Joe Wein’s blog

On 24 February 2010 Bloom Energy, a Sunnyvale, California based company launched its solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), which is currently being field tested at several large customers, including eBay, Google and WalMart. CBS “60 Minutes” ran a program on the company and their product three days earlier. Their technology will let you generate your [...]

[Read more →]

Gizmodo reported about a Gadget shown at CES 2010 that supposedly harvests energy from a wireless hotspot. The “RCA Airnergy WiFi Hotspot Power Harvester” consists of a small battery, a USB connector and some circuitry that is supposed to convert wireless signals into DC power to top up the battery. The gadget can then be [...]

[Read more →]

Our household of four uses about 500 kWh of electricity per month on average, a considerable portion of which is consumed by the computers I run my business on. The total tends to be more in July and August, when we also run air conditioners to take the edge of 35+ centigrade heat, whereas in [...]

[Read more →]

The Kill A Watt EZ Electricity Usage Monitor P4460 by P3 International is a popular gadget in North America for measuring power usage by electronics and electrical appliances. You simple plug it into the wall socket and plug the appliance into the device and it will give you instant read-outs of power usage in Watt, [...]

[Read more →]

In December 2007, Congress passed a bill and President Bush signed it into law that would ban conventional light bulbs by 2014, starting with 100W bulbs in 2012. In February 2009 the European Union’s Environment Committee voted to phase out conventional light bulbs, starting with 100W bulbs by September 2009. Australia and Canada have similar [...]

[Read more →]