Planet Analog DesignLine Blog
Adventures in 'green' living
Vanessa Knivett
7/28/2009 4:58 PM EDT
I grew up in a village well-known for a strong Rudolph Steiner community. Apart from the organic, biodynamic agriculture, other central tenets (to my, I hasten to add, then uninformed mind) were obligatory sandal wearing, an abhorrence of plastics as well as anything high-tech, with utmost disapproval reserved for the TV.
Some time spent back there last year reminded me how much so-called 'green lifestyles' have changed. The latest generation of adherents seem not to bat an eyelid at international air travel (as long as the carbon is offset), 4 x 4 vehicles (for taking kids to school on tarmac roads) and mobile phones.
Indeed, modern 'green' living is wedded to technology, with home energy management via smart metering just the start. Being conscious of making environmentally-aware choices myself, one of my 'sometime in the future' projects cum ongoing personal research interests is straw bale buildings (am thinking of an alternative to a dull rented office). Even here, I have discovered that one indispensable piece of kit is a moisture-monitoring network - not that straw bales are necessarily more susceptible to moisture ingress than other building materials.
Being of the mildly green-fingered kind, I am often on the lookout for time and water-saving solutions and one keen gardener that I read about recently has installed a solar-powered moisture feedback loop with rf link that enables his hanging baskets to 'tweet' for water (via Twitter, for the few uninitiated out there). A case of using a hammer to crack a nut, maybe, but for fruit and vegetable growers he may be onto something.
I had also tentatively begun to look into hydroponic gardening - a market arguably first driven by demand from clandestine marijuana growers - only to discover how vast and well-catered for it is. Of-course, whilst industrial food producers have always sought to monitor and control as many elements of a plant's growth environment in order to maximise crop yield, amateur gardeners (and marijuana growers!) have benefited from these economies of scale. A proliferation of hand-held monitoring equipment and low-cost sensors has resulted in humidity sensors (for the greenhouse), moisture meters, pH meters, CO2 and oxygen meters at costs that are accessible to amateur gardening budgets. And with small growing space or climate change effects being an issue for many would-be successful gardeners, hydroponics (an altogether more technological fix) seems to have begun a move towards mass appeal.
Equally interesting was a device I came across to check up on the efficiency and efficacy of recycling services. Researchers at MIT's SENSEable City Lab have developed smart tags that can be attached to an item of recycling, and will send their location back in real time. Encased in resin to ensure their durability, the tags will track different types of waste on the journey through the disposal systems of two City testbeds, New York and Seattle. Professor Carlo Ratti, head of the MIT SENSEable City lab said that the project 'aims to reveal the disposal process of our everyday objects, as well as to highlight potential inefficiencies in today's recycling and sanitation systems.'
At DAC 2009 yesterday, Aart de Geus, chairman and ceo of Synopsys, was clearly on a 'green' wavelength when he posed the following question to delegates: "What if your toaster could 'talk' to your refrigerator to tell it to shut the compressor when the toaster is in use? On the small scale, that is one energy-efficient problem that could be solved in the home. Think of all the other possible opportunities where EDA tools could help design more efficient power applications."
Technology for technology's sake - sometimes - but the marriage between technology and 'green living' isn't going to end soon.
Related Content: Video: Green tech drives ICs beyond silicon
Green energy boosted by analog circuitry
Watch for the advent of Green EDA!
Related Blogs: Can Obama reinvigorate Europe's green dream?
Retrofitting in a time of transition?
|
|
|
|
|
ReneCardenas
8/30/2010 5:58 PM EDT
I like the concept of improved efficiencies at home that can be reproduced in mass scale, with the Central AC, water heater, clothing dryer and refrigerator units been the hogs at home.
Although I benefit from a programmable thermostat that captures at least a weekly human profile that can match my departure and arrival from/to office/school, I still see room for improvement with automatic adjustments for holidays and special events (home population detection) so that the temperature can be adjusted with the benefit of best pricing policy and use demand changes and vacation times.
I would like to see my AC thermostat be improved a little more by using more profiles to improve on efficiency. This simple device can save more money if it could talk to my water heater, and fridge (at least to top hogs that use greater than 5% of home total share) to coordinate the best electrical resource usage.
Sign in to Reply
Rich Krajewski
8/30/2010 6:56 PM EDT
Greener living is an excellent application of electronics technology, and I'm all for it. Watch out for its over-application, though. For instance, I've seen some fancy swimming pool monitors that check water temperature electronically and compare the temperature to air temperature to see if a heating pump that collected solar heat should be turned on. That's overkill. I just run a cheap rubber hose on the ground, and power it with a 12-volt small pump, which in turn is run by a solar panel. No monitoring needed. When the sunlight is strong enough to power the pump, it's also probably strong enough to heat the hose, so warm water goes into the pool when it should. No fancy controllers needed, or wanted.
And as for electrical load management, it may be simpler to just take the fridge off the grid altogether, rather than have a controller determine when it's okay to run the fridge, so it doesn't compete with the toaster. A single appliance can be more easily and affordably taken off the grid than a whole house. And, you can run the coils outside, so that in winter it takes practically no electricity to cool the fridge, and in summer, you can use the coils to heat the pool. I put the spare solar power into a battery, instead of messing with the grid. Of course, controllers are pretty cheap....
Sign in to Reply