A Day with the Nissan Leaf - Electric Transportation Land

With my in-laws coming in via train for Courtney's graduation, they decided to rent a Nissan Leaf, one of the few fully electric cars on the market right now, to get themselves around town while they're down.  For various logistical reasons, I had to pick up the Leaf a day early, and had 24 hours to use it as my primary mode of transportation.

While I am not exactly "in the market" for a fully electric car (my goals are more oriented towards driving as little as possible and living in a walkable, bikable neighborhood), I recognize that they will play an essential role in an overall shift in private transit if we ever want to kick fossil and foreign oil-based fuels.  Also, I am a bit of a technocrat, and I just love new things.

There are a number of fun features on the leaf, many of them designed specifically to give you good feelings while driving it.  From the cute sounds it makes to let you know it is on (there is no engine noise while idling, and hardly any while driving) to the little trees that "grow" on your dashboard display when you drive efficiently, the car is made to make you feel good about yourself for driving it.  And it works, a little.  Until it backfires.

When I picked up the car, the dashboard display informed me that I had about 89 miles of potential charge on the battery.  It comes up with this estimate based on the car's individual driving history, which is personalized to you if you own it but for a rental car is all over the map.  As I started to drive I was intentionally being as efficient as I possibly could, and I watched as the potential miles crept up as I drove.  From the starting point at 89 miles, I got over a hundred within 6 minutes.  But then I made a terrible, unforgivable mistake.  I was brash and foolish enough to drive over a hill.  The Leaf handled the hill just fine, acceleration and responsiveness were great, but the potential miles plummeted as I ascended.  As I climbed the hill, I had a sinking, anxious feeling that I would get to the other side and not have enough charge on the battery to get back!

That panic was unwarranted, as it turned out, the car had plenty of charge to get me where I needed to go for the full 24 hours, but in about 1 quarter mile of steep incline I used up 30 miles of potential in the battery.  As I was born and raised in a town that is all hills, with only one moderately flat street, it struck me that electric vehicles would be impractical for entire cities such as Laguna Beach, San Francisco, or any other topographically challenged locale.

Also, the  eighty to one hundred miles of potential on a full charge is more than enough for the average commute plus jaunt around town (unless you live in a sprawling mega-city like Los Angeles), but it is extremely limiting once you start thinking about traveling, or work that requires a lot of driving (sales jobs, couriers, or taxis e.g.).  So in the end, the Leaf can be an excellent commuter, if you live in a moderately sized city with no hills, but it does not provide the all around one stop shopping silver bullet to all of your transportation needs that internal combustion does.

But there never is a silver bullet is there?  The Leaf is a cool car, and fun to drive, but if we are serious about kicking foreign oil and fossil fuels, we still need better public transit, design for walkable and bikable cities, more programs like flex cars, and some internal combustion run on bio-fuels, methane, or some as yet undiscovered other renewable energy.  In other words, the solution will be a patchwork, involving all of the technologies that have been presented as silver bullets.  As it has been said by many others (Grist, Wired, to name a few) silver buckshot is the solution, and the Leaf is one attractive little pellet in that mix.

GreenSwitch: The Vampire Power Slayer

Image via Wikipedia

Whether you call it vampire electronics, phantom loads, or standby power, appliances which draw power when they are "off" can account for a significant chunk of your home energy bill.  GreenSwitch LLC, a California based company that operates nationally and internationally,  provides a service that can help you dramatically reduce your vampire power use at home, at work, or in any building with significant standby power loads.

Essentially, GreenSwitch is a home automation product, which allows the home owner to control what appliances are getting power and when.  GreenSwitch differs greatly from other home automation systems in its extreme simplicity, however.  Instead of a complicated remote control or internet based control interface, there is a single physical switch that you flip when leaving the house or going to bed that cuts power to all vampire electronics.

The switch uses a wifi signal to control specialized outlets in your house, cutting power to anything plugged in at that point.  You can get a remote control as well as the master switch for more precise control, if you are a tech geek like me, but even the most devout Luddite will be comfortable with the master switch option.

Another difference with GreenSwitch is that their product looks very similar to conventional wall fixtures.  The unflattering design and bulk of some other systems will likely turn away the consumer with an eye for design, but GreenSwitch is very low profile and blends right in with the old fashioned wall outlets.  In fact it is designed to fit into the existing outlet boxes already installed in your wall.

The specialized outlets and switch have a tiny, minuscule standby power draw, which is an order of magnitude smaller than most TVs, Computers, DVD players, VCRs, etc.  When you have several of these appliances plugged into the same outlet, the energy savings really pile up fast.  This means, however, that not every outlet in your house should be replaced, just those with a heavy standby power load.

One customer who installed GreenSwitch and got a hot tub in the same month said their energy bill went down significantly afterward.  Considering the huge energy load that a hot tubs heating element can generate, that is quite an endorsement for the GreenSwitch system.

But GreenSwitch is not just for the home.  It is also an ideal solution for small businesses with high power bills.  Most business energy solutions are for large scale operations, but businesses in mid sized offices are frequently playing very close to the margins financially, and saving up to 30% on your energy bills can have a huge impact on positive cash flow.  Particularly in offices with scores of computers and printers, vampire power can be a huge drain.

Basic packages start at $415 for home kits, which includes a simple thermostat control as well.  That may seem like a pretty steep buy in, but with energy savings from 20-35% (by their reporting), installing GreenSwitch could pay for itself in a matter of months (depending greatly on where you live).

Related articles

• Standby Mode Turns Appliances Into Money Suckers (moneyning.com)
• What is 'vampire power'? (greenanswers.com)

Clean+Green - a Miracle Cleaning Product for Pet Owners

I don't use the word miracle very often.  Truth be told, I didn't really believe in miracles until recently, when I got a package in the mail containing these two aerosol cans of Clean+Green cleaning products [legally, I have to disclose that they sent me free samples to review their product].  Even upon inspecting the cans, I was skeptical, especially since the directions instructed me to spray the mess and then do nothing, no wiping no blotting, nothing.  You can imagine, then, why I use the verbiage of a religious experience when I first had an opportunity to use this brilliant product and it worked better than anything else ever.  And when I say that it worked, I mean I didn't do a thing, the product literally did all of the work.

The word 'aerosol' in the last paragraph may scare some people, as CFCs which deplete the ozone have been used as aerosol propellants in the past.  But please, do not be alarmed, because CFCs are not the only effective propellants.  In fact, the folks at Clean+Green use nitrogen as their propellant, which does not deplete the ozone, is not a green house gas, and has no toxicity at all.  Nitrogen is already the most abundant element in our atmosphere, and spraying it out of a can has just about exactly zero impact on the environment.

The packaging of this product is almost entirely aluminum, which is not only 100% recyclable with very little loss or degradation of materials, it's vastly more energy efficient when recycled than when produced new (it has been estimated that recycling aluminum takes 5% of the energy of producing it from bauxite).  The remaining components are plastic, which is also recyclable (though less awesomely so).

[Update: I assumed the packaging was aluminum.  In fact, it is a pretty new and exiting process for making tin free steel aerosol cans, which is lighter (more fuel efficient to ship), made from two solid pieces with no welding (reducing the need for copper and water in manufacturing).  Steel is still 100% recyclable with almost no loss or degradation to the product in the recycling process.]


The most impressive thing about this product, however, is not that it works miracles with pet waste and odors, nor that it comes in recyclable packaging or uses nitrogen as its propellant, no.  The most amazing thing is that the cleaning agents are completely non-toxic as well.  No chlorine, no ammonia, no alcohol, no oxidants, it is not bleach based or enzymatic in nature, it is not even perfumed (aromatic compounds can irritate some people, especially those with severe allergies).  Everything that goes into this cleaner is biodegradable, and completely safe for pets (who have a tendency to lick interesting smells on the floor), kids, and the environment.

So in short, if I was prone to using a star system, this product would get as many as I can give.  It handled multiple different kinds of pet stains and odors from my dogs and my cats, leaving no residual smell or stains in carpets or upholstery.  We even tried it on an old ink stain on a sofa, and to our utter shock and amazement, it reduced the visibility of the stain significantly (they don't make any claims about ink though, so don't hold me or them to that).  Marry that performance with a non-toxic, biodegradable product packaged in recyclable materials, and you have one great, green product that I am happy to promote.  In shorter: Clean+Green is one of the best cleaning products I have ever used.