String a clothesline in your room and shut off the lights when you leave, and you could win money for your dorm -- that's what a program called Save Power and Reduce Costs is offering for residence hall energy conservation.
SPARC officially began on Oct. 1, and is a student-founded and student-run program designed to reduce energy waste in College residences while awarding cash prizes.
"Our goal is to tangibly reduce electricity use on campus, and more importantly, to make people more aware of their energy use in general," SPARC Coordinator Dan Braden '01 said.
The program encourages conservation by redistributing 50 percent of residence halls' energy savings if they use less electricity this year than they did the previous year. An additional cash prize of $100 will be given to the dorm with the highest percentage savings for the term.
Director of Residential Life Woody Eckels said the money is given back to students through allotments to programming funds, to the Area Coordinators or building improvements such as buying a better VCR for a dorm lounge.
Last fall, Kyle Teamey '98 and Kirk Klausmeyer '00 approached Eckels with the idea of initiating an official energy conservation program targeting dorm electrical use.
"There was some initial concern on how the program would be administered, and how the electrical meter reading would be done," Eckels. "So rather than giving permission to the proposal right away, we decided that a pilot project would be smart."
Sixteen residence halls were part of test pilot Spring term, and those dorms involved used 7 percent less electricity, while those not involved used 4.6 percent more, according to Eckels.
The total amount of dorm electrical use conserved through the SPARC pilot project last spring was 6.77 percent of normal dorm usage, meaning the involved dorms earned $1,276. Smith residence hall was the overall winner with energy savings of 19.12 percent
Eckels said the program was happy with the overall savings. "But we have to realize that as we do this from term to term, there are only so many things we can do to increase savings."
Eckels said savings will eventually level off.
For the 1997 fiscal year, 4,640,000 kilowatt hours were consumed by residence halls -- excluding fraternities, sororities and affinity houses. This was a decrease over the 1996 fiscal year, during which students consumed 4,865,000 kilowatt hours.
According to Ann Bunnell, assistant director for business management in Facilities Operations and Management, the drop in energy use from the 1996-1997 year is mainly due to the College-wide bans of halogen lamps.
When considering leave terms and students inhabiting Greek, affinity and off-campus housing, an average of 2,500 students live in a Dartmouth residence hall at any given time. This means in the 1997-1998 year, each Dartmouth student used approximately 1550 kilowatt hours of energy in his or her dorm room.
One kilowatt is the amount of energy a single 100-watt light bulb would use if it burned for 10 hours straight.
As a result, each Dartmouth student used enough dorm electricity last year to burn a light bulb for approximately 645 days straight.
According to Eckels, the College spent a total of $464,931 last year on Dartmouth residence hall electricity alone. This includes lighting and appliances, but not residential heat or hot water, which is generated through a steam heating system. The program is targeted to shave these costs and increase student awareness.
Along with the announcement of the official start of the program, SPARC released a series of "Energy and Money Saving Tips" to help with the conservation cause.
The tips included turning off all unused lights, appliances and computers, washing and drying clothes in full loads or air drying laundry, replacing incandescent with compact fluorescent light bulbs and ensuring storm windows are closed to cut heat loss by more than a half.
Since there are approximately 7,000 personal computers on campus owned by Dartmouth students and faculty members, the use of electricity by computers has become a prevalent conservation issue.
According to Computing Services Spokesperson Bill Brawley, the most efficient way to conserve energy is to program the computer to go to sleep after a specified amount of time. Shutting the computer off nightly, when the computer will not be in use for long periods of time, is also a good tactic.
Brawley said students should use their discretion when putting their computers to sleep.
Yet another conservation program in the pilot stage this fall is the Environmental Conservation Organization.
"One of purposes of ECO is to coordinate the recycling program, and to have one representative in every dorm to field any questions students have," said Nicholas Dankers '01, coordinator of the project.
Dankers said that the goal of all the ecological conservation projects is to encourage students to look beyond immediate needs and consider the long-term effects of energy waste.
"Student awareness is the greater goal of the conservation projects," he said.
"It's important to realize that in efforts like these, it's always the little things that add up."
