www.everythingsgonegreen.co.uk

Whilst many PCs have energy-saving modes there’s clearly room for improvement in these days of high energy prices and greater green awareness. That’s where Edison comes in.

Edison is a handy program from software vendor Verdiem that monitors and controls your home PC’s energy consumption. You can set the energy-saving modes for when you work from your PC and for non-work times, so if you work on your laptop from 9:30am to 5:30pm, just program these times into Edison.

By default Edison turns off the display, powers down the hard-drive and suspends the computer after 15 minutes in work mode, allowing you to work without power-management interruptions. Non-work mode turns off the display and powers down your PC’s hard-drive after 5 minutes and suspends the computer after 10 minutes, although this is all configurable from Edison’s power management panel.

Edison also shows you how much CO₂ and money you’re saving by powering down although, for us Brits, this feature is in U.S. dollars. And at $0.089 per kWh I’m not sure whether Americans get a better rate than us, although you can set the rate. (Use xe.com to convert dollars to your local currency)

Arguably driving in itself is not a green activity, especially when you don’t have an economical or an environmentally-friendly car. And let’s be frank, how many of us greenies actually have a green mobile let alone the world’s public at large?

Let’s take me, for example, the main man behind Everything’sGoneGreen. I, for my sins, own a Subaru. No, not an Impreza with a big-bore exhaust and a body kit covered in stickers but an old Subaru Legacy which is certainly just as capable. It’s fast and “quick off the line”, it’s a turbo, it’s got permanent four wheel drive (yes, it’s technically a 4×4) and it sticks to the road like sh*t to blanket. Those are boy-racer credentials in anyone’s book.

But I love mountain-biking and walking and, when I get the chance, I will go to inaccessible places in my car with bikes in the boot. It’s an estate/station wagon so it can carry 5 people comfortably with all their luggage. It gets regularly serviced and is well-maintained; it just had a puncture repaired and has two new tyres and the oil is topped up. I even brought the vehicle from a farmer who lived in Glastonbury and you can’t get more green than that.

That’s not bad for a 14 year old car with 134,000 miles on the clock. And yes, that’s me justifying my ownership of such a “beast” and still hypocritically running a website showing people how to go green. Am I bad for admitting all this?

Ideally I’d love a Tesla Roadster, but that’s not entirely practical with a wife and kid. A Toyota Prius would be nice but they’re still ugly and I’m sure Toyota can do better than that. Even a Smart four-four would be cool with that 3-cylinder diesel engine but they’re still a little on the small side.

And more, much than this… I really do not have the money to fork out on a new green car.

So, what to do, Mr Subaru-driving, green-preaching hypocrite?

Well, I walk and ride my bike locally whenever I can and, check this, when I struggle normally to get 280 miles out of a tank of petrol… I drove like a granny on my way to and from a wedding at the weekend. I broke the 300 mile barrier on the way there and drove the whole distance back, over 350 miles, on a tank of petrol. That’s a whopping 75 miles more on a tank than I’ve ever done before and a fuel efficiency increase of around 25%. I got the same mileage out of a 2.0 turbo, 4×4 Subaru as my friend gets out of his 1.4 Citroen.

So tread lightly on that gas pedal; you’ll save fuel and save money and drive a little greener too

It’s so annoying to get junk mail don’t you think? It’s usually for all the stuff that you don’t want; another credit card, mortgage, car insurance… Actually that’s as far as I can remember about what sort junk mail we used to get because it’s been quite a long time since we saw that deluge of wasted paper on our doormat - We joined the MPS the Mailing Preference Service. We prefer not to receive mail from random companies hawking their wares and we certainly don’t want junk for the previous residents of this property who have not been here for over 2 years!

MPS online is the place to sign up. They don’t guarantee to stop ALL your junk mail but they reckon it’s good for cutting unwanted mail by as much as 95%. We can certainly vouch for that and we were only prompted to write this because we received a stray piece of junk mail yesterday. And if you’re visiting from stateside, as a number of our visitors are, try the DMA’s MPS in the U.S.

Once you’ve signed up for the Mail Preference Service it can take up to 4 months to see the reduction in evil junk mail but it’s worth it. That’s less junk mail, less paper used, less trees cut down, less crap for the postal service to carry around, less stress for you.

Now that just leaves the matter of all those pizza companies and local Asian restaurants that send their underpaid flunkies into our neighbourhood to try to get us to buy their greasy food…

Tips for avoiding junk mail:

1. Sign up to the Mail Preference Service (UKor US)
2. Sign up to paper free billing from your utility companies or your bank
3. Be careful when you sign up for some services that you check the small print and tick boxes: make sure you do not wish to be sent more crap from “carefully selected partners”
4. If they still persist then fill up their pre-paid envelopes with all your other junk mail and post it back to them