October is Energy Awareness Month!

  • Published
  • By By Kate Morrison
  • 354th Civil Engineer Squadron
EIELSON AIR FORCE BASE, Alaska --  If you hunt, fish, or grow your own vegetables, you understand where food comes from, and it is not from the grocery store. Do you have the same understanding and appreciation of where the electricity and heat that runs your building comes from?

Here, we have a unique opportunity to see firsthand how energy is made and where it comes from. Next time you are stopped at the railroad tracks because the locomotive pulling rail cars full of coal is rumbling by, remember that coal is what is letting you turn on your lights.

October is Energy Awareness Month, which means it is time to think about energy and how you are using it. We take it for granted that when we enter a room and flick on a light switch, the lights come on. We do not always remember to turn the lights back off when we leave though.

From almost every building on base we can look over to the Central Heat and Power Plant and remember that our energy conservation actions directly impact the amount of fuel burned at the plant.

As we follow the Air Force Energy Strategy to "Reduce Demand, Increase Supply, and Change the Culture," pause to think about how easily we can reduce the energy we consume at work and home.

Do not underestimate the power of your finger. Turn off your computer monitors, speakers and printer if you plan on leaving your work area for more than 20 minutes. Even in sleep or hibernation mode these work station electronics use enough power to energize more than 10 homes for a whole year.

Do not use garlic to stave off vampire loads, use power strips. Radios, microwaves, cell phone chargers, and anything with a digital display draws power constantly, even when not in use. Simply plug these items into a power strip and turn the strip off when you leave for the day.

Remember what you learned in kindergarten and share office fridge space. A typical energy star rated personal refrigerator uses $45 of power every year. A larger energy star refrigerator that six people can fit their items into uses $75 of power every year. You do the math and see if it pays to share.

Swap out incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs. In a typical home CFLs use one-third the power incandescent bulbs use.

Water is not free and it takes energy to move it to your faucet. It costs about half a penny's worth of electricity to get a gallon of water out of the ground and into your building or home. That does not sound like a lot, but when you consider that a leaky faucet wastes nine gallons a day and a running toilet wastes over a gallon every minute, that is a lot of pennies going down the drain.

Put on a sweater and turn off that space heater. Depending on the size and age of your electric space heaters, it can use between 1,000 to 3,000 Watts. That's $0.16 to $0.49 every hour.

If there is a problem with your building's heat, notify your facility manager; don't just plug in a heater.

Seal leaky doors and windows. More heat is lost from your facility the colder it gets outside. If you can feel a draft coming through leaky seals on doors and windows, notify your facility manager. By doing this you will have a warmer winter at your work space and we'll stop wasting heat.

We can all take simple steps in our daily routine to reduce the energy consumption at Eielson. It is hard to change your energy using habits, but if we all do our part, maybe next time you are waiting for the coal cars to chug by on the railroad, there will be one less car on its way to the plant.