Let’s take energy saving seriously

winter. The best way to warm a room is to put up thick curtains and keep them closed. It is estimated that around 40 percent of heat from the average home is lost through walls and windows.
As for companies, the magazine recommends that office lights should be put on a sensor which automatically switches off lighting overnight. While visiting in the USA, I saw it at first hand lights being switched off by sensors if an area of a supermarket did not have shoppers. As soon as shoppers went to that area again, the lights came on.
A company in the USA (run by a Zimbabwean engineer) called US Energy Engineers, has perfected the system of reducing energy use. By using software and efficient energy bulbs, many companies have saved a lot of money in energy bills.
Dr Felix Goto, who hold a PhD in engineering, and a former Associate Professor of Engineering at Grand Rapids University in Michigan, USA, has invested in promoting energy saving concepts by practically implementing his ideas for the benefit of public organisations and companies.
What Zesa Holdings has begun to promote to save energy by issuing energy saver bulbs must be supported. It has been reported that the average house has about 23 light bulbs and most of these are of the incandescent variety.
Change the six you use most to eco-friendly compact fluorescent bulbs. They last up to 12 times longer and emit around 70 percent less carbon dioxide than their inefficient relatives.
Did many women know that matching the correct pan to the size of the hot plate of the stove saves 40 percent of energy from escaping? There are many ways of also saving electricity in the home. I was surprised to find out that, in the USA and other developed countries, they do not use electricity for cooking but instead use gas.
In our home and I am sure in several homes in Zimbabwe, we use gas for cooking only if electricity is cut off during load shedding. But it would be more efficient and less expensive to use gas for cooking even if electricity is not interrupted. Actually, it is cheaper to use gas for cooking than electricity. This would save a lot of energy.
It is amazing that, in Africa where there is sunshine all the time, the design of buildings does not cater for the use of sunlight to illuminate the inside of buildings.
Offices for companies and other public places use electricity during the day for illumination. Why not design buildings which allow sunlight inside the rooms or public areas like banking halls and corridors?
Many people have read through the Press that work may start soon to tap the Lupane gas fields. But the problem is that the country wants to use the gas to power turbines to produce electricity instead of piping the gas to Bulawayo and other centres to be used for cooking. Maybe there will be enough gas to be channelled for domestic use as well. This would save a lot of electricity for consumption purposes.
There is no doubt that producing electricity from gas would be more efficient than using coal which is more polluting to the environment. Another area which could benefit from Lupane gas exploits would be the rural areas.
It would be expensive to pipe the gas throughout the country but bottled gas could be sold cheaply to the villagers and save lots of forests. Small-scale farmers are racking a lot of money from selling tobacco. But hardly do we see trucks loaded with gas tanks for use in their households. They still yearn to use electricity which is in short supply for domestic use.
Another aspect that has been overlooked is the use of solar power especially for public buildings in isolated areas. I have been impressed to see residents in Seke area around Harare using solar power for television and radios. But solar power could also be used to light homes at night using a battery to store energy at night.
What is difficult to understand is that there is  lack of innovation by our engineers to come up with energy saving devices which can be installed in homes and companies to save electricity.
In Vietnam, the effluent from pigs and humans is now being used to generate methane gas for use in the homes. This has wiped out the horrible smell in the countryside.
Not only that, engineering students spend some time in rural areas coming up with scientific methods to assist farmers in using energy efficiently. We cannot just claim that our education system is one of the best in the world while our students spend most of their time walking the streets without harnessing their talents for the benefit of the communities.
Many devices left on consume a lot of electricity. Take, for an example, the phone charger. An amazing 95 percent of energy used by mobile phone chargers is wasted when the charger is left unplugged after use.  Just 5 percent is actually used to charge the phone and the rest is sucked out of the grid as the phone charger is left plugged into the wall but not switched off at the socket.
Please turn it off. If you have not noticed it, Zesa has embarked on a system of reducing power instead of turning it off. You may have noticed that certain appliances, such as bread toasters cannot be turned on during the day. This is most welcome.
There are many people who still use electric heaters, especially, bar heaters even during the day when room temperatures have risen to about 18 to 22 degrees Celsius. This is just unacceptable. Energy saving should be taught in schools as well.