< PREVIOUS ] [ 2001 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
All day Thursday I fretted about how to send a message
to the energy and utility companies, as well as their
chattels in Congress and the White House, by participating
in the roll-your-own blackout.
Note that I am in favor of rolling your own,
since there's usually a can of Bugler near me. And if I
had anything against occasional blackouts, I wouldn't live
here, where summer thunderstorms often disrupt electrical
service.
But the logistics of turning the electricity off for three hours quickly became complex.
Start with the refrigerator. Ours is less than a decade old, and fairly efficient. It replaced an old one that still worked, but was a real pig on power use.
Its inefficiency turned out to be a selling point after I advertised it and a fellow came by to look at it (on my front porch, of course -- I do what I can to depress local property values).
He asked why I was selling it if it still worked. I told him. He said that was exactly what he was looking for, as he was a landlord with some tenants in a rental house who needed a refrigerator, and he had also been trying to get them to move out because they whined all the time.
If this inefficient antique jacks up their electric
bill by $20 or $30 a month, so they'll go somewhere else,
it's just what I need,
he said. I can just keep it
around and install it where it will do me the most
good.
Consider that a caution if you rent and pay your own electric bill where the landlord provides a refrigerator, especially an avocado side-by-side.
Back to the current refrigerator. Food should keep for three hours without thawing or spoiling, but to be sure, maybe I should get some dry ice for the freezer compartment.
But does the energy involved in making -- and transporting and storing -- a few pounds of dry ice exceed the electricity consumed by the refrigerator for the three hours of roll-your-own blackout?
That's for an engineer to answer, but I figured it was a good enough excuse to leave the refrigerator plugged in.
June 21 is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, so we could get by with sunlight for the first hour or so of the roll-your-own blackout.
One of the blackout promoters, Monica Rex of Los
Angeles, suggested that afterward, we could light a
candle.
All the household candles I checked were made from
paraffin, which comes from petroleum, which comes from --
well, the box of paraffin in the pantry said it was made by
Gulf,
as in one of those evil multi-national
energy corporations.
The alternatives didn't look much greener, either. We have a battery-powered lantern -- and depleted batteries are toxic waste. There's the trusty and rusty old Coleman lantern, but the white gas it burns comes from the same wicked sources as paraffin.
But certainly we could sit outdoors in the dark for an
hour or two, enjoying the night sky with Mars at its
brightest. The TV and stereo could stay off, although
off
is a relative term in these days of remote
controls -- unless you unplug the devices, they'll be using
some electricity. And if you do unplug them, they seem to
need to be reconfigured when the power returns, and that's
an aggravating process which involves a lengthy search to
find manuals which have hidden themselves in strange
corners of the house.
Rex also advises that You can turn the computer off
every now and then.
That's harder than it sounds. Not all that long ago, I could just plug computer, monitor, printer, etc. into a power strip with a surge protector, and just flip that switch.
But it's not that simple any more. First came the uninterruptible power supplies. They do what they're supposed to do -- provide enough time to shut down gracefully when the power goes off -- but they don't have enough juice for laser printers, which can't be plugged into the UPS.
I got around that problem with a relay, but then came
the newer computers with ATX motherboards and the start
button. You can't just turn one off -- you have to go
through a shutdown procedure, which often hangs, which
means the next time you boot up, you get told that
Because Windows was not properly shut down ...
and
you get to sit impatiently while it scans your hard disk
for errors.
Since the computer has to be turned off separately now, that means you also have to remember to turn off the monitor, speakers, printers, scanners, etc.
I liked it better a few years ago, before the energy
saving
features, when we were presumed to be adults who
knew when we wanted our computers on and when we didn't,
and one switch could do it all. Now it's so complicated to
turn one off that I suspect that Bill Gates has invested
heavily in electric utilities.
And that would be a great reason to participate in a roll-your-own blackout, except it might take days for me to figure out how to get everything running again afterwards.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2001 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >