As the Carbon-Fast draws to a close I am looking at my efforts thinking that I could be doing more. It's one of the themes of my life!
As you can see from my photo, the electric set-up for our home office is very complex! It's a tangle of cords, some that move onto other cords.
It's not hard to turn this power strip on and off. We've started doing this every evening when the day is done. In a way this has improved the quality of our lives because it turns the LAN, including the wireless, off so there can't be any "just one more google" before bedtime once this is switched. If one wants Internet access after bedtime then you've got to go downstairs and venture into a dark and chilly room. So far we don't seem to have lost touch with the world, despite clicking the Internet off at bedtime and I'm sure that we've both gotten more minutes of sleep for not indulging our Internet whims.
One thing I noticed as I was switching this on every morning, after setting the coffee pot to brew, was that the room lite up with clicks and grinds. Every appliance in the office -two printers, a LAN, a FAX, a heater, numerous PCs- was on this power strip. One person working in an office rarely prints on two printers at the same time, yet we turned those both back on every morning. Days go by without the fax being used.
One reason to do this is that figuring out which cord powered which appliance is a hassle. If someone calls to say they're sending a FAX then you had to go fish around to find the FAX cord.
One of my Carbon-Fast solutions is to make unplugging all these very necessary machines easier by labeling their cords. That way when one is needed it can be hooked back up easily.
The other thing we did was to identify what you want to keep on and what can be turned off. This picture, another decorating disaster, shows how we keep our cable box on, but can turn the TV and DVD player off from the power strip. Originally we'd had everything on the power strip, but the cable box won't record if it's switched off -- and that was important!
Separating out what's a priority from what isn't is a good way to approach this.
