Energy Conservation

In our rooms at the Aparthotel Roma, energy conservation is quite obvious. Every lightbulb in the place is a compact fluorescent and the appliances are very small. At first I thought that maybe they were just "apartment-sized" but when we walked by the appliance stores during our sojourn downtown this morning, I noticed several similarly-sized units for sale on the sales floor. Small appliances = small energy consumption (mostly, if they are also efficient).

Think about your refrigerator, for example. If it is large and you do not keep it full all the time, each time you open the door you allow a large amount of cold air to escape. It gets replaced by a large volume of warm, moist air that must be cooled and dried. That takes energy. A larger refrigerator also has more surface area exposed to the outside air - again, allowing for more heat infiltration. Fortunately, a big unit may actually have better insulation than a small one so this might not be an important factor.

On-demand hot water heating is a good energy-saving option too. Our showerhead heats the water as needed, eliminating the need to keep a large volume of water continuously hot. This unit probably uses a lot of electricity while it is heating but it only needs to run for a very short period of time. Which is better? A small amount of electricity x a long time or lot of electricity x a very short time? In this case, probably the latter.

The washing machine is a small unit - cold water wash only. There is no dryer in our apartment but the solar dryer (clothesline) works just great.

At home, I live in a suburb four miles from my office. The nearest store is probably a mile away and it is served by a huge parking lot. They clearly don't expect many customers on foot; everyone drives in the U.S. This morning, we walked past the University and into town with two cloth bags and an empty backpack. We walked into a small grocery store on a busy street (lots of buses and taxis but relatively fewer private cars than you see in the U.S.), then carried our groceries home on our backs. I guess if I lived in a city such as Philadelphia or New York,or a well-planned community, I could walk to shops but I can't really do it in West Chester. Even if I lived in town I would have to use a vehicle to get my groceries; the last grocery store in town (the old A&P on Market Street) moved out many years ago.

When it comes to packaging, we were able to find lots of grocery items in very simple packages. Soaps, salt, pepper, tomato sauce and pasta came in simple plastic bags. There were no overwraps of cardboard. Large hard-sided plastic or glass bottles that get used once and thrown away were rare. Wednesday our class will be visiting the local recycling center. It will be interesting to observe what finds it way there.

Where is the electrical energy in Heredia generated? Coal? Nuclear? Oil? We shall see...last year I observed some wind generators near lake Arenal, but they seemed more of an oddity than a regular feature.

- Chuck