Green printing?

This week my trusty old Canon IP4000 inkjet stopped working. Changing the cartridges and running deep cleaning cycles make no difference. The print quality has been slowly falling off for some time now, so my suspicion was that the print head had finally died. I suspect the printer must be something like four or five years old now, so it’s not perhaps not unexpected.

What was unexpected was the cost of a replacement print head; the cheapest I could find was nearly £70. Add in another set of cartridges at £30, and it becomes significantly less expensive to just buy the new replacement model printer from Canon (the IP4850) at about £75 delivered. Which is just completely ridiculous.

In addition I’ve always been frustrated that the inkjet cartridges always seem to run out at an alarming rate. The manufacturers quote the capacity in pages of 5% coverage (340 pages, apparently), which may be representative of average business use, but decidedly unrealistic when you have three children printing lots of full-colour diagrams as part of their homework. I doubt that I got more than a hundred pages before one or another of the colour cartridges started running dry. Keeping the printer supplied involved the frequent advance purchase & stockpiling of cartridges.

Of course, printing technology has moved on in the intervening years, so I decided to do a proper examination of the options available against my expected printing requirements over the next few years. This is heavily influenced by the needs of my daughters who are entering the stage where they will be doing a lot more homework as part of their GCSE and A levels, and my need to produce the occasional “customer ready” document at home.

My requirements; Linux support, excellent black and white performance, automatic duplex (saves so much paper!), the ability to print colour diagrams, and a volume of approximately 200 pages per month. Long term cost of ownership is more of a factor than the purchase price, and we have no requirement for photographic printing, as we print photographs via a bureau.

To my surprise, the latest generation of SOHO colour laser printers compete very favourably with inkjets on total cost of ownership. There is no doubt that they are still more expensive, but to compensate for that, you get better print quality, faster throughput, and the convenience of much longer between (more expensive) toner cartridge changes.

In the end I narrowed the choice down to either the Canon IP4850 inkjet, or a Lexmark C543dn laser printer. Both had excellent reviews and represented the best fit for my expected needs for their respective technologies. However, finding a supplier offering the Lexmark with a 50% discount pretty much decided the issue; £150 delivered, with full capacity toner cartridges installed is hard to beat.

I took my old Canon IP4000 down to the recycling centre yesterday. It felt really wrong to be “throwing away” something that with a little maintenance is basically capable of continuing to provide good service. But economically it just didn’t make sense. I felt very un-green.

Meanwhile the Lexmark is installed on my home network and working beautifully. I spent some time fiddling with the printer settings to reduce the toner intensity levels and the timeout period before the printer drops into its lowest power-saving mode, both of which ought to help me save money. It does mean a twenty second delay before the first page is printed while the printer warms back up, but once running it churns out paper at 20 pages a minute, so overall it’s a lot faster than the old inkjet we were used to.

Energy usage

I’ve been tracking my homes annual energy usage for several years now. For the last few it’s been fairly stable at around 19,000Kwh gas and 6,500Kwh electricity.

This year, with our new central heating boiler and maximised loft insulation, the figures are 15,500Kwh gas and 5,800Kwh electricity.

Taken together this reduces the carbon footprint of our home from 7.05 to 6.02 tonnes. The drop in gas usage is responsible for most of that, and is very welcome indeed. The electricity drop is good news too, though apart from forever going around turning lights off after my kids, I can’t account for any real changes in our usage, which is odd. However, I suspect it could be easily accounted for by something as small as using the oven a little less each week.

Now, if only I could find some reliable figures for the UK average to benchmark myself against…

Insulating the loft (part iii)

Just thought that I’d post the information that since the weekend when the heating first cut in (the 25th Sept), when I added 200mm of insulation to the loft, the heating has remained completely off until today, when it finally decided to cut back in (for a surprisingly short time) this morning.

Admittedly it’s been a fairly mild autumn, but I assume that adding the insulation has still saved me a fortnight of running the heating this autumn, will presumably reduce the amount of heating that I’m going to provide from now on, as well as (hopefully) save me another fortnight or so of running the heating in spring. That has got to add up to a significant saving of both energy and money.

And I still haven’t got around to properly insulating and draught-proofing the loft hatch, so there should be some more savings to be made there too. That suddenly feels like a job for this coming weekend!

Insulating the loft (part ii)

Looks like I started just in time; the weather has definitely turned autumnal, and the heating cut in this morning for the first time this year. However, the good news is that up in the loft, the temperature is cool enough that it’s actually possible to work. And in theory at least, the more insulation I get in there, the cooler it will become.

After running some errands this morning, I managed to spend about 4 hours insulating the loft this afternoon. I completed the gable dormer over our bedroom (which was completely stuffed full of trusses, making it a nightmare to work in) and about a third of the remaining area. It was interesting to see how poorly insulated the “hard to see” areas of the loft actually were; presumably because the builders found it hard to get in there, and didn’t expect anyone to ever check their work! But there was insulation that didn’t stretch right into the eaves, and some big gaps where there was no insulation at all, which clearly hasn’t been helping us to keep the house warm.

I’ve patched all the insulation between the joists, installed renovation eaves ventilators (to make sure the insulation doesn’t block the airflow through the loft and cause condensation), and then added a further 200mm of cross-laid insulation over the top of the joists. I’m not totally convinced that the eaves ventilators are making a big enough gap past the insulation; the building codes say 25mm is sufficient, but looking at the gaps, it seems pretty small, especially compared to the huge gaps that were there previously. I think I’ll be keeping a very close eye out for condensation this winter, just in case I’ve overly constrained the ventilation.

Tomorrow I need to complete the remaining two thirds of the loft space, which is all nice simple square areas, that are easily accessed. Hopefully no more than another couple of hours work. But then I also need to double-check the insulation on the pipework to the heatstore, and finally insulate the loft hatch.

The loft hatch is going to be interesting. I made this one from 20mm marine plywood, varnishing and painting it to stop it from warping. But it warped anyway, and now doesn’t form a particularly good seal, as revealed by the dust patterns on the sides of the hatch. So at a minimum I need to draught-proof it. But realistically I need to add some insulation to it too, which is going to be awkward.

At the moment I favour the idea of glueing some Celotex insulation batons to the inside of the hatch with something like “no nails”, to a depth of about 100mm … which is equivalent to about 250mm of glass fibre insulation. But to make it work well, I’m going to need to get the size and shape of the insulation exactly right, which is going to be interesting.

So far I’m pleased with progress, though clearly the ultimate proof will be in this winters heating bills.

Insulating the loft

Todays main job was to move forward the loft; laying the remaining flooring boards (and the insulation under them) to complete the main central section of the loft. This gives us a large space where we can store things “out of season”, and allows us easy access to everything. It’s also the last job that needs doing before I order & fit the extra insulation to bring the rest of the loft space up to current insulation standards – we currently only have a woeful 100mm of insulation up there.

The current plan is to fit eave vents and another 200mm of insulation across all the unboarded loft space, add additional insulation to the pipework and heatstore, and insulate & draught-proof the loft hatch. On the one hand that’s all very laudable from a “green” perspective, and practically I ought to see a return on my investment (about £200) within a year or so – but actually this is all about keeping warm. I spent most of last winter feeling cold, and I just don’t want to go through that again. So more insulation? Yes please! Bring it on…

Female stag beetle

And on the 10th July (was it really so long ago?!) we came across this little beauty, also in the undergrowth around the house:

Hopefully this means the continuation of their species, at least for this year.

Stag Beetle

For the last few days we’ve had this not-so-little chap keep turning up at different locations around our garden:

At about 3inches (8cm or so) he’s pretty huge, and very impressive. It’s taken a good 6-8 years for him to reach this final stage in his life, and he really needs to find a mate this summer, because he won’t make it through the winter.

Sadly these beetles are becoming more and more rare. I’ve only ever seen one a few times in my life. They’re considered endangered across most of Europe, and are a protected species in the UK. Given that we seem to keep rescuing him from various “scrapes” that he gets himself into, I can see why. Yesterday we found him stuck on his back on the front doorstep, waiting to be eaten by any passing bird. Today I rescued him from some flower pots that he’d apparently fallen into. Although he’s an amazing sight, I hope I don’t see him again, and that he just manages to get on with his life, and continuing his species.

“Measure twice, cut once”, Anon

As many of you will know, over the last 3 or 4 years I’ve become increasingly concerned with what is often referred to as “Green Issues”, and in particular the environment and how we are impacting upon it. I guess it’s one of the results of getting older and having kids – a case of suddenly realising that what we do now is going to affect them, and even their children. Now this isn’t to say that I’m particularly fanatical; I’d like to think that I’m a pretty pragmatic kind of guy. But I do try to do what I can, even though that’s pretty much limited to trying to reduce my personal impact on the planet, and finding ways to reduce the impact of IT on our planet (this latter one because its part of my day job, working in emerging technology for a large multinational IT company).

So I was really interested to come across this little device recently. Although I’ve seen such things before (usually at high prices), this is the first one that I’ve seen that can handle proper 3 phase supplies, and also has a PC interface on it, allowing it to be integrated with a home automation system.

The companys business model is to sell these (hopefully in huge quantities!) to the energy supply companies, who will then either sell or give them to end-user power-consumers in an effort to help them to reduce their power consumption. This model is being helped (in Europe anyway) by the expectation of legislation that will require energy supply companies to find ways to help energy consumers to reduce their power consumption (and hence CO2 emissions). Unfortunately you can’t (as an individual) buy one just yet, but fortunately (for me) the company I work for is involved in a trial using them, and so I was allowed to buy one at the price an energy supply company would pay. I don’t believe I’m allowed to say exactly what that was, but let me just say that it was a pleasantly affordable deal.

Setting it up took about 60 seconds. Hook the current clamp around one of the meter tails (the wires running from the supply companys electricity meter to my fusebox) and turn on the wireless transmitter. Plug the display unit into my server with a serial cable, and then into the mains for power. Power consumption numbers appear on the display unit – simple as that. I must admit that I’ve not done a detailed check on the unit for accuracy, but a few quick empirical tests show that it’s definitely close enough that I’m happy to believe the accuracy claims on their website.

Reading the data from the serial port is a small matter of a little bit of perl. The data itself is encoded in a tagged text format, similar to XML, which naturally makes it trivial to parse in a perl script. So its easy to extract the interesting bits of information, and store them in a round robin database, where they can then be analysed, graphed, or whatever. In my case I’m extracting the instantaneous power consumption figures for the three cable clamps (even though as a domestic user, I only have single phase) and the temperature at the display unit. This means I can combine the room temp of my study (where my server and the display unit are) with the internal temperatures of my server, and see how external temperature affects those, as well as watching how my electricity usage varies over time.

Of course, the trick here is to use this thing to lower my energy consumption. But that doesn’t really mean to stop doing things. We will still need to run the washing machine, the tumble-dryer, the fridge and freezer etc, and we’ll still want to boil water in the kettle. Because although all of those things take a “lot” of power, it’s power that’s being spent on useful work. Where we can (and should) be concentrating is the “resting” power-consumption of the house. The stuff that’s running 24×7, and doing nothing useful, that could be shutdown. And yet, to my surprise, despite having quite a lot of general stuff that does run 24×7, my base resting power consumption is pretty low (well, compared to some of the other people on the trial, anyway!)

Overnight the numbers are under 200w. And that includes my server, my printer, my ADSL/wireless, my 24 port switch, the central heating controls, the alarm, and a nightlight for the kids, plus a surprising number of “standby items” including alarm clocks, radios, 2xTV, set top boxes, various cellphone and laptop chargers, etc etc. And the big ticket items are the ones that it would be difficult/impracticable (for me) to change – namely the server and its associated support networking. So it seems like we’re doing a pretty good job at the moment, though I think I might try unplugging some of the easily accessible stuff, and see if I can half it.

After all, 100w saving doesn’t sound a lot, but when its over a whole year, that’s 876kwh. Nearly £90 of electricity ($170). And there are 25 million households, and a lot more commercial/industrial establishments in the UK who could attempt this …

If you’re interested, you can see near-realtime graphs of all this data here.

The end is nigh – unless we do something about it

This weekend we went away and hired a small cottage on a working farm. My family needed a break from the normal routine of dealing with my wifes cancer. It was great – miles from anywhere, nice friendly farmer and his family, lovely comfortable cottage, and nothing else. My kids played with the farmers daughters, helped to muck out the cows, fed the lambs, searched for the free-range eggs, and rode horses.

My wife and I chilled out and ignored the world. And I did what I always do when I’m on holiday, and demolished a new book.

Except in this case it was the most terrifying book I have ever read. This is the ultimate horror story. Because it’s talking about the future that we’re bringing down on ourselves. I urge you to go grab a copy, and read it. It’s packed with scientific evidence, and quotations from scientific papers, but presented in the most readable fashion you could ever want. You owe it to your children, and their children.

“Six Degrees”, by Mark Lynas. ISBN 978-0-00-720905-7

When a butterfly flaps its wings in … February ???

Last weekend I saw two bumblebees. That would be in January. Today I saw a butterfly. This is *months* before I would normally expect to see either of them.

What on earth have we done to our climate?