We’ve talked before about a very cool green gadget called the Kill-O-Watt meter. Basically you plug it into your wall and plug an appliance into the meter. You leave it plugged in for a few days (or a few weeks for larger appliances) and you can find out how much energy an appliance is using. The meter can also guage how much energy you’re using overall on a daily basis – which can be super helpful if you’re trying to reduce your overall kilowatt usage on your electric bill – which means being greener and saving money!

The kill-o-watt meter is a great, and pretty inexpensive, way to really assess if you need to replace an older appliance with one that’s more energy efficient and also a great way to really understand your power consumption! After all, assessing your electric load is one of the first steps towards successfully changing your energy habits and preparing to implement any renewable.

Well, a modified version of the Kill-O-Watt meter, called the Tweet-O-Watt just won the #1 Audience Pick in the Greener Gadgets awards over at Treehugger. This modified meter actually wirelessly publishes the user’s daily energy consumption in kilowatt hours onto their Twitter account.

Created by Philip Torrone of Make Magazine and Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries, this is literally an open source hardware modification to the regular Kill-O-Watt meter – so anyone can make it at home. The guys who developed the gadget have put step by step instructions on how to recreate it out onto the web – hence the open source – in hopes of inspiring energy aces worldwide!

The idea here is that by publishing your daily kilowatt hours you become far more aware of how much electricity you are actually using – and you can watch the changes to your energy usage by changing your behaviors. You’ll be able to actually track the energy you save from taking care of ghost loads, changing out your lightbulbs or just being a better energy ace.

By tweeting your progress you can serve as a great example to the folks who follow you on Twitter and other social media sites – since you can actually have your twitter feed right into your Facebook (or other social media site) status updates. Your friends can watch your kilowatt hour usage evolve and you’ll be making them more aware just by showing them what you’re doing and informing them about how electricity is metered and used.

As energy efficiency becomes a hotter issue its education and information that becomes the most valuable commodity. People need to better understand how much power they’re using, how they’re using it and how much power they actually need in order to move forward in the process of going green.

Who knows, you could even inspire them to take steps towards reducing their own energy consumption!
So if you haven’t invested in your kilowatt meter, think seriously about getting one – and if you’re feeling really intrepid, consider using this hardware hack to inspire other to become as energy efficient as possible!

We talk about climate change quite a bit in the “green” world but until recently I hadn’t really learned that much about oil production and what is also means to the world. Sure, I know to “use less” and “conserve” but is keeping my heat at 62 degrees and owning a fuel efficient vehicle really conserving? And is it really all just about the ever present “carbon footprint”?

I’ve recently been reading The Transition Handbook and the author, Rob Hopkins, points out that we not only need to worry about climate change, we also need to worry about the fact that there is only so much oil, and if we’ve reached Peak Oil then we’re all consuming on borrowed time.

Peak oil is defined as being the moment when we have reached the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction – basically once we’ve reached the apex of pumping oil out of the earth. Once that point is reached, the production of oil will go into a terminal decline meaning that the price of oil will rise and rise and supply becomes even more disproportionate to demand.

Whether we have already reached or are getting close to Peak Oil is a hotly contested debate. The oil companies are constantly putting out information about new potential oil fields and trying to allay fears about peak oil, but there are other analysts, geologists and scientists out there that say we have already hit this crucial point.

The reason Peak Oil becomes important is that it raises consciousness about the value of this resource – which is not infinite. And, knowing when we do hit Peak Oil will help us prepare for the inevitable oil reserve depletion. As a society and as an economy, we need to be aware of how dependent we are on petroleum and we need to reduce that dependence so we aren’t in big trouble as it becomes more and more expensive.

After all, we don’t just use petroleum to heat our homes and fuel our cars – we use it in tons and tons of products from nylon to polyester and everything in between. It makes perfect sense that we’ve used it for as many applications as we have, but we need to have a plan for when all of these cheap and easy products aren’t as readily available. I think we all need to make a commitment to begin supporting or continue supporting products with lower carbon footprints and choose products made of natural non-petroleum based materials to reduce our consumption now.

Essentially, we need to think about peak oil and consumption as much as we need to think about CO2 emissions as we think about conservation, the environment and going green.

Learn more about Peak Oil:

• Peak Oil at Wikipedia
• ASPO International: The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas

Peak Oil: How Will You Ride the Slide

We’re all bombarded with doomsday messages these days about the polar ice cap and the poor bee colonies. More folks are buying reusable grocery bags, conserving fuel and making some smaller and smarter decisions. Researching renewable energy technology like solar electric, wind turbines and geo-thermal can get very overwhelming if you aren’t an engineer. How the heck do you really start going green?

The first things to do are really super simple. And anyone in the solar power or wind turbine business should tell you the same thing – conserve. Why this first step? Because in order to ultimately invest in an alternative energy technology, you need to know how much power you actually need. If you just slap a solar electric system on your house before you make your house efficient, you are just perpetuating the usage and need for too much power.

Step One:
Turn stuff off! Turn off lights and AC when you aren’t using it directly. Plug those pesky silent energy drainers into a power strip and turn the strip off at night. Replace whichever bulbs you can with Compact Fluorescent. Wait until your old incandescent bulbs burn out and replace old technology with new. As your old appliances fail, or when you have the resources, replace them with new, Energy Saver models.

If you really want to get serious on evaluating your power usage, you can also grab a Kill-A-Watt, which is a gadget you plug into the wall, and then you plug your appliance into the Kill-O-Watt. Leave your appliance plugged in for a couple of weeks and you can figure out how much you are paying per billing cycle per appliance. This can help you quickly find out which of your existing or old appliances are the worst energy hogs – helping you to make smarter decisions about what to replace first!

Step Two:
Once you have reduced your power consumption and you’ve worked through replacing appliances and light bulbs, look at the construction of your home. Do you have old leaky windows? How thick is your insulation? Do you have conifers planted on your home’s windward side and deciduous trees planted on the southerly side? Do you have a solar powered attic fan helping to vent the hot air from your attic in the summer to keep your AC from working so hard?

Make sure your home isn’t leaky and can hold heat in the winter and stay cooler in the summer. By making your home “tighter” you’ll need less energy to modulate the interior temperature and you’ll all me more comfortable.

Step Three:
Now you can consider the most cost effective alternative energy technology in terms of getting a return on your investment. Solar thermal is the way to go! Whether you want to look at installing a solar air heater as a supplemental heat source for 700 square feet of your home, or a solar water heater to remove heating water from your oil or natural gas heating needs, these systems are not only comparable in price with traditional technologies, but also will yield a return on your investment within a few years!

At the end of the day, these three steps will get you well on your way to being less energy consumptive and less dependent on fossil fuels. Going green, unless you have a lot of money to invest, is something that takes time so treat it that way. Build up gradually and then you’ll know when it’s time to really explore introducing solar electric, wind electric or even hydro electric power.