This Sunday is Energy Efficiency Day. What does it mean and what can you do?
"On October 5th, Energy Efficiency Day is an initiative that emerged in 1998, with the idea to raise awareness about energy consumption. What is energy efficiency? It means using less energy to do a specific task. In other words, it's about finding ways to avoid energy waste."
In Europe this is an important day for the parliament and policymakers to come together and discuss future plans. "EE Day will feature a high-level policy roundtable bringing together policymakers, business leaders, and civil society representatives to explore the role of energy efficiency in strengthening Europe’s competitiveness and building a more secure and sustainable energy system."
But on a more local level you can find actionable suggestions here. Increasing energy efficiency can be achieved by using more efficient devices and machines, insulating buildings, having a programmable thermostat that is only active when people use the building, cleaning and maintaining equipment, turning devices off when they are not used, using or blocking out the sun according to the season.
How do we apply this concept at our LILa project? Our dataloggers are solar powered and automatically stop charging their internal batteries once full, thus preventing use and elongating the lifetime. The building we work with has airconditioning, but can also use windows for fresh air. As for equipment and insulation, we still need to check the status once the new occupants are decided. There is a tradeoff between using older equipment to the end of its lifetime and upgrading to more energy efficient equipment that still needs to be determined.
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