Tag: automatic

Saving Energy With Auto Switches

  • According to the EPA, sixty-percent of lighting actually goes to lighting unoccupied rooms. (Photo Courtesy of Vincent Ma CC-2.0)

Saving energy can be as simple as turning off the light switch when you leave a room. But in most homes… that doesn’t happen all the time. Lester Graham reports… motion sensing light switches are becoming more popular because they’ll switch on and off automatically.

Transcript

Saving energy can be as simple as turning off the light switch when you leave a room. But in most homes… that doesn’t happen all the time. Lester Graham reports… motion sensing light switches are become more popular because they’ll switch on and off automatically.

In some families, Dad stomping around the house, turning off lights and yelling to no one in particular is legendary.

“How many times do I have to tell you, turn off those lights.”

Don’t burst a blood vessel there, pal.

Well, Dad might have had a point. Matt Grocoff with Greenovation.TV says he’s been poking around the Environmental Protection Agency’s website and found this:

“Sixty-percent of lighting actually goes to lighting an unoccupied room, hallways, bathrooms, your bedroom. Drive by any neighborhood house and you’ll see eight rooms lit. How many of those houses have eight people in them.”

Matt says there’s a solution. Motion-sensing light switches. They can be set to turn on when you walk into a room and turn themselves off when you leave… staying on for a minute or two… or five… or a half-hour. Whatever you set it to.

There are a lot of different types. Laurie Gross is President of Gross Electric in Ohio and Michigan. They’ve been selling lamps and lights and switches for one-hundred years.

She says there are light switches that turn on when you enter and off when you leave, others that you have to turn on and they turn off when the room is empty. Different technology works –well– differently. Gross says passive infrared works well for pantries or kitchens because they detect motion.

“Then there’s ultrasonic which doesn’t need a line-of-sight. So, those are good in public bathrooms so when it senses heat, when go in there, it knows you’re there and turns off if you take a little longer than expected to take.”

And there are switches that use both infrared and ultrasonic… good for places like big office spaces.

You can expect to spend 50 – 60 bucks or more for a good one, depending on what you want. There are cheaper sensor light switches out there… but in this case, you really do get what you pay for.

Now… these switches use a tiny bit of power themselves… so the best place for them is in a room where leaving the light bulb on is not likely to be noticed for a while. Matt tells the story of forgetting to turn off a light in the garage during vacation. That bulb burned for two weeks. A sensor switch makes a lot of sense in a place like that… or in a closet… or a room you don’t use a lot.

Matt Grocoff and his wife Kelly are working to make their 110 year old house the oldest net-zero energy home in America. And he says he loves having motion sensing switches in key areas for the convenience as well as the energy savings.

“We open the door in the kitchen and come through the door with loads of groceries and the light comes on automatically. You don’t have to do the elbow dance.”

His wife Kelly says for her… it’s avoiding a little childhood terror.

“I have a little PTSD from when I was younger and my Dad was constantly harassing us to turn the lights off. Now, I know if I leave the room and I don’t turn the light off, it’s going to go off eventually instead of having my Dad chase me down and giving me some lecture about turning the lights off, saving energy, saving money, blah, blah, blah.”

Funny story about that. Kelly’s Mom, Jane Casselman was visiting when I was at the couple’s house… and she started laughing about Dad lecturing about the lights.

“’Cause in the evening, yours truly would turn all the lights off before going to bed.”

Heh– busted.

For The Environment Report… I’m Lester Graham.

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Dry Urinals Aim to Save Water

  • "Look! No handle." Jim Fashbaugh shows off one of the waterless urinals Michigan State University is installing in new buildings. It uses no water. (Photo by Lester Graham)

There’s a change happening in certain restrooms across the country. With growing concerns about wasting water, companies have been looking at ways to use less water to flush… and now a new product uses no water at all. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

There’s a change happening in certain restrooms across the country. With growing concerns about wasting water, companies have been looking at ways to use less water to flush… and now a new product uses no water at all. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:


Alright… this is a story for the guys. I mean, you women might be interested, but this is really a guy thing. They’re taking the flush away from us. You’ve probably noticed that urinals have been changing from manual flush to some kind of automatic or motion-detecting sensor flush. Now a few companies are producing urinals with no handle, no button, no sensor. Companies such as Sloan Valve Company, Waterless Company and Falcon Waterfree Technologies are making urinals without flushers.


Bruce Fleisher is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Falcon Waterfree Technologies.


Fleisher: “Literally there is zero water consumption with the use of this urinal product.”


Graham: “Well how do you flush it?”


Fleisher: “Well, in fact, it’s the no-flush urinal.”


No flush. No water. The urine just goes down the drain, past a sealant and it’s trapped there. All the no-water urinal companies use similar technology.


“Because it’s a dry surface, that prevents the urine from breeding bacteria rather quickly. And, as a result, you have no odor.”


Hold it. What did he just say?


(sound of rewinding tape)


“And, as a result, you have no odor.”


Now, I couldn’t let that one go… so I asked Mr. Fleisher to explain how that works.


“The odor that people would typically experience in a urinal derives from the combination of the urine and the water creating a breeding ground for bacteria. Bacteria then generates ammonia gas. Ammonia gas is what most people are picking up. That’s what smells.”


I remember from some high school science class that urine, when it’s expelled, is sterile. So, it kinda makes sense. But hey, this guy’s in charge of sales. So I called up a nephrologist. Nephrologists study kidneys so they know something about urine. Dr. Akinolu Ojo is the director of nephrology outpatient services at the University of Michigan. He explained why urine smells.


Ojo: “The odor that one gets from the urine comes from exposure to atmospheric air and water moisture. As that happens there is decomposition of some of the compounds in the urine. One of the by-products is ammonia. And so you get at that point an ammonia smell.”


Graham: “So, this mixture with water, it becomes a better breeding ground for bacteria?”


Ojo: “That’s correct.”


Graham: “And then the chemical reaction in addition to that also could cause some odor?”


Ojo: “You are correct.”


Glad we got that cleared up. In fact, when I went to see the Assistant Manager of the Physical Plant and Maintenance Services at Michigan State Univesity, Jim Fashbaugh said an odor problem with flush urinals is what prompted that univeristy’s first experiment with no-flush urinals.


“We’d heard about the waterless urinals. We thought we’d give them a chance to see how they would work. And we installed it and it took care of the odor problem, but we also realized we were saving water at that point, so we thought we’d take a look at other applications.”


So, they had one installed in the bathroom in the building where the top maintenance guys work.


(sound of men’s room door opening)


We took a peek at it.


Fashbaugh: “It’s one of the first ones that we ended up trying out. That’s basically it.”


Graham: “It looks like it’s broken, like there’s-”


(sound of laughing)


Fashbaugh: “Yeah. As you see, there’s no flush valve. There’s no- anything else happning. It just goes down through the ports there and there’s a blue liquid that allows the urine to go through and it separates it out. Frankly, we have hard water here at MSU; we’ve got those deep water wells. And it eliminates that lime buildup and whatever that we had to clean up before. So it saves us on products to have to do that issue too.”


Fashbaugh says the janitors love them. Instead of disinfectant, water and a lot of scrubbing, it’s more of a spray and wipe procedure. The no-flush, no-water urinals have been around in Europe for a long time, and they became popular in the drier areas of the American Southwest a few years ago. Now, universities, stadiums, and airports among others all across the country are installing them.


Guys… it could be that this sound…


(sound of flushing)


…might soon be flushed down the drain of water-wasting history.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham


(sound of restroom door opening)


Fashbaugh: “Do a lot of interviews in restrooms?”


Graham: “Uh, not – I think that might be a first for me.”


Fashbaugh: “Yeah, really. I was glad we didn’t have to do a demonstration.”


(sound of laughing)

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The Foibles of Suburban Lawn Care

  • Although a well-manicured lawn offers certain benefits... not everyone thinks it's worth the effort. (Photo by Ed Herrmann)

One of the great rituals in suburban America is mowing the lawn. A manicured lawn seems to say that the house is well cared for, that it belongs to the neighborhood. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Ed Herrmann wonders whether this obsession for the perfect lawn is worth the effort:

Transcript

One of the great rituals in suburban America is mowing the lawn. A
manicured lawn seems to say that the house is well cared for, that it belongs
to the neighborhood. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Ed
Herrmann wonders whether this obsession with the perfect lawn is worth the
effort:


(sound of evening insects)


It’s a late summer evening and at last I can go outside and enjoy the
sounds of the neighborhood. There’s a little breeze, the air is cooler. The
chorus of insects is soothing, gentle but insistent, an ancient throbbing
resonance. Much better than during the day…


(roar of lawn machines)


Summer days in the suburbs are the time of assault, when people attack their
lawns with powerful weapons from the chemical and manufacturing
industries. Anyone who uses the words “quiet” and “suburbs” in the same
sentence has never been to a suburb, at least not in summer.


It takes a lot of noise to maintain a lawn. Besides the mower, you’ve got edgers, trimmers,
leaf blowers, weed whackers, core aerators, little tractors, big tractors, slitting
machines. I don’t know whatever happened to rakes and hand clippers. One
thing’s for sure. This quest for lawn perfection wouldn’t be possible without
the industrial revolution.


(machines stop)


So where did we get the idea that a house should be surrounded by a field of
uniform grass kept at the same height?


Well, with apologies to the Queen, I’m afraid we must blame the British. It
seems that, along with our language, our imperial ambitions and our
ambivalent morals, America also gets its notion of what a lawn should look
like from the English. Of course, the estates of the English aristocracy were
tended by a staff of gardeners. England also has a milder climate, and the
grass that looks so nice there doesn’t do as well in North America. In the
1930’s the USDA came up with a blend of imported grasses that would
tolerate our climate. Since these grasses are not native, they need help, and
that calls for fertilizers, pesticides and lots of extra water. Since normal
people can’t afford gardeners who trim by hand, that means lawn machines.
American industry to the rescue.


(mower starts up, fades under next sentence)


A quick Google tells me that today we have 40 million lawn mowers in use.
Each emits 11 times the pollution of a new car, and lawn mowers contribute
five percent of the nation’s air pollution. Plus more than 70 million pounds of
pesticides are used each year and over half of our residential water is used
for landscaping. Don’t you love those automatic sprinklers that come on in the
rain? Add to that all the time that people spend mowing and edging. Of
course the two billion dollar lawn care industry is thrilled about all this
enthusiasm, but I gotta ask, “Is it worth it?”


Call me old fashioned, but I actually prefer the looks of a meadow with mixed
wildflowers and grasses to the lawn that looks like a pool table. My own lawn
is somewhere between. It’s mowed, but it’s what you might call multicultural.


There are at least five different kinds of grass with different colors and
thicknesses, plus clover, dandelions, mushrooms, a few pinecones, and a
rabbit hole or two. There’s also some kind of nasty weed with thorns, but even
that has nice purple flowers if it gets big enough.


Clover, by the way, used to be added to grass seed because it adds nitrogen to
the soil. Now we just buy a bag of nitrogen fertilizer, so who needs clover?
And what’s wrong with
dandelions? You can eat them, some people even make wine out of them,
they have happy yellow flowers; yet to most people they indicate your yard is
out of control. So I’m down on my hands and knees pulling dandelions. I’m
not sure why, but I hope it keeps the neighbors happy.


One thing I won’t give in to, though, is the chemical spraying trucks, painted
green of course, that roll through the neighborhood.


I can only hold my breath. (sound of trucks and mowers) Try not to listen. And
wait for the evening. (evening insects)


(air conditioner starts up)


Although, with all these air conditioners, even the night’s not too quiet.


But that’s another story.


Host tag: “Ed Herrmann is an outdoor enthusiast living in the
suburbs of Detroit.”

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