The are lots of ways to save a little energy here and a little there, but the typical consumer gets numb to all the reminders of all these ways, and the small amounts saved tend to mean little. Well, a little here and a little there do add up, and rather fast at that. This article won't go listing them all, just a couple ideas for starters.

Alliant Energy  recently posted some enlightening information on their web site listing the many things that just one dollar's worth of electricity can buy at today's rates. A consumer can pop 130 bags of popcorn in a microwave for $1 of electrical power, talk for an hour at a time on the telephone for almost 3,000 calls for just $1, or they can play 92 hours of video games, listen to almost 1400 CDs, open and close a typical garage door almost 4500 times - all for just $1.

The point is that saving just one dollar of power, a task that is very doable, is a significant achievement with measurable benefits. There are many ways to do this. Here's just a couple simple, but good ideas.

Many appliances use a significant amount of power even when turned off. This standby power state is used in many computer monitors, TVs, DVD players, gaming consoles, and so on. A switchable power strip is a simple way to save this energy, and many of these strips provide overvoltage protection to boot. A throw of one switch, on the power strip, and all the devices plugged into it will stop wasting power when not in use.

Changing out just one 60 watt filament light bulb in a typical home and replacing it with an equivalently bright 15 watt CFL (compact florescent light bulb) can save about $60 per year in electricity. That's a whole lot of bags of pop corn popped, or garage doors opened and shut! More importantly, it's $60 dollars that can go elsewhere in the economy, while reducing the ecological burden on the planet too.

Rather than continue with a laundry list of 1,001 other ways to save a little energy here and a little energy there (and there really are lot of good ideas all around us) let's take a look at just one other interesting and fun example of how to think outside the box to save some energy.

Consider those car top carriers, fondly called "spock boxes" because they look like the ceremonial casket Mr. Spock was buried in (see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)  These spock boxes are typically sleek and pointed at the front end, apparently ready to slice through the air just above today's suburban vehicles. But consider, for a moment, an airplane wing or the body itself of a typical commercial air liner. These aircraft are carefully engineered to move through the air in the most aerodynamically way possible, and that's why they are rounded on the front ends and tapered to edges and points along the trailing edges. Spock boxes are typically backwards, aerodynamically, and the rounded or blunt end should lead the way, with the pointy end towards the back of the car. True, the amount of extra turbulence from having them look cool rather than act cool is probably not much, but when you count the number of spock boxes moving along on the American highway system, the fuel savings nationwide could be very significant if everyone would just mount their spock boxes "backwards"!

Energy waste, dollars, and the environment - these things are worth the effort of making a lot of little changes. These little changes here and little changes there do add up.

For more information:  Thule     Alliant    Spockboxes.com