Go Greener

Toasty Tuesday Wrap Up

Did we save Energy?

The forecast for Toasty Tuesday was sunshine and an expected temperature of 17⁰C. There were many unusual outfits and happy faces as the girls arrived at school for the challenge of keeping themselves warm with no heating and as few lights as possible turned on. The aim of the day was to raise awareness about our energy use and see if we could reduce our carbon emissions.

The results are in, and we did manage to reduce our energy use! On Toasty Tuesday the whole school used 2,792kWh (senior school used 2,385kWh).  If we compare this to the previous Tuesday, August 9, the whole school used 3,189kWh (senior school used 2,599kWh). The day after Toasty Tuesday on Wednesday 17 August we used 2,977 kWh (senior school used 2,520). The two graphs below show the load was clearly lower on Toasty Tuesday. The Graph 1 shows the energy used by the Senior school only and Graph 2 does a comparison for the whole school.

Another tradition of Toasty Tuesday is of course toasted sandwiches! The cafeteria sold about two hundred toasted sandwiches to keep people warm. Plain cheese was the most popular variety purchased.

This year we decided to use our own energy to created pedal powered strawberry and mango smoothies. It was a hectic time as about 380 smoothies were made by Primary and Secondary students with pedal power.

As mentioned in a previous edition of Go Greener, the energy for the school comes from solar and wind power. There are number of interesting podcasts on the 100 climate conversations website dealing with solar and wind energy in Australia. These include:

• Martin Green who pioneered solar panels in Australia
• Charlie Prell who developed a wind farm on his property at Crookwell and set up the Framers for climate action
• Chris McGrath who developed a system to deploy solar panel quickly and more efficiently. He is behind the Sun Cable project to send electricity to Singapore via underwater cable

Sue Zipfinger
Sustainability Coordinator