Earth Hour on Saturday 29th March

This coming Saturday will be the 2014 earth hour day, which is a global initiative to save electricity by turning off unnecessary electrical appliances for an hour between 8:30 and 9:30pm.

As always, the Environmental Society of Oman is leading the charge (pun not intended!) to increase awareness about this energy saving initiative. They have set up a website to get individuals, as well as companies, to pledge their support of this 2014 Earth Hour, and that they'll be turning off their lights. Last year over 2,000 people pledged to do this, and so far 1,097 people have pledged this year - it looks like we need to spread awareness of this to get that number up!

The Earth Hour initiative has become quite popular around the world, and its common to see global landmarks like the Eifel Tower, British Houses of Parliament, CN Tower in Toronto etc etc not lit up during this hour. Especially in this part of the world where electricity is always in high demand, there should be a much bigger emphasis on saving energy.

Here's a few tips to help save some electricity during the hour, and in general:

1. Turn lights off in rooms you are not in. If you have outside lights, turn them off too.
2. When you are done charging your mobile device, camera or whatever, turn the power off at the wall - chargers suck electricity whether you have a phone plugged into them or not.
3. Turn your TV/DVD/Sound off at the wall, even in "Standby" mode, they are still using a surprising amount of power. Check out this graph and this table showing just how much various appliances use around the home when in standby mode, it's quite interesting to see.
4. Believe it or not, the amount of energy expended in rearing livestock is actually significant, by eating vegetarian even just one day a week, you are reducing your carbon footprint.

So - did you go and sign up at the ESO Earth Hour 2014 website yet?

Have a great day, more soon.

le fin.