Energy Consumption - SMART Board

In honor of Earth Day, I thought that I would share some data that I have been collecting in one of my classes.

37 days and 2 hours ago, we installed a Kill A Watt EZ to monitor how much electricity our SMART Board consumed.

Here is the Kill A Watt EZ

Before I reveal the results, here is some background information that needs to be taken into account.

• The Kill A Watt EZ device is metering electricity to the following devices: iMac, SMART Board, Regent Surround Sound System, VCR and a Primera Bravo SE Disc Publisher.
• Only the iMac, SMART Board and Surround Sound System are on all day (8-4).
  
• We used a standard $.10 per KWH (we are paying less, but we used $.10 because it seemed like a good even number).
• We are currently at 890 hours (37 days, 2 hours).

Here is my setup.

Results:

To date, it has cost us $11.37 in electricity for our SMART Board (and accessories). That averages out to about 30 cents a day!

Earth Day

Happy Earth Day!

Today is Earth Day and I believe that each person should recognize it in whatever way they can. Personally, I am using the day to encourage my students to use less paper by emailing assignments or by using Google Docs where they can just share their assignments with fellow students or their instructors.

Even Google has gotten into the mood with a Earth Day image on their search page.

I sat down on my computer this morning to start drafting up this blog post and I searched for "Earth Day". The top result appeared to be the official Earth Day site. This is what I got when I clicked on it:
Social Issues? Well I can see how Earth Day may be viewed as a social issue, but why are we filtering social issues in a educational systems that requires that we teach Social Studies? Interesting.