Published by Rhonda Dibachi under Energy Efficiency, Kitchen, Renewable Energy, Sustainable Products

I loved Hubert’s post yesterday. So much waste to avoid! And then I read the following newsflash from the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council, 11/17/2008): Video Games are Energy Drains

“Video game consoles nationwide use about as much electricity in a year as every home in San Diego combined, and can significantly add to consumers’ electric bills.”  The NRDC points out that turning off the power, rather than just setting it to standby mode, can save over $100 per year in a home’s electricity bill.

Well, no shiitake mushrooms, Sherlock! My son’s gaming centers are such power pigs that we don’t even need to heat his room. His heavily-modded PC roars like an airport runway—he’s such a hack, he even water-cooled it. We eventually had to rewire his room because his gaming systems overloaded the circuits. That should tell you something.

But I’m as guilty as he is, since I have power hogs a-plenty. Our AppleTV heats up the media cabinet so much that I’m afraid the CDs will melt like Dali’s pocket watch. Our towel warmers alone are enough to keep the guest bathrooms toasty; we don’t even bother with the radiant heating.

Turning off the lights in my study brings out the stars: the LEDs on my computer, printer, various rechargers, and other devices. I don’t even carry a watch any more, since I’m surrounded by clocks: five in my kitchen alone…clocks on the wall, microwave, coffee machine, toaster, and oven.

OK, so a clock on my coffee maker is handy…now I need not suffer a nanomoment without my coffee. But a clock on a toaster? Makes me pause to wonder why I bought all this stuff with these optional bells and whistles.

I guess I was a sucker for the Three Cs: Convenience! Coolness! Cachet! In recent decades retailers have added more and more marginally useful features to everyday objects, simply to pad their customer-enticing features list. It costs them close to zilch to make eye candy and extra toys, but it causes a huge pump-up in our electric bills and an unaffordable cost to the planet.

Shamefacedly I admit that, unlike Hubert, I am not excited about the prospect of both plugging in my coffee machine and then turning it on—that’s too much effort for my caffeine-craving 7:00 a.m. self. The brain-dead option would be to buy a coffee machine sans clock or maybe go manual with a French press. But you and I know the answer isn’t to spend ourselves green.

What about this: For powering our gizmos’ ancillary gewgaws such as clocks, how about a little solar-powered strip, like the one on a pocket calculator? I have one that I picked up at a trade show decades ago and use almost daily. I’m sure that the solar cells on that thing could easily power most of the extra widgets that all my power pigs require.

My son’s Xbox can happily survive in standby on solar power and I am sure my toaster’s clock can, too.

These may sound like musings, though I am actively working to make this a reality at my company Noribachi, a venture accelerator focused on the clean technology industry.

So that’s my battle plan: unplug the pigs I don’t use, and commercialize solar power to take a bite out of the rest of the power porkers. Bacon, anyone?

Got any good ideas for solar power? Send me a line at ideas@noribachi.com.