Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

people, on average, refrigerators manufactured before 1993 cost over $50 more per year to operate than new Energy Star-qualified models.

If you use an Energy Star-qualified dishwasher instead of hand washing, you’ll save nearly 5,000 gallons of water a year.

Compared with a model manufactured before 1994, an Energy Star-qualified clothes washer can save up to $110 per year on your utility bills. The efficient machine also can use 50 percent less energy than a standard model.

There are many cleaning products made from natural substances such as pine, cane roots, and olive seeds.

A hundred pounds of cellulose insulation contains 80 to 85 pounds of recycled material. Cellulose insulation creates demand for recycled newsprint.

R-value refers to resistance to heat or cold. The higher the number, the more resistant that material is, and the better it insulates.

If you want to save a sizable amount on your heating and cooling bills, change from old single-pane windows to double-pane windows. Curtains can physically reduce the amount of heat that escapes through your windows in winter and the amount of heat that comes through in summer.

The single best thing you can do for your home’s bottom line is to change out every incandescent bulb for a CFL. If every American home replaced just one incandescent lightbulb with a CFL, we’d save enough energy to light 2.5 million homes for a year.

By saving water, you save a lot of energy.

Long showers really do use a lot of water—between 5 and 10 gallons every minute.

A leaking toilet can waste up to 60 gallons of water per day.

Switching to a water-saving shower head or installing a flow restrictor can save as much as 500 to 800 gallons of water each month.

Tests have shown that air inside a home can be four to eight times more polluted than air outside.

VOCs also react with sunlight to form smog.

Turn off your computer and monitor when you aren’t using them, or simply set them to go into energy-saving, or “sleep,” mode.

Home electronics items use several watts of power when they’re turned off.

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TRANSPORTATION

FEET, PEDALS, AND ED POWER

You’ve got lots of choices when it comes to how you get from point A to point B.

You can drive. You can walk. You can ride a bike. You can catch a subway or a bus or a train. You can take an airplane.

How I choose to travel certainly depends on how far I have to go, and also on how soon I need to get there. But even within those confines there are choices to be made.

Ed’s Transportation Hierarchy

I’ve given this subject a lot of thought over the years, and I’ve devised my own transportation hierarchy. Here it is.

1.         Walking is my first choice. It cuts down on traffic congestion, and it’s good exercise.

2.         Riding my bike is number two. Also good exercise and great for reducing traffic. It also gives me much greater range—and gets me where I need to go faster than walking.

3.         Public transportation is next. It not only saves money and energy, it’s also like a chauffeur. I can read or do a puzzle while I’m going someplace.

4.         Next in line in the transportation hierarchy—and sorry to disappoint people who think it’s my first          choice—would be my electric car. Only when I can’t walk, ride the bike, or take the bus to my destination do I then drive my electric car. I also choose it when I have to transport heavy things or go beyond the immediate neighborhood.

5.         When I need to go beyond the range of that electric car—which has a range of about 80 to 130 miles per charge—I take a hybrid car. If I have to get up to Santa Barbara or San Francisco, or even if I need to drive to Pittsburgh or North Carolina, I’ll take the hybrid. I just drove up to San Francisco—about 250 miles—and it cost just $23 in gas each way!

6.         Finally, if I have to be in L.A. on Monday and in New York on Tuesday, I will be a good boy, shut up, and get on an airplane. Yes, I’m burning kerosene up at 31,000 feet, and yes, I accept all the pollution associated with that for that seat on a commercial airliner. But I don’t do it often, and I will also take steps to mitigate that pollution with a carbon offset program.

Walking and Hiking

So you now know my preferred form of transportation is not my electric car, not Rachelle’s hybrid, not my bike. I just like to walk.

I’m fortunate to live in a neighborhood where walking can be my first choice. Most people say you can’t walk in L.A., but there are many neighbor-hoods, like mine in Studio City, where you can live and work and recreate all within easy walking distance from your home.

I specifically chose this neighborhood—and found this house desirable—because of its location. I can walk to the post office. I can walk to the drugstore. I can walk to seven really good restaurants. I can walk to the supermarket. There are these great places nearby that I can walk to. And when I say walk, we’re talking fractions of a mile to get major shopping done. It’s good, obviously, to get exercise at my age—or any age—and you’re also cutting down on pollution in the best way possible. There is very little pollution involved in walking, although you’ve got to factor in the life of your shoes, and the pollution involved in making them and in transporting them to you. Still, compared with any other form of transportation, it’s minuscule.

So walking is always my first choice of transportation if I need to go someplace within a mile.

As for the health benefits of walking, they’ve been well documented.

Studies have shown that walking is good for your mind and spirit:

• It reduces your stress level.

• It improves your mood.

• It makes you mentally sharper and more alert.

• Walking releases your brain’s natural “happy