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    PowerStruggle: Reducing our energy demand

    There's much discussion of increasing supply, but what clever ways have you found for reducing your energy/fuel needs?

    Started by: DarkOptimism Raves:2

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    Good question! In our commune we actually live off the grid as much as possible. Most everything we manage to do is mostly human-powered. Our building is filled with things you'd find in the Lehman's Catalog (http://www.lehmans.com/). Switching to non-electric has made life much more stable as the rolling blackouts don't really affect us. When we set that up back in '14 it was a nice break through. Also, since most of our computers run on the OLPC (http://laptop.org/) philosophy, we don't have to worry too much about our net connection being disrupted or the laptop running out of juice.

    Do you mean non-electric? Or just off-grid?

    Simple as it is, I installed some solar-powered blinds in the new place which auto-adjust their angle to maximize the amount of sunlight entering the room (I have it set hourly; this helps the blinds to charge themselves). It's not much, but the additional sunlight does a great job warming the place. If I only break even, I'm ahead afaic.




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