Thanks to Green Lifestyle Consulting for the tip!

It looks like a smartphone, but it's not.

This rechargeable battery pack can either draw its power from a normal wall socket or the sun. My Kindle doesn’t even have to be plugged into it while it’s storing electricity. Since I don’t have a window at work, I can leave the ReVIVE to charge at home while I read at lunch. It only takes a couple hours to get a decent charge and maybe half an hour to transfer that to the Kindle.

You can check if it's fully charged while it's suctioned to the window.

Compared to the outlet, the solar option only fills the battery up halfway, but that’s about half a charge for the Kindle, which already goes for almost a month at a time on a full battery. (The secret is turning off the wireless.)

No, this isn’t just for Kindles—it’ll charge anything that has a USB plug on one end. But cell phones suck it dry pretty quickly, so the Kindle’s mostly what I use it for. Has anyone else tried something like this?

Where's Oliver?

Here are some tips that made my conversion easier.

• Don’t rack dry everything. Ease into it with just a few clothes. Jason really wants dryer-soft towels, but has no preferences for jeans and shirts. Since our two racks don’t hold everything all at once, anyway, we can pick and choose.
• Finish in the dryer. If you still absolutely need the softness (like Jason with the towels), you can dry on the rack until damp and then toss in the dryer for a couple minutes.
• Dry shirts on hangers. Button-up shirts are actually less wrinkled if they dry this way.

It hasn’t really been as much hassle as I expected it to be. And while clothes do take a day or so to dry, the active part of laundry day is shorter, since you don’t have to wait for the dryer to finish before starting a new load. It’s also supposed to make clothes last longer, too (no lint loss), but I’ll have to get back to you about that.

Or you can always borrow mine. It’s been kind of lonely lately.

my morning

Much like reusable bags, it takes a little while to train myself to use them (and I still only remember them half the time). When I was making the effort to stop, it seemed like too much extra willpower to switch to reusables, and I wondered if it was even worthwhile.

I had a hard time tracking down data on how many times I’d have to use a reusable cup in order to break even with the disposable ones Starbucks uses. The only study that I could find back-up material for is from 1994. Consider how much has changed in the world since 1994. (Did the internet even exist?)

Everyone made a big deal of the fact that the study said a ceramic cup would have to be used 1,006 times to break even with styrofoam, but they seemed to ignore the fact that it only needs to be used 39 times to break even with paper (far more common now), and a plastic cup only has to be used 17 times. Easy enough for a person with a coffee-a-day habit. And dishwasher efficiency has increased 42% since 1990, so reusables would make even more sense now than they did back then.

Ironically, I think one of the things that has changed the most since 1994 is that most places have switched from styrofoam cups to paper, which requires a lot more energy to produce. Of course, styrofoam can’t be recycled or break down in landfills, but neither can paper cups coated in plastic. (Unfortunately, disposable plastic cups for iced drinks weren’t even considered in the study.)

Eventually I hope to actually abandon this vice, but until then, I’ll make the effort to use reusable cups secure in the knowledge that after the first dozen or so, it’s far better than the disposable alternative.

photo by James Minchen

Mattea’s not quite a coal miner’s daughter, but almost. Both her grandfathers were miners in West Virginia, where she grew up. Now she’s a dedicated environmentalist who uses her celebrity to bring attention to the effects of coal—on both the people who mine it and the rest of the world.

Check out the story over at Berklee.edu.

gas usage (in therms)

We’ve definitely reduced our natural gas usage—by 20–25% in the coldest months of the year. This isn’t due to any sort of deprivation on our part, because I can’t stand being cold. The apartment has actually felt warmer while we cut back on gas. This is really encouraging. If we can save heating fuel that much just with the small improvements we’ve made as renters, anybody can do it.

electricity usage (in kWh)

Our electricity usage has dropped August through January, but actually increased February through July. This may be because we haven’t used our ceiling fans this winter (and we didn’t have them in early 2009). We stopped because they actually seemed to make us feel a little colder. I’ll have to see how that plays out the rest of this winter.

It’s really easy to track your energy use. Nstar prints the past year’s numbers on every bill, and all bills are archived under your account on their website. You should try it!

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I didn’t think we’d have many leaks left, but we did find some interesting things:

1. The plastic-in-a-frame that we put in the single-paned window above our couch really makes a difference. It stayed 10 degrees warmer than the uncovered window at night. It was still 10 degrees colder than the wall beside it, but that seemed to be on par with the double-paned windows. Now we just need to do this for the other two single-paned windows in the house, too.
2. I always knew that honeycomb shades insulated, but it was neat to actually see it. With the shades down, they’re 9 degrees warmer than the uncovered window (at night).
3. The draft guard on the closet door actually makes a difference. It’s on an outside wall, so it’s 10 degrees colder in the closet than in the bedroom.
4. Despite the old weatherstripping and sweep, the back door isn’t weatherized as well as it could be. Especially on the corners, where it’s 6 degrees colder than the door itself.
5. The crack between the floor and the baseboard along the outside wall is letting in a draft in places. We caulked it last winter, but it’s widened since then.

Yes, the thermal leak detector showed that we still have some work left to do, but it also showed that some of our choices were actually making a difference. What’s more, it was really fun to use—and way more accurate than the incense.

I can see the wind.

We’d already put sweeps on both the front and back doors, but we’d never considered that we’d need one inside the house. In addition to the cellar door, we decided to put twin draft guards on two closet doors, too. They’re not as attractive “as seen on TV,” but they stay in place really well.

The old, useless latch on the back door never seemed like much of an issue, but when we put the incense stick in front of it, the smoke blew horizontally. My finger disappeared completely inside the hole—it could go all the way outside, for all we know. Spray foam would probably be a good thing to use here, but it seemed wasteful to start a new can for this one spot. Instead, we cut off some of the leftover foam from the draft guards and stuffed it inside. Ta-da—no more draft.

I felt a silly wandering around the house with incense sticks, like I was trying to bless it or something, but it was actually really fun. And it worked.