Great Energy and Water Savings

Through our water company, we were offered a really great deal, where someone from  Ecovantage  came out to our house and swapped our old shower head which we had thought would save water, however it didn't.  The new one is GREAT and will actually save water!  It is a FlexiSpray Bermuda shower head and apparently will massage us as well.

The other brilliant thing that the guy Peter did for us was walk through our house finding all of the forgotten light bulbs that I hadn't yet changed over.  It is incredible that even after all of this time, I still have a few.  He was able to change 3 over, leaving a few still to be done.  The ones that he couldn't do were because they had dimmer switches, were dodgy bayonets or were downlights (only 4 of our 6 work and we dislike them so much that we have not replaced them - working with lamps instead).  He recommended for the downlights to change them over the  Low Voltage Halogen Dichroic Xenon Lamp

Low voltage globe

At $80 for a box of 10 globes, he reckons we will probably get our money back in a year.  The LED is a much more expensive option, it would cost us $125 for the 6 globes that we would need, then the additional costs of about $50 of the fittings (driver & flex and plug) to change over to the LED per light ($300) plus the cost of an electrician. 

LED light

LED fiitting

 This is certainly something that I would take into account when we get the sparky out here to do the work that we do need to do.  Until then, I am happy to go with the low energy globes.  They are globes that we are can put in ourselves.

The last couple of things that Peter looked at were putting the computer, TV and DVD on standby.  There are a number of new nifty power boards around now that are clever enough to understand when the machines haven't been used for a while and will automatically put the machines onto standby.  I was a little sceptical as we normally turn them off when we are done, however, there are some things that still don't turn off.  The DVD is one and I know that there are still a couple of little lights around the computer.  

On the TV he installed an Embertec board which will notice if we haven't done anything with the remote for an hour (we can change that to 2 hours or 3 or cancel it) and then will switch the TV and DVD off.  The standby power is then in the Embertec board which uses less power than the standby power in the TV or DVD.  

On the computer he installed an Emerald Planet board that will switch off all "slaves" to the computer (ie the printer, external hard drive, monitor) when the machine goes into low power or off.  It doesn't actually turn the computer itself off - I have to do that, so there is no risk of losing files.  

Feeling a little bit smuggly happy now (and writing a list of all the things that I still need to do; downlights, dimmable low energy globes, an electrician....etc).