So you have an all singing all dancing smartphone, perhaps an Android or an iPhone, and right now it’s probably your pride and joy. You’re probably using it every two minutes to get as much enjoyment out of it as possible, and as a result you’re probably guzzling the battery like you wouldn’t believe. Unfortunately our dependence on technology is currently a drain on the environment and one of the many obstacles we have to overcome when trying to go green. Until we start using a different form of power en-masse this is unfortunately going to be the case for many of our devices but that doesn’t mean you can’t be smart with how you use them and save a lot of energy as a result. This is particularly true of using phones, so here we will look at some methods you can use to save energy with your mobile. Elsewhere on this site you will be able to find a piece on solar USB chargers and these are compatible with many phones. This is a great way to go [...]

Going green affects every aspect of your life and gives you a whole new way to think of things and a whole new ‘compass’ to help you guide decisions and actions. It can affect almost every aspect of your life and you’d be very surprised at just how all-invasive it can be. Case in point: fireplaces. Most likely you would think that choosing a fireplace has very little to do with going green – but you’d be wrong and in fact there is a very green-friendly way to think of fireplaces and they provide just one more way for you to improve your carbon footprint. First and foremost your fireplaces are going to help you go green however you use them and these are a very eco-friendly way to enjoy a warm heat. The reason for this is that they create an ‘oasis’ of heat which means that they heat up just the room they are in and even more specifically just one part of the room. This helps with going green because it means you can selectively heat just [...]

In order to go green it is not completely necessary to understand every facet of the technology. You don’t need to know how a solar panel works for instance in order to enjoy free energy on your roof, and you don’t need to know what a deep cell battery is or how it differs from petrol engines. However that said, if you really want to immerse yourself in the idea of going green, then understanding the technology can give you a real buzz and can help you to make more of what you have. Deep cell batteries then… how are these relevant to going green? Well basically these are the ‘car batteries’ that you find in eco-friendly vehicles like electric cars and these work in a slightly different way to your classic car batteries which helps with going green. Here we will look at how. Deep cell batteries are actually not only used in electric cars, but rather they are used in a range of leisure vehicles too such as boats and even golf carts. The reason for this is [...]

The Amazon Kindle is a gadget that is forward thinking in many ways and that was one of the first to offer a contract-free internet connection as well as one of the first popular e-readers that attempted to do for e-books what the iPod did for MP3s. But it’s also very forward thinking in terms of going green, and for people who are interested in going green, the ways in which it manages to save energy and resources are very impressive. In fact it teaches us some lessons about eco friendly hardware that other companies can learn from. So here they are…   The first feature that qualifies the Kindle as an eco product is its screen – and this is what primarily makes the Kindle great for going green. The good thing about the Kindle screen is that it works using droplets of ink arranged around the screen. In other words there’s no energy used to power the light of the pixels and this means that the screen uses up no energy at all once it’s loaded. This is [...]

Let’s open this up with a fact that can demonstrate just how important it is to consider the use of LED technology where possible and how this can help you to go green: if every household across the US were to replace just two of their current incandescent lightbulbs with LED technology, more power would be saved than the output of the largest nuclear power plant every day. That’s an incredible amount of energy and it shows you just how easy it is to use this method to go green. Here’s another one: LED bulbs can last for 30,000 hours – that’s around10 times as long as a regular lightbulbs. So in other words LED technology isn’t just crucial if you want to go green – it’s also a very smart investment and can save you money. Most importantly though governments are starting to step up and take notice of these statistics. If you don’t stop using incandescent bulbs by choice, soon you won’t have to option – as of 2012 US residents won’t even be able to buy them [...]