I work at home now, so I don’t have to worry about this, but how many people out there work in a building where they have to use an elevator? (I used to.)
How many of you take that elevator daily to get to your office? (I used to be guilty of this.)
How many of you take that elevator multiple times every day to get to different floors in your building, leave for lunch, use a bathroom on a different level, etc.? (Again, I definitely did this.)
I bet you can see where I’m going with this post.
However, I didn’t want to just recommend that you take the stairs. Instead, I wanted to do a little research and show you in numbers how much energy you’re wasting by using the elevator when you could walk.
How much energy does an elevator use? Well, it depends on how far you’re traveling, how many people are in the compartment, whether you’re going up or down, what kinds of elevator you’re riding, and so forth. Let’s assuming that everything is “average” though.
To take the elevator up and down one floor, according to this website, you’re using about 5 Wh. That’s enough energy to charge your cell phone.
If you take a round-trip 20 floors, you’re using about 100 Wh. That’s enough enough energy to run your desktop computer for 30 minutes.
So, let’s say that you working on the 4th floor (a manageable distance to walk) and that you take the elevator up and down twice a day - once when you get there/leave and once when you leave for/get back from lunch. You also, on average, take the elevator up and down two floors once a day for meetings or other reasons.
Are you adding it up? That’s…50 Wh a day. If you work 20 days a month, that’s 1000 Wh a month.
So, every month you decide to walk the stairs instead of taking the elevator, you’re saving enough energy to power your computer for five hours (probably the average amount of time you use your computer at work each day.
Ok, ok, it may not seem like that big of a deal. But think about what would happen if all 100 people in your office people did that. You’d have enough saved energy to run a computer for 500 hours!
All I’m saying is that it adds up. Little sacrifices here are there are worth it. After all, the stairs are good for your health too.
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