Jamie's Favorite Sites (in no particular order)
- Energy Information Administration: International Petroleum Monthly - Oil Production
- Sustainable Sciences Institute
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Big Ideas @ Berkeley: Student-Led Projects at Berkeley. Take a look!
- George Monbiot's homepage. Better than a cold shower in the morning.
- Hersch and Bezdek report to DOE on peaking of world oil production
- The Oil Drum
- Democrats for Life of America
- First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, CA
- Bureau of the Public Debt: The Debt to the Penny
September, 2006. We've now installed solar panels on the house. One of the fun things about the system (Xantrex inverter) is that we can see every day how we're doing. So far, the maximum kWh generated in a day has been 19 kWh. Now near the end of September, it's down to about 16 kWh per day. We are also on "Time of Use" metering (TOU) in PG&E parlance. This means that when we dump electricity onto the grid during "peak" hours of use (M-F, noon to 6 PM), we get paid more per kWh. We'll see after the first year if this in fact was better economically than just having a flat rate.
We've now installed compact fluorescent lightbulbs in our house, to replace incandensce nt bulbs and halogens wherever possible. We've had good luck with GE "spiral" CFLs that are "soft white" in the color spectrum. We also tried reflector CFLs for recessed cans, made by Technical Consumer Products, Inc. (TCP). We chose 14W CFLs with a color index of 2700K, supposedly "warm" like typical incandescents. These were R20 bulbs that we used to replace 50W halogen bulbs. In contrast to the GE bulbs, we have not been as happy with the TCP ones. The TCP ones turn on very dim, and take a minute or so to go from about 30% output to 100%. The TCP lights are also more "cold" than the halogens they replaced. Jennifer is tolerating these in some locations, but the one over the breakfast table had to come out, and we're back to the halogen bulb there.
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