Saturday 27 March 2010

A Momentary Lapse of Consumption

Uncharacteristically, we remembered Earth Hour this year, and managed to organise ourselves with enough candles (and fuel for the fire!) to take us through the hour. We also managed, for the first time ever, to get the house down to zero electricity consumption [*]. To date, our best has been ~50 watts, but this evening we hit rock bottom as evidenced by this (shamefully out of focus) photograph ...


Of course, it is still something of a token event, and after 21:30 we almost immediately boiled the kettle as usual for an evening drink (~3000 watts), but I suppose that we did temporarily slow our CO2 production. Nothing on the news though to suggest the wider significance of the event. Perhaps climate change fatigue has set in.



[*] Actually only near-zero since we left a handful of devices on - the electricity meter for starters. But these consumed less than 1 watt, so the meter struck out at zero for the whole hour.

2 comments:

Anne said...

For Earth Hour, I'll either be soaking in a well deserved bath by candle-light (cleaning out the garage today), or lighting candles down at the beach as ceremony to the things I'm letting go and things I'm taking on (rather than actually burning my trash). I understand they will be turning out the decorative lighting on the the Golden Gate Bridge.

Plumbago said...

Although Earth Hour was in the newspapers earlier in the week, we didn't see much about it last night. Maybe all of the coverage was put, ironically, during the "blackout"? Anyway, while our street seemed relatively dark, it was difficult to see if wider Southampton was saving on electrons.

Hope that the candles worked out!