Just Like (a) Human

I think it is now in our nature to be wasteful creatures.

We leave desktops on all day — not piddly little things with a 50 watt PSU, but behemoths that demand 500 or even 1000 watts of power through their power supplies.

We leave all the lights on in the house — not compact fluorescent bulbs, not LEDs, but those hot, huge incandescent 100 watt bulbs.

We run our central heating and air units all day — not at a relatively comfortable temperature like 76 degrees, but at 65 degrees on a day where it’s 95 degrees outside AND we leave the door open, as if to try to cool down the neighborhood.

All in all, this makes me rather sad.

I try to do my part for what we have left on this rock, but sometimes, it feels like I’m the only one bothering.

I leave one desktop on all day. It has a 24 watt power supply. I encourage my roomie to put his in standby when he’s going to leave for work, but I don’t think that happens (*sigh*). I flat out hibernate my desktop before leaving to go to work, which results in the machine being off for 12 and a half hours or so. Our primary desktops have 300 watt power supplies — more than adequate for what either of us actually does at the computer, and that’s with the three hard drives and the ATi Radeon I’ve got in my case (caught some cheap deals on 500GB HDDs~).

We leave a light on. It’s a 9 watt Compact Fluorescent, so that neither of us step on the cat when we come in at night.

The central air? We don’t even look at it in the winter — is it that hard to put on a pair of sweatpants and a pair of socks? Seriously? In the summer, we usually set it to about 75. Ceiling fan helps to circulate the air around the apartment, as does the box fan I have that usually sits in my doorway (my room gets the warmest — in fact, almost unbearably warm at times).

I try to be frugal with our power consumption, keeping in mind that until 4 years ago, I didn’t even have central air and heating. A family of seven, living in a tiny house, and able to keep the electric bill under $150 a month (even during the summer) without levelizing the bill shows me that if we’re willing to give something up, we can show that we aren’t so dependent on electricity.

Granted, now I live in an apartment that becomes stifling and unbearable if the AC is off (In the old house, we could leave the doors wide open, as they were screened, adding tremendously to the general airflow), but we try our best to limit our power usage.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m the only one trying even remotely to give a damn.