ConfusedAboutEnergy.co.uk

Confused About Energy is a free impartial service to help you reduce energy consumption and save on your energy costs. Much of the available information regarding energy efficiency savings is confusing and misleading. At Confused About Energy we aim to cut through the jargon and provide practical, impartial advice on all aspects of energy use and ways in which you can save money, this includes:-

 

Household Energy Costs: Heating, insulation, water, harnessing energy and more.

Car Energy Costs: The real MPG, using less fuel, green cars efficient cars and more

Energy Storage: also new to Confused About Energy, starting with batteries, again much more will be added throughout the year.

Our Children can’t be expected to understand the Global Warming debate until they have an understanding of “The Facts”

I recently picked up my teenaged son’s school science revision guide, at the same time asking him if he needed any help. “I'm fine” he said and maybe I should have respected this but I was bored and felt a familiar urge to irritate him without motive because unfortunately that’s the kind of Dad I am (in return I have made an implied promise to leave him half a house when I die and to be fair both he and his brother seem relaxed about this arrangement). So anyway, I resolved to test him on the material in the guide with a view to ensuring that he gets enough qualifications to get him a job that will allow him to escape my tormenting at the earliest opportunity? The subject of the open page of the booklet was “The Environment” and since I didn’t feel inclined to wade through the whole document I decided to play the cards as they fell. “The Environment” it was.

With the current high fuel prices, even a relatively small improvement in your MPG can save you money. Most drivers will be able to make savings by changing their driving habits and techniques.

There is a lot written on this subject, however some of the information is misleading and confusing. Confused About Energy has carried extensive research to identify the best ways to improve your car’s fuel economy and save you money. Here are our top ten tips (not necessarily in order of importance or amount of saving):-

1. Drive smoothly
   All aspects of your driving should be gentle and smooth – accelerating, breaking and steering. Sharp acceleration, hard breaking and flinging the car about will significantly increase fuel consumption. Imagine you have a passenger holding a full cup of coffee and trying to drive so that none of it spills out!
2. Don’t over rev and avoid high speeds.
   It isn’t just about driving slowly, but driving at the most efficient speed for the engine. This can be done by keeping the engine at its most economical rpm, usually between 1500 and 2500 depending on engine type and size. At very high speeds engines will be outside this range and consume significantly more fuel. Aerodynamic drag also increases rapidly above 70mph. According to the Department of Transport driving at 85mph uses approximately 25per cent more fuel than at 70mph (plus its illegal!) and at 70mph about 10 per cent more than at 60mph.

We are! We have decided to try to find out how much energy there actually is in your average battery. There are so many brands, names, categories and types it is very unclear what you actually get for your money. Should you buy an expensive alkaline battery or would a cheaper brand suffice. Batteries use descriptive words like, superpower, power plus or extra energy to describe what you get, but there is no data on the side of batteries to quantify what you are buying. So we have decided to find out.

There are complications in calculating the energy in a battery, since the energy of the output varies with the change in voltage as a battery is discharged at a given rate (mAh specified). An absolute number for the capacity of the battery (the number of mAh) can however be evaluated easily by setting the discharge current of the test apparatus to a fixed value. If you are then willing to accept an approximation of energy by averaging the discharge voltage over the discharge time then the energy in each battery can be estimated.