Swaffham Wind Turbine Norfolk

If you're interested in eco-power generation, the Swaffham Wind Turbine in Norfolk operated by Ecotricity with the EcoTech Visitor Centre on-site is definitely worth a visit!

Be careful to book though, as the opening times are pretty erratic, like no bank-holiday opening! and only the last Sunday in the month is open.

The EcoTech Visitor Centre phone number is 01760 726 100, but they often don't staff it or have an answering machine with opening times either. Worth a visit if you can manage to book.

Too much packaging

I'm sure everyone is noticing just how much superfluous packaging food and products now come in. Now rather than taking all that packaging off individually wrapped apples in a larger bag at home, imagine if we took all the packaging off while still in the supermarket. Imagine if we left it all there neatly placed in black sacks, and took the food home in our reusable shopping bags. Supermarkets would have to hire skips at great expense to take away the packaging, and would soon stop buying produce from supplies who over-packed their food ;)

Saving Energy - Mobile phone chargers etc

We can all do our bit to save energy by switching off appliances when they are not in use. However, what we really need is for there to be an easily accessible switch to do this. The switch needs to be a physical switch to stop the current flowing, as even devices on standby still consume energy. Mobile phone chargers and other transformers don't yet have a switch, so we need to switch them off at the wall. I don't know about you, but my study is crammed with so much stuff that getting to a socket or 4-way adaptor would require some serious crawling!

Consider the example of my friend James' Laptop, it's a Lenovo ThinkPad, even when it is off the Ethernet and power LEDs are lit, the router LED is also lit. Wake On LAN is disabled, so there is no good reason that a certain amount of current being used for these functions when it is off. What we need is a new type of physical switch to turn laptops on and off, one which when pressed completes a magnetic relay circuit, which keeps the connection established. When the laptop is shutdown the relay magnet is switched off which disconnects the power completely.

Laptops have a special need to charge their internal batteries, a couple of ideas to cover that area:

1. The power transformer needs a physical switch on the side of it.
2. The battery monitoring/charging circuit could be the only part of the laptop which is using any current when the laptop is off.
3. The power transformer could be integrated into the laptop as their mass is so tiny these days.
   

In addition, appliances which have clocks like DVRs could be designed to have a battery backed clock so we can switch them off when they're not in use.

When you think of how many appliances each of us have on standby, or even off but using power like the laptop you see that every little change helps us save energy and thus the environment. There could easily be 10 Million mobile phone chargers and laptops plugged in and using energy as we speak!