.

So do that during this upcoming week.

3. Start looking for opportunities to buy and install LED light bulbs & do it.

They are still a bit too expensive to be easy to buy upfront. But they are an unusually shrewd investment.

Even at today’s prices you’ll save as much as four times the upfront cost in savings on your electric bill before the bulb stops working.

LED lights save even more energy than compact fluorescents in any given size of light!

Even better, unlike compact fluorescents, LED lights contain no mercury.
Here’s why that’s important too. Since many of the people all over the world will simply dump compact fluorescents in ways that wind up adding their mercury to our waters and land, we already face increases in the mercury content of our food, particularly fish and seafood, from this source.

The sooner we can switch to LED light bulbs instead, we’ll not only save more energy, we’ll turn off this source of pollution of our planet.

Last, but far from least, now that incandescent bulbs are becoming illegal in many places, if we support the LED light bulb makers now, they may be able to make LED light bulbs that fit all the sockets in refrigerators and lamps all over the world BEFORE it becomes illegal to install incandescent bulbs in those sockets and nothing else will fit.

Try to buy even one LED light bulb within 30 days for where you live.

You can even make money selling LED light bulbs now.

See http://www.netprofitstoday.com/blog/the-perfect-time-to-go-and-sell-green/ .

Here’s a quote from that blog entry.:

“ For example, the prospect of saving up to 75% on lighting costs (typically representing approximately 25% of a home energy budget) convinced me to outfit 98% of the lights in my home with compact fluorescents when the product was first introduced. Now, 10-watt LED bulbs that last up to 50,000 hours and are equivalent to 100-watt incandescent bulbs are available for home use. Those who have already replaced 150-watt incandescent bulbs with the 10-watt LED spotlights are reporting better and brighter task lighting in addition to the benefit of increased savings.
Although the initial outlay of $60.00 to $100.00 per bulb seems pretty pricey, taking a longer-term view and applying some simple math reveals that each bulb $400 to $500 in electricity savings over the life of a bulb - based on a median cost of 10 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity. That’s not a cost — it’s a no-brainer investment. Replace ten incandescent bulbs, save $4,000.00 (or more), invest those savings in the solar retrofit and pretty soon the local hydro-electric utility will be sending you a check every month for the power that you send back to the grid!
Green Product Availability
Alas, not so fast. You can’t buy an LED light bulb that isn’t attached to a Christmas string for love nor money here in Backwater, British Columbia. So, this is where YOU come in. You can promote those bulbs as an affiliate. Do a search for “LED bulb” and “affiliate program” and merchants such as Smarthome (partnered with Linkshare) show up at the top of the Google search results. Smarthome reports that their average sale is over $200.00 and they pay 8-10% sales commissions.
Go beyond the bulbs and check out the plethora of energy-saving products that are available for promotion through those and other merchants with affiliate programs. Visitors who might be loathe to drop $70.00 on an LED light bulb can be sold a $34.00 sensor-activated switch that dims conventional and fluorescent bulbs by up to 50% and extends the expected lifespan by up to 35 times. While you’re at it, point that visitor to programmable thermostats that save 10 to 20% on the annual heating bill and cost as little as 40 bucks. For the still-skeptical, there are electricity usage monitors that display consumption by the kilowatt-hour and calculate electricity expenses by the day, week, month, or year and are an easy sell at $19.99. Put them on a list and they’ll come running back to your site for the real energy-saving tools once they gain perspective on their current usage and potential savings. “
I found lots of energy saving devices when I clicked on http://www.sarthome.com/ as Rosalind Gardner mentions above.

But to find the 10 Watt LED spotlights I had search on Yahoo.

I found this.: www.zgsm-china.com/LED-Spotlights.html .

Their site in English also pointed out that LED lights are far safer to use, particularly in uses where the light needs to be on and unattended for any length of time since they run dramatically cooler than compact fluorescents or incandescent light bulbs.

My hope is that major United States based companies that make light bulbs such as GE and Sylvania will make decent LED light bulbs available soon if only online & that fit all the existing fixtures that have been using the incandescent light bulbs for which they were originally designed.

Why should the Chinese companies make all the money?

The 10 watt spotlights use a fifteenth of the energy of a 150 watt incandescent and can light a whole room.