environment

Brondell’s Perfect Flush Toilet Retrofit Kit Saves You Money

Gizmo of the Day, Home Automation / By /

As you well know, most of the time you flush the toilet, you’re flushing water and money down the drain needlessly. What’s really needed on toilets is a 2nd button that only uses half the water. Brondell’s Perfect Flush product retrofits your toilet to have that 2nd button without you having to go out and buy and install a whole new toilet.

The Perfect Flush toilet retrofit kit can be installed by anyone and takes about 30 minutes. If you use the calculator on their website, even with average usage and costs plugged in the Perfect Flush will save a family of 4 enough money on their water bill to pay for itself within a year. If your costs and usage are higher, for example, if your toilet water tanks are larger, then you savings go up. What’s more important is that you are doing your bit to save the environment as well.

Ideally, those newer toilets should also really have an adjustment to regulate how much water is used per flush and Perfect Flush has that as well. Eco-friendly Perfect Flush is compatible with most toilet tanks ranging in types and sizes 1.28 through 7+ gallon per flush.

Buy now!
More info from the manufacturer
Price: $92.89
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

Great Pacific garbage Gyre to be studied

Miscellaneous / By /

Finally. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a huge area in the Pacific Ocean that has a concentration of debris and garbage, particularly plastic. A scientific crew has set off to investigate it in-person.

This trash gyre is not the only one, but it is the largest. Despite the NOAA having predicted its existence over 20 years, this is the first time a real survey is to be conducted. For shame. They don’t even know exactly what they’ll find – a super dense patch of garbage or just the place where the garbage eventually drifts to. Either way, it’s a problem. The plastic is toxic when it degrades and it certainly kills wildlife when they eat it.

InterHome – smart house ‘learns’ from its inhabitants

Home Automation / By /

More good (and cool) news from the home automation field. The University of Hertfordshire has put together a working demo of a house they called InterHome that is able to ‘learn’ and adapt to its inhabitants lifestyles. Using X10 technology and embedded devices, the house can text its owners in the event of unlocked doors or wasted energy (ex: lights unused or thermostat too high/low). In turn the owner can control the InterHome via web browsers, smartphones and SMS messages.

As more such projects are unveiled and their cost to implement comes down, we’ll should see more homeowners jump at the chance to add their houses to the list of eco-friendly, energy-saving, carbon-neutral abodes. For example, take a look at the wireless temperature monitoring project. In time, such features will no longer be add-ons, but standard. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

Wireless temperature monitoring can save you money

Home Automation, Networking & Internet / By /

Typical central air systems for homes have a fatal flaw – a single thermostat for the entire floor if not the entire house. You then typically end up with different rooms being at different temperatures.

Today’s technology lets you manage this problem cheaply. Snag a bunch of wireless sensors and deploy them around the home. They in turn report back to a central system that you can monitor to figure out where you may need to improve the insulation and/or adjust the airflow into that room.

You may be able to take it a step further by having the vents motorized and automatically controlled to open/close based on temperature thresholds.

You can find more details at Embedded.com.

Microsoft launches Hohm, a power and resource monitor

Home Automation, Networking & Internet, Tools, DIY, Home, Office / By /

Microsoft Hohm

We’ve seen Google trying their hand at operating systems but what about Microsoft trying to steal power usage market share from Google? Back in February we took a look at PowerMeter – a product from Google that allows users to monitor their power consumption via ‘smart’ meters, but Microsoft has released Hohm (still in beta) to do pretty much the same job.

Hohm will check your levels of electricity, propane and oil consumption within a given time period and Microsoft will look at adding device monitoring (something already offered by PowerMeter) and water monitoring to give a complete picture of your resource usage. When you sign up for your free account you can see how much you’re spending on energy, how it compares to similar users and how it can be reduced.

It’s just a pity they couldn’t get hold of a better domain to host it on.

Google’s PowerMeter lets consumers tap into their power usage

Home Automation, Miscellaneous, Networking & Internet / By /

Google is currently testing a software tool dubbed the PowerMeter than can tap into the stats that ‘smart’ power meters monitor. It isn’t meant for the power companies so much as it is meant to enable consumers to monitor and shepherd their own usage. Currently, there are over 40 million US homes scheduled to get smart meters in the next 3 years. FAQ.

Here’s a screenshot of what the tool may look like:

What’s in it for Google? Well, it is being run out of their philanthropic arm, so they can argue that it is in the best interest of both consumers and the environment, but there can certainly be more. Robert Cringley believe it’s a precursor to Google becoming your ISP via the power line. Yes, networking over power lines. I think he may very well be right.

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