The book To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don’t Exist by Evgeny Morozov is a warmly advised read for everyone concerned with or about modern technology and technocrats. I’ll say more about it elsewehere, but here I’ll just take inspiration from the last chapter, where Morozov describes some rather hilarious ideas to make us more aware of what we are actually doing whenever we push an ‘on’ button.

“We live in a world that seems firm and permanent only to find out that it isn’t – and that many of the practices we take for granted are harming the planet, or our neighbours, or teenage factory workers in Cambodia, or squirrels in Tajikistan, or some as-yet-unnamed community that is only now beginning to articulate its opposition to our way of life.” writes Morozov as an introduction to some schemes to make us, users, more aware of our footprint. Take for instance the erratic appliances pioneered by Swedish engineers: home appliances that start to behave strangely as energy consumption increases. So your hoover may suddenly decide to take a five minutes timeout, your radio may switch to a different station or your toaster may refuse to go further then a very bleak finish whenever the energy consumption in the appartment rises above certain levels. (I’d think burning the toast to a crisp would be both more hilarious and more effective but as this wastes energy I take it this option is not on the menu.) Thus, the Swedish engineers seek to make people acutely aware
of their energy consumption, while also introducing elements of risk and indeterminacy, elements which are always present but usually hidden from view for the user and thus all too often forgotten.
In Germany, engineers of the Folkwang University of the Arts designed what they called “transformational products” with the aim of furthering the consumer’s energy awareness. Most hilarious I find the ‘catarpillar’ extension cord, which gets thicker when more energy flows through it and even starts to twist and turn, as if tortured, when it has to transport even more power.
I’ll resist the temptation to describe more of these projects here (you can find more info on the web, see for instance https://issuu.com/hassenzahl/docs/create_transformational_products_cr).

I fear that these kind of appliancies may not gain much foothold in even the most eco-aware of households. So I’ll describe a trick, somewhat in the same vein although quite mundane by comparison, which is practical. It’s about your heating system; let’s call it, somewhat grandly, a ‘thermostat with an attitude’.

The idea is very simple, really; it harks back to the old days when electricity and gas were paid through inserting coins in a slot in the gas- and electricity meter. This made the consumers very thrifty and acutely aware of their energy consumption. It even gave a good insight into what appliances and activities consumed the most. Later we got more modern meters and monthly bills, which quickly became yearly bills. This innovation much lessened awareness and the yearly statement of past consumption provides no insights into where all this energy went.

Thermostat with an attitude

We can’t easily bring the old coin system back, but what you can very easily do is this: installing a clock device which shuts off (or reduces) the heating system every hour or every few hours. To re-start, you push a button after wich it goes for another hour or whatever period you choose.
I’ve been using such a device for quite a while now and I can tell you it absolutely does wonders for both our awareness of our real heating needs and our energy bill. For instance, we used to sometimes forget to turn the heating off when leaving the appartment, or think the other would do it or had done it, or leave ‘for a few minutes only’ which then turned into hours. I say this ‘sometimes’ happened but the pernicious thing here is that we had no way of knowing how often this happened as this would require not only alertness but also extensive note-keeping both of which are beyond our mental capabilities.
Also a great advantage is that it is now the acute feeling of chillyness which triggers a push on the start-button. This ensures the button is only pressed when more heating is really desired and quite often the button does not get pushed as we were just about to break up anyway, or engage in activities like hoovering or cooking for which a somewhat lower room temperature is readily acceptable.

Everyone can devise such a system quite easily. One way is to have a modern thermostat installed; suitable models are available of many makes. The device should a) be programmable with many different programs and b) have a manual ‘start’-button. The trick, then, is quite easy. For daily use, you program a series of on-off sessions. All these sessions are set to ‘on’ at the same time, say 7 a.m. The first program switches off at 7:05, the second starts at 7 and switches off at, say, 9. The third switches on at 7 and off at 11, and so forth. The combined effect is that the heating only once per day switches on automatically for 5 minutes (or half an hour if you prefer to get up in an already heated appartment) and during the rest of the day you have to push the manual override button to get the heating going and it will switch off at the set times.
(Actually, most modern thermostats are even more sophisticated in that they let you switch between a higher ‘day temperature’ and a lower ‘night temperature’. But that doesn’t prevent this trick to work.)

You may already have a suitable thermostat installed! Else you can buy one, of course, but as they are quite expensive you can just as well make do with a very cheap programmable switch. But as this requires some DIY I’ll describe this in a seperate document here: http://www.phlogiston.nl/papers/energy%20saving%20thermostat.pdf

Just to remind us

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could introduce an element of randomness here? The wonderful mind bell app chimes not precisely, but somewhere around every hour – and I don’t doubt that is one of the reasons for it’s popularity. Likewise, our thermostat could switch off every now and then or somewhere around set times. This would not only make the thermostat more interesting and fun, it could also – much like the ‘mind bell’ – give us a tiny reminder that the comfortable temperature of our appartments is not at all self evident. Such an addition would surely be to the liking of those Swedish and German designers I mentioned.
I do hope that this text will be read someday by someone knowledgeable in DIY electronic projects who then decides to make such a device and publish the details.

Hans