Tag Archives: efficiency

Thoughts

13 arguments for telecommuting

I thought I’d put together this list of arguments you could use to make the case for telecommuting at your workplace. No, there’s nothing special about the number 13. That’s how many reasons I came up with. If you know of more, please let me know and I’ll be glad to publish them here.

First, I should say I’m all for telecommuting, and I think it’s unfair to make people come into work when most jobs — in particular tech jobs — can be readily converted (with little or no effort) to allow employees to work from their homes.

Reduced office space

Leased office space can be less (significantly less) when employees are allowed to telecommute, since most people won’t need dedicated offices at company headquarters. All that’s needed are offices for the employees that need to be there: phone operators, receptionists, facilities, help desk, and meeting rooms. You’ll need the latter because employees will probably need to come in for meetings or other tasks that need to be performed on-site once a week or every two weeks. In addition, sales folks may need to come in to meet with clients, etc. An unexpected benefit will be that you’ll actually be using the conference rooms a lot more than before. Management will be happy, since the space they’re paying for will be well utilized.

Reduced business utilities

Utilities and other bills, like communications, will be much, much less. With most of the workforce staying at home, and much less office space, electricity usage will be slashed. None of those things that really rack up the bills, like A/C, computers and lights will be anywhere near their previous figures. People will use IM and video conferencing tools (like Skype) to communicate with each other, and will use home phones when needed. You’ll be able to ditch expensive phone system, or scale them down significantly.

Less crowding during rush hour

Businesses that allow their employees to telecommute are doing a greater good. They’re directly contributing to solving today’s serious traffic problems. When employees don’t need to come into work, they stay home and their cars stay in the garage, not on the streets, clogging up avenues and highways, causing traffic delays and accidents. Let’s not also forget the added benefits of burning up less fossil fuels.

Less pollution

When cars stay in the garage, there’s less pollution. I’m not just talking about greenhouse gases, I’m talking about traffic noise as well. Those of you who live near busy streets know this.

Contribute to national security efforts

Businesses that allow employees to telecommute are indirectly contributing to the safety of our country, by reducing our dependence on foreign oil. The less gas employees burn driving to work, the less gas that we’ll need to purchase from countries that finance terrorism. That’s always a good thing. And police and fire trucks will have an easier time driving on our streets during rush hour with less cars on the roads.

Less stress for everyone

I don’t know about you but traffic is very stressful. Sitting in traffic, knowing you can’t go anywhere and you’re stuck there, sandwiched in between other cars, puts one in a very helpless mood. Don’t even get me started on how much time is wasted on commutes, because that’s completely ridiculous and unnecessary. And let’s not forget the people who are actually trying to go shopping or must make it to an event during rush hour. They’re stuck in there too, and they’re not going to work.

Higher job satisfaction

Wasted time makes productive people unhappy. Time and energy gets wasted in traffic. Hence, allowing employees to work from home makes them happy. It’s logical, isn’t it? Besides, I don’t need to analyze things to know that if I could sit at my computer in the morning, right after having breakfast, and get right to work, instead of having to find clothes, get in the car, waste my time on the road, get out of the car and settle in my office, I’d be a lot happier. Why go through all that when I’ve got everything I need right at home?

Less expenses for employees

What do we spend on gas every month? C’mon, add it up! I spend about $100, but I’m one of the luckier ones, because I only have a 25 mile round-trip commute. I’m sure other people spend more. And we’re not even counting the wear and tear on our cars. And how would we value the time we waste in traffic, time that could be spent working productively? I suppose we could calculate our hourly rate, then come up with a total for the time wasted on the road.

Less expenses per employee (business-wise)

Managers, count up the costs to get an employee in a chair at your place. Add in furniture, supplies and equipment (and make sure to include the computer as well). Well, now slash all those costs by about 70%. Happier? An employee that works from home won’t need an office, won’t need a phone, won’t need a desk or a chair or a bookcase or a filing cabinet or even a computer. Okay, there might be some leeway with the computer. You could let them sign out company equipment if you desire, or sponsor the whole or part of the cost of a computer, considering that they’ll use it for work now in addition to their home chores. And you might need to supply them with work-related software as well. But think about it, all of the other costs will go away. When employees come in, they can use terminals set up in the conference rooms, or bring their own laptops. And they’ll use common desks set up near conference rooms to do work that needs to be done at work, not dedicated offices.

Improved management practices

When employees telecommute, work becomes objective and goal-oriented for everyone. It has to, in order for telecommuting to work. Employees get treated as adults instead of babies that need to be micromanaged. Clear monthly and weekly objectives get set, and employees produce status reports or track their objectives online. When tracking is enabled, it’s easy to see who performs and who doesn’t perform. Non-performers can be let go. This is efficient management. Employees are enabled to do what they need to do, and the good ones will go out there and do it.

More family time

Those of you who are married or have significant others, let me ask you this: if you had two hours a day, extra, would you spend them in traffic, or would you spend them with the person you love? That’s an easy answer, right? So okay, you don’t have a spouse. Wouldn’t you rather pursue a hobby or read a book rather than waste your time in traffic?

Safety, safety, safety

People without time constraints are more laid back when they drive. When you work from home, you don’t need to rush into work. This means we’ll have less aggressive drivers on the streets, and our lifestyles will be more relaxed on the whole. Businesses who allow their employees to telecommute are indirectly decreasing the number of accidents and costly traffic tickets.

No more workplace annoyances

This may be more of a pet peeve of mine than anyone else’s, but I’d rather use the bathroom at home than the one at work. I don’t want to go to the bathroom and see (or smell) someone else in there. Why? Because people are disgusting. I want to be able to relax, at home, in my own bathroom, where I’m not in danger of contracting other people’s germs or be subjected to other people’s gross bathroom habits. I’m sure there are plenty of things that annoy you about your own workplace or co-workers, so we probably don’t need to get started down that path. Well, wouldn’t you be happier if you could see less of those annoying people, and only deal with them through email, from time to time? I thought so.

Hope this helps you make the case for telecommuting at your own workplace. Or, that it helps business managers realize the value of this wonderful practice, which is a fantastic way to attract motivated and valuable employees to one’s organization.

Standard
Thoughts

Make the switch to a compact fluorescent light bulb

Environmental Defense is running a campaign to get 1 million households to replace their incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents. They’re saying that if you swap out just one 100W incandescent bulb, you’ll reduce your household’s global warming pollution by more than 1,300 pounds. Alternately, “if every US household replaced three 60W incandescent bulbs in their home with CFLs, it would be like taking 3.5 million cars off the roads!” Food for thought, right! Meanwhile, here’s a link to the pledge.

Standard
How To

New clothes washer uses steam and no detergent

Gizmag has the details on a new electric-powered clotheswasher that uses no detergent, only steam. The steam cycle can be used alone, or in combination with the normal hot/warm water cycles. It’s made by LG.

Standard
Thoughts

Are energy vampires in your home?

In the April Issue of the UCS Green Tips, standby or phantom energy loss is detailed. From the issue:

“This wasted energy, known as standby or phantom energy loss, represents a relatively small but growing percentage of an individual home’s electricity use (about five percent), but taken across all U.S. households, adds up to an estimated 65 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. This extra electricity costs consumers more than $5.8 billion annually and sends more than 87 billion pounds of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

Some of the biggest energy wasters in most homes are the adapters that come with rechargeable battery-powered cordless phones, cell phones, digital cameras and music players, power tools, and other electronic devices. Most draw power whenever they’re plugged into an outlet, regardless of whether the device battery is fully charged or even connected. Other culprits include appliances or electronic equipment with standby capability (such as televisions and computer monitors), a remote control, and/or a digital clock display (such as microwaves, DVD players, and stereo systems).”

Read the issue (it’s only a page long) to find out what to do to prevent phantom energy loss. Here is the link.

Standard
How To

A guide to saving energy

Given our dwindling energy resources, it makes good sense to conserve what we have left. If the phrase “dwindling energy resources” is news to you, welcome back to reality. Where have you been, and was it nice there?

With these concerns in my mind, I’ve put together a list of energy-saving tips that will help both the environment and your pocketbook. I’m fairly sure that you may have seen some of these tips before, but what I’ll try to do is to come up with a comprehensive list grouped by categories in alphabetical order, that I will update as I stumble upon more material.

Bathroom

  • Don’t take very hot showers. Some of us like that sort of thing (including me,) but not doing it saves a whole lot of energy, and according to my wife, is also better for the skin. Apparently very hot water dries the skin and makes it less resilient. Hot water is also bad for your hair. It dries it out too, and it has a tendency to break afterwards.
  • Don’t leave the water running while you brush your teeth.
  • Squeeze the toothpaste tube only from the bottom – just kidding! I squeeze it from the middle just to spite the people that write those directions on the tube.
  • You’ve all heard this saying, right? “If it’s yellow, let it mellow, if it’s brown, flush it down…” Well, I think it’s downright disgusting not to flush after urinating, so flush those toilets, for goodness’ sake! But you could invest in a toilet that uses less water per flush.

Cars

  • Be sensible and realize that oil reserves are not unlimited. Just because we don’t have to stand in line to buy gasoline here in the States doesn’t mean you have the right to drive a Hummer or some other gas guzzling SUV or large sedan. Think about this: now, in 2004, the price of gasoline in Europe is 2-3 times what we’ve got here. How long do you think this difference will last? I tell you, not long. Invest in a gas-sipping automobile, preferably a hybrid, before your monster’s resale value drops to nothing.
  • Plan your trips carefully. Going to the drugstore to floss shouldn’t qualify as a car trip. If you’re going to use your car, go to multiple stores during the same trip.
  • Quit trying to impress the person next to you in traffic lights. So your car is probably faster than theirs. So what! It doesn’t mean you should speed off every time just so your ego can get a nice pat on the back. Be reasonable and conserve your acceleration for those times when you really need it.

Computers

  • We have all heard that it pays to leave your computer on all the time, because it’s built with energy-saving devices, and it can be programmed to power individual devices such as hard drives off, etc. Let’s do a bit of math here. Most computers nowadays come with a 320W power source and some with ~400W power sources. If you leave it on all the time, chances are it will only be used actively for about 4-5 hours out of a day, more for some people, less for others. For the rest of that time, it will consume electricity at the rate of 3 (that’s three) 100-watt light bulbs and some change. Would you leave three 100-watt light bulbs on all the time? I didn’t think so. If you’re not sure about the impact your computer has on your electricity bill, just turn off everything else in the house and go look at your electricity meter (note: at 2004 rates, if left on all the time, a computer will cost about $12-15 per month in electricity). That meter’s rotating kind of fast, doesn’t it? Now do you begin to get the point? Therefore set your computer to go into Standby mode after a half hour of idle time. If your network card is equipped with Wake On LAN capability, then get your computer to go into Hibernate mode – most Windows computers using the latest OS can do this without a problem. On an Apple this is Sleep mode – Apple doesn’t have a Standby mode. If neither Standby nor Hibernate will work for you, just TURN IT OFF. Don’t worry about those who say that over time, it will damage the computer. It’ll probably still last upwards of 5 years, which is well beyond the projected lifetime of most PCs.
  • Set your computer to turn the monitor off after 5-10 idle minutes. CRT screens use quite a bit of electricity by themselves. Just look at the labels on their backs to see how much yours consumes. You can also just turn off the monitor. The power switch can take it, don’t worry. It’ll work for years, and years, and years… Well, you get the idea.
  • Set the computer to turn off the hard drives after 30 minutes – 1 hour of idle time. They can start back up without a problem in about 5-10 seconds.
  • Purchase a flat screen monitor if you can afford it. They consume a lot less electricity than CRT screens (about 2-3 times less), and they’re better on your eyes. They also emit less radiation, not to mention they take up a whole lot less space.
  • Instead of adding extra hard drives to the inside of the computer, add them to the outside by purchasing a USB or Firewire hard drive enclosure. That way, when you’re not using them, you can simply unplug them and not have to worry about the extra electricity each uses as it spins around whenever the computer is on. Use them to store files you don’t need to access often.
  • Purchase extra RAM. More RAM means less access time seeking the hard drives, thus, over time, less energy usage.

House

  • Replace all your incandescent bulbs with the new fluorescent spiral bulbs. They consume 3-4 times less energy and give off better light.
  • If you’re building a new house, or just replacing your drywall in your old house, then invest in good insulation. There are plenty of websites on the Internet that can teach you how to properly layer a wall from the outside to the inside in order to get the maximum energy savings – the process is easy and fairly cheap to implement. Just do a search on Google for this stuff. You’ll be happy you did when your heating/cooling bills arrive.
  • If you’ve got a house, put a solar panel (or more if you’d like) on the roof. Store the electricity generated in a battery or generator. You can then use it to power the devices in your house, including air conditioning devices. I’ve heard of people that get paid by their energy company every month because they generate more energy from the solar panels that they are using. A little extra cash can’t hurt, right? Again, there are detailed descriptions for this stuff on the Internet.
  • Install double glass pane windows. There are those windows that have two layers of glass and are filled with an inert gas in the middle. They are very energy efficient.
  • Install draft guards on the main door(s) to your house/apartment. This will not only keep in the nice cool air in the summer (or warm air in the winter) but it will also keep out bugs, and we all want that, right?
  • At night, only turn on the lights in those rooms that you’re using. If you’re afraid you’ll stumble over things, invest in night-lights. You can find fluorescent green night-lights that consume very little energy and last for years and years. Or you could purchase those combination night-light/deodorizers.

Kitchen

  • Don’t use the dishwasher if you can help it.
  • If you do end up having to use it, only wash full loads and put it on the cycle that takes the least time to clean the dishes. What I’ve found is that you can wash a full load in the Light cycle and get results that are just the same or better than washing it in the Normal cycle. I don’t know why, but that’s been my personal experience.
  • Don’t leave the water running in the sink while you’re doing the dishes.
  • Don’t open the faucets all the way if you don’t need a full jet of water.
Standard