Hello,
Anyone else working on energy consumption by students living in university or college residence halls? That is my graduate student work here at Western Washington in Bellingham, WA. I'm working with the offices of Sustainability, Residence Life, and Facilities Management to figure out how to best implement a program to increase efficient use of energy (with a goal of seeing reduced consumption). I'd love to collaborate with anyone doing similar work.
THANKS,
Kimbrough Mauney
University Residence Energy Use
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Hi ,
We have been working on year a long energy conservation strategy with residents at Murdoch University in Perth Western Australia. Key aspects of the project were running focus groups to identify barriers, cultural differences and harness energy saving knowledge of residents, bill reminders re: standby energy; ipod, laptop recharging, 2mins off your shower stuff. Walk through audits with some residents where you show them how much hot water is used by them in a one minute period in their shower then calculate for the "20 min shower" - very visible activity. Other fun, social events were also really successful - an energy saving rap competition and bbq. Also really important for residential assistant's to do energy saving training and then communicate to residents during orientation and flat inspections. Check out University of Bath also http://www.bath.ac.uk/accommodation/green/competition.shtml
Hope that helps
Nicola Wiseman
Sustainability Projects Officer
Green Skills
p: (08) 9360 6667
Nicola mentioned training the residential assistants on energy savings so they can communicate it to residents during orientation and dorm inspections. Does anyone have examples or outlines or RA energy training? We are going to offer it to our students, but I don't want it to be boring. I want it to be memorable and interactive and utilize CBSM concepts so it can effect behavior change.
Thanks,
Cassidy Reimer
Energy Conservation Behavior Specialist
University of Kansas
United States
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Kimbrough -
I am a graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I'm working with our environmental center's energy programs this summer. One thing we are implementing this year is an online real-time energy feedback program with Lucid Design. Lucid designs the website and manages all of the data. Oberlin college has installed this feature on all of their residence halls and has seen up to 30% reduction in energy use. www.oberlin.edu/dormenergy Also Toronto has a really good program called REWIRE - it is based upon CBSM principles: http://rewire.utoronto.ca/
Hope this helps.
Megan Murphy