it’s been a few months since i’ve been trying to reduce my power consumption. thus far it’s been going well. i find myself shutting off the lights when i leave the room, even if i’m coming back just a few minutes later. i’ve come to realize that my previous light usage was completely ridiculous. in most cases, there is absolutely no need to leave the lights on in a room when no one is in there. i found i was doing that somewhat regularly. there are even times i now catch myself turning off other peoples’ lights where applicable. i feel like i’ve made a good impact myself. not only that, but my habits are reflecting on others as they are becoming more aware of their lighting habits. pretty neat.

in other news, i’ve been hardcore about my battery recycling. i’ve also been using my battery charger much more. i had a couple gift cards to use, so i picked up some rechargeable batteries for my biking lights, wiimotes, and other uses.

on top of all that, i’ve been configuring all the computers i manage for lower power usage. tricks i use are allowing the hard drives to spin down when idle, lowering the screen brightness, setting the screensaver to blank rather than show anything, and setting the systems to turn off monitors and/or standby after a few hours of idle time. i really feel like i’m making an impact!

all in all, i’d say reducing my demand on the grid has substantially reduced. and it wasn’t even difficult! we’ll see if i can keep that up with the xmas lights up around our house :)

my next goal is to deny the dozens of mailings we get each week. after reading about paper recycling i’ve come to learn that repurposing paper is very easy. it seems a huge number of folks around milwaukee recycle their paper products efficiently. that’s good news. however, there are other things to consider: paper cannot be reused like the clean paper it once was. not only that, those mailings have a lot of ink, cost a fair amount to create, and their deliveries have a decent environmental impact.

i don’t suspect my next task will be very easy or fun, but i hope to get rid of a large chunk of our mail (most days i recycle 80% of the mail we get because it is useless to us) and report back here with my findings so that you too can do this.