Shutdown Survived 26 Mar 07
Well we made it through Shutdown Day with the Computer, TV and our mobile phones switched off for the entire 24 period.
As we had planned, we went on a little family outing, taking a drive along the North Down coast and stopping wherever we fancied for shopping or sight-seeing. Things didn’t get off to a great start, when we realised that we’d neglected to bring either the buggy or carrier for Ben. However, after a quick spot of tag-team shop searching and baby sitting, a suitable carrier was found, which will now be stored in the car in case of similar emergencies in the future. With that brief panic over, the rest of the trip was an enjoyable day out.
Our evening was spent playing Trivial Pursuit and after some time of getting nowhere fast with the “1980s” edition, a strange hybrid game was formed using questions from the “Star Wars” edition too. The fact that Sarah won in the end (the game took about 2 hours to finish) is possibly more embarrassing for her than it is for me. I blame the fact that every time I went for that brown wedge, I was getting 1980s politics questions.
We may not have saved any significant amounts of energy or money (especially with the baby carrier incident) but we did find that having a shutdown day highlighted some habits that we’ve fallen into. For example, most mornings we watch the news on TV over breakfast and many evenings are spent flicking through channels, never really finding anything to watch. We don’t actually need the TV on, its just something that we’ve got used to doing. That time could be better spent reading a good book or, when he’s not asleep, playing a little longer with Ben.
We did find one drawback to Shutdown Day, though we didn’t realise it until Sunday. The UK changed into Summer Time on Saturday night, moving the clocks forward by one hour. Without seeing reminders on the news or little pop-up messages on the computer, we managed to completely forget about this and ended up running an hour behind on Sunday morning until we realised.
Ah well, no harm done ;-)
Posted by Nev in Energy , Going Green , Technology with tags computers, electricity, energy, shutdown day
