Thursday, September 27, 2007

Kill-a-Watt?!? You bet!

A patron asked for it before it was even catalogued--NPL's new Library Energy Kit.

Assembled, it looks like one of the Discovery Packs from the Children's Room, but its intended audience is us big kids, so look for it upstairs.

Provided by the Norwich Energy Committee and the Sustainable Energy Resource Group (that's SERG to you), the materials provide information about the effects of global warming and ways to reduce energy use. Between reduced energy use and the switch to renewable resources, SERG estimates that many homeowners can cut energy bills by up to 50 per cent.

In the kit are a mix of tools and information: a watt meter (or Kill-a-Watt Monitor, according to SERG) with instructions on how to test appliance efficiency, two DVDs--An Inconvenient Truth and Kilowatt Ours. There are books: The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook: Community Solutions to a Global Crisis by Greg Pahl, and Your Green Home by Alex Wilson. Consumer's Energy Guide helps with product selection and use for maximum energy savings. Additionally, there are a collection of "energy briefs" from the Rocky Mountain Institute, and a home energy calculator produced by SERG.


The kit will circulate for a week (it'll be 50 cents a day for overdues, so be sure to return it on time).

Lucinda is anxious to use it for an energy analysis here at NPL.

Here's to better conservation, one household --and one library!-- at a time.

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