Earth Hour

Earth Hour was this past weekend on March 25th, but we had conflicting schedules and so did it on Sunday instead!

If you’ve never done an Earth Hour, the concept is simple: turn off your lights and all power at the designated time, for one whole hour. The idea is to work in solidarity and also all save energy and see what it’s like to live without electricity!

We are lucky to have an app that allows my family to see where and how much energy is coming into the home.

So when I turned the lights off, the kids got the phone and took it around, turning off and unplugging everything they could, seeing what the lowest numbers were.

A couple of things we actually turned ON for a moment to see how much energy they drain.

We checked out the stars, and how dark the rooms were.

Then we played Uno by flashlight (cool trick: put a glass over the light to reflect the light and make it more diffuse and less harsh), with plenty of laughs.

Finally, we turned everything off and sat for a minute in the dark, breathing.

Some cool learnings:
– the stars are so pretty and noticeable when the home lights are off
– the top electricity users were not the electric heater but actually the dryer and dishwasher. The fridge was the third.
– Little bits of all the energy in our house aside from these three added up to 0.2-0.3 kW/hour – also not trivial. It’s worth unplugging things.
– playing in the dark is hard (is that green or blue?) but made for lots of fun

We might make this a regular occurrence just for the fun of it, for the appreciation of electricity, and for enjoyment of simple family time which is more than worth the supposed sacrifice.

More about Earth Hour:
Earth Hour is a global event at 8:30pm local time to save collective energy and be in the dark together – a way to make a step towards understanding how to live with less, to voluntarily give up what we’ve become so dependent on, and see what it would be like!

Learn more about Earth Hour here: https://www.earthhour.org, and here are some ideas of what to do when the lights go out: https://www.contiki.com/six-two/article/16-electricity-free-things-to-do-during-earth-hour/