Diy, Green, Home Improvements

Composting is probably pretty far from what you are thinking about lately as the temperatures have been dropping and the snow is starting to accumulate.  All the more reason to think about the nice warm upcomming spring I say.  So, today we are going to take a look at composting with worms.

As it happens to be, you can actually compost with worms year round.  Thats news to me, but the good people over on CityFarmer seem to have a good handle on this. I suggest you take a look at what it takes to get a setup started, even if its just in your basement this winter.

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Today we are taking a look at the Samsung Syncmaster T220. It is a pretty bare bones offering from Samsung, but it does have some real nice features in addition to simply looking great.

Features & Specifications

Lets go over the basics. The T220 is a real beauty of a monitor with what Samsung calls Touch of Color. Touch of Color incorporates a blended color into the bezel of the monitor. In this case it is rose black. You can see from the pictures that is amongst the better looking and stylish monitors available. It is a fair sized monitor at 22″ of widescreen viewability. It also touts 2ms response time and .3 watts of power usage in standby mode. For more specifics, check out the link to the T220 specifications on Samsung’s website.

The software package that it comes with is descent.  Samsung has its a program called MultiScreen which splits your screen into different size zones.  There are many preset zone configurations or you can customize your own.  When you drag a window into one of these zones, the window is resized to the size of the zone.  This is really useful if you find yourself with a lot of windows open at the same time and want to be able to see them all at once.  I can see this being very useful in an office environment.  However, for the average home user, it can get a little annoying because you have to remember to hold ALT if you don’t want it to resize your windows when dragging them.  Thankfully, the feature is easily toggleable with the icon in the system tray by the clock.

The other program I’ll mention is called MagicTune.  This basically lets you control what the buttons on the monitor would do, except with a snazzy user interface.  Its a neat program, but I want to mention this because I noticed that this program is a bit of a memory hog.  You wouldn’t think so, but MagicTune takes up 22 megs on boot up.  No, its not a huge amount of memory, but it is a fair amount for something you’re likely to never use once you have your monitor setup the way you want.

As I said, the T220 is pretty much your bare bones monitor. It does not have any of what I would consider luxury features. The stand has vertical tilt, but no horizontal adjustment. There are no speakers, no headphone jack, and no USB ports. It has a power port, DVI and D-sub connector on the back. In my book this is no big deal. Computers these days have plenty of USB ports, they also usually have a headphone jack, and speakers on monitors never sound as good as real speakers.

Environmental Impact

Lets check out how good Samsung did with the environmental aspect of the monitor. Looking at the T220 on EPEAT’s site we can see that it achieved their silver rating. Not too bad. They have done good work to reduce environmentally sensitive materials in building the monitor, and have also have done a great job with designing the monitor with respect to how recycling will be handled once it has died.  It is at least 90% recyclable. It is also energy star rated.

With mention of the energy star rating, lets take a closer look at what this monitor will actually use. In standby mode, my kill-a-watt could not measure any power draw. This falls in line with Samsung’s claim of .3W of power usage in standby. This is great considering some LCDs pull 5W just sitting there! Once the monitor is up and running at the stock 100% brightness it was using between 42 and 45 watts. This was way too bright for me since my computer is in a fairly dimly lit room. I turned the brightness down to 40% and power usage dropped to 29W. After a while this was still a bit bright much for me and I ended up settling on 20% brightness. This finally brought the power consumption down to a very reasonable 21W. That is worlds better than my current monitor I’m using which is a ancient Hitachi 21″ CRT which uses 110W on average.

Final Words

The T220 is an absolutely beautiful monitor with its Touch of Color and graceful curves as opposed to your average black box. It also has great power-on consumption as all LCDs do, but also has great standby power consumption. The design with respect to environmental impact isn’t perfect, but it is not far off.  It is well thought out and very recyclable.

The downside to the T220 would be the price as its not the cheapest 22″ widescreen out there at its current $300 price tag. It also doesn’t come with a bunch of fancy extra features if you are into that kind of thing. However, Samsung does have another variant called the T220HD that includes more features.

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Background

As I talked about in my post on magnetic induction cooktops, it’s hard to measure comparative energy use between a gas stove an a replacement electric appliance, but the nature of heat losses on an open flame compared to an enclosed, insulated rice cooker with an electric coil make the rice cooker a clear winner. This is especially true when you take into account that I need to leave the pot half hanging off the flame to get the right temperature.

That was why I decided to try out a rice cooker to see what kind of power consumption it had. And I didn’t want to try out any rice cooker, I wanted to try something that would make better rice than I ever had while still eliminating some of the waste of my natural gas stove. That’s what I picked the Zojirushi NS-ZCC.

Features

The most impressive thing about the NS-ZCC is how much it can do. It has all sorts of settings that allow you to cook any sort of rice to perfection, much better than I can ever do it. It’s easy to talk all day about how good the rice from this cooker is, and that’s really what sets it apart. You won’t be disappointed with what it can do.

It also comes with other features as a matter of convenience. The lid is removable and washable, the power cord is retractable, and there is a handle for easy transportation. What’s more, it has a battery that powers the clock even when it’s not plugged in. And, just to be unnecessary, it plays a little song when your rice is ready just so to let you know.

Cooking

As I already said, the Zojirushi makes great rice. I’ve made my own rice and used various 1-button type rice cookers over the years, but nothing compares. Usually your rice is too watery or soft or comes burnt around the edges of the rice cooker. None of this is an issue with the Zojirushi because it uses “Neuro Fuzzy Logic” to adjust how it cooks the rice during cooking to make sure it always comes out perfect.

It does take a while to cook, which would be my only complaint, but once you get used to it you know to set it before you plan to eat, and it even comes with a countdown timer to let you know when your rice will be ready, which is a nice touch. Furthermore, the keep warm feature does a good job of keeping the rice at the right temperature without drying it out.

Energy Use

Frankly, I expected the NS-ZCC to use more energy than it does. On full blast, the cooker uses about 700 watts, but over the course of cooking 2 cups of rice it only consumed 0.14 kWH, which is a little more than a cent’s worth of energy. The keep warm feature uses about 28 watts consistently, and having it on during the meal only meant an extra 0.01 kWH was used. What’s even nicer is that the idle energy consumption is so low that it didn’t even register on my Kill-A-Watt.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a rice cooker or a way to reduce some natural gas usage, this is a great choice for both. It may be a little pricey, but it would be a good, practical gift for this holiday shopping season. I’m definitely glad I have mine.

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One of the biggest challenges to making an effective solar system is being able to absorb the sunlight available. Because it’s easier to to absorb sunlight aimed directly at silicon cells, traditional solar set ups have use sun tracking technology or are place where they will get maximum direct exposure.

However, researchers at RPI have created a new anti-reflective coating that allows solar panels to capture sunlight from any direction. This coating have increased light absorption from 67.4% to 96.21% in tests. This is a huge leap, and I’m sure it wont translate into a 96% efficient solar panel (most are about 25% efficient now), but it would mean that they will be at least 50% more efficient at light gathering.

Time will only tell when and if this technology goes into production, but if it does solar energy will only get cheaper.

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