Save money, save the planet

By Amy Maginnis-Honey | Daily Republic | May 22, 2009 08:27

Doug Daut and his wife, Marty, pose with their two electric bicycles in front of their Fairfield, CA home. The bikes have allowed the couple to get rid of one of their cars.

Photo by Brad Zweerink

FAIRFIELD - For Fairfield's Daut family going green has been a win-win situation. They are saving money while helping save the environment.

After reading American Automobile Association statistics that Americans spent more than $8,000 driving a medium-size sedan 15,000 miles last year, they eliminated one of the family's automobiles.  Now, Doug Daut uses a bicycle that he installed an electric bike kit on and public transportation to get around.  This includes riding the electric bike anywhere from Vacaville, CA to Benecia/Vallejo CA  'It basically paid for itself in the first month (no insurance, registration, gas, payments, etc.),' he wrote in an e-mail to the newspaper. 'It's fun to ride, and I still can peddle and get exercise as desired.'  After receiving many comments on it, he decided to get a home business license and sell and install electric bike kits on existing bicycles. 

The family has also significantly reduced using the clothes dryer. 'It costs nearly 50 cents a load to dry clothes' Daut said. 'It could even be more when you consider it is taking us into PG&E's second and third tier of kilowatt per hour pricing.'  So, with some spare items that were laying around the shed, he created a closet-type hanger system from hooks in the ceiling of the family's garage. Clothes get hung up there after washing and then tossed in the dryer for 5 to 10 minutes to fluff them up.  Anybody in the house that doesn't want to hang up their clothes first has to deposit 50 cents in a cup above the dryer when they use it. This is saving $35-plus per month.  For more ideas on saving money, Daut suggested readers visit the PG&E Web site at www.pge.com, which offers alternatives and posts the cost of things.

The dryer, he added, is an easy place to start.  'There are ways (around using it),' Daut said. 'There's not always ways around using other things.'  'I'd love to do more,' he added. 'The whole solar thing, wind energy, especially living in Cordelia Villages. It would be nice to harness that. But that technology is unreachable for the average person, especially in urban areas.'

The family, Daut said, are big fans of going green. 'You have to start somewhere,' he said!

Shirley Osborne, also of Fairfield, has created her own faux compost bins, catches water from her leaky faucet and takes the train and bus to work even though it's about double the time of driving.
'I recycle everything, I cash in my cans,' she said in an e-mail. 'I rarely water my back lawn and have a drip for my roses. 'I run through the sprinklers instead of using the air conditioner and save my baking and laundry for night. I have a push lawn mower,' she added.

Eva Rivera and her family started off by switching to low-energy bulbs, a low-flow shower head and using shower towels more than once before putting them in the laundry.  The Fairfield resident also created a recycling center in her home's laundry room. 'This was actually easy to get the family on board with, because everything goes in one location,' she wrote.  'The bottles and cans are taken to our local recycling center. The deal is that whoever takes (the recycling) in gets to keep the money. It usually totals anywhere from $40 to $80.' The family has also put the sprinklers on timers and uses solar lighting outside the house.  'Our next purchases will be a composter for the back yard and a rain barrel that collects water from the gutter drain for watering plants,' Rivera said. 'My dream is to someday get a solar roof.'

Go Green!

Reach Amy Maginnis-Honey at 427-6957 or amaginnis@dailyrepublic.net.

As school lets out and parents arrive to pick up their kids, e-bikes are everywhere, a common fixture in daily life in China. Credit: Christopher Cherry, University of Tennessee

If you were to just read the title of a recent article in the WSJ, you might think that E-Bikes are the most dangerous thing since car-roof-surfing: "E-Yikes! Electric Bikes Terrorize the Streets of China".  Upon further investigation, what we find is an article that is begging for the use of a good calculator: Using government figures from China, the hub of the electric bicycle world, they show that in 2007, 2,469 electric-bike users were killed; in 2001, that figure was just 34.  However, a decade ago there was estimated to be just 50,000 E-Bikes in China.  Today that estimate is 120 million, but in an article dated in November 2007, in partnership with the National Science Foundation, it was reported that there were an estimated 40 million E-Bike users in China.  So 34 is .068% of 50,000 and 2,469 is .0062% of 40 million (note the extra zero).  .0062 is just 9% of .068; this equates to over a 90% reduction in the fatality rate even though the number of e-bikes increased 80,000%; and it's not like the Chinese let their bikes sit around and collect dust, like I used to do before installing an electric bike kit on it.  Wow, now that is quite an improvement!  In addition, the fact that there are estimated to be some 120 million electric bikes in use in China now, the latest government fatality figures still only account for 3 percent of China's annual 90,000 traffic deaths.  Pedestrian deaths were over 21,000 and motorbike deaths over 18,000. Cycle fatalities, at 7,500, were significantly greater than e-bike fatalities, while deaths on public transport were a relatively low 1,200.

Electric bicycling is very safe and, if China is the example, the more of them there are, the safer it gets!