Earth Hour: Oman

Last year, the Environmental Society of Oman joined the rest of the world for the first time in the Earth Hour. It's an initiative where people turn off their electrical appliances, lights and whatever else uses electricity for an hour between 8:30 and 9:30 pm on a designated date, this year the date is today: March 31st. Last year here in the Sultanate, an estimated 20,000KW of electricity was saved, enough to supply 250 houses for a whole day or the whole district of Al Khuwair in Muscat for an hour (ripped that from this Oman Tribune article). This year the ESO are targeting a saving of 50,000KW of electricity, no small mean feat as it means we will have to collectively do more than twice as well as we did last year to hit this target.

Here's a few tips to help save some electricity during the hour, and in general:

1. Turn lights off in rooms you are not in. If you have outside lights, turn them off too.
2. When you are done charging your mobile device, camera or whatever, turn the power off at the wall - chargers suck electricity whether you have a phone plugged into them or not.
3. Turn your TV/DVD/Sound off at the wall, even in "Standby" mode, they are still using a surprising amount of power. Check out this graph and this table showing just how much various appliances use around the home when in standby mode, it's quite interesting to see.

As for things to do during the Earth Hour, here's my suggestions:

1. Dinner by candle light
2. Going for a walk
3. Talking with friends
4. Take a nap!
5. Play hide in the dark!

Remember, as the Tesco supermarket chain loves to remind its customers, "Every little helps", so join in, whats turning some lights off for an hour really going to do to you?

le fin.