My e-ner-geeee

Have been thinking about energy a bit the last couple of days...because I don't seem to have any - partly related to my trial dairy free week (to try to help with the bub's green poo - say no more!) and partly because of my utter un-preparedness for the said dairy free week. (Uh - what exactly did I think I was going to eat?!). Anway, that's a whole other post but back to my energy question...

So, I was using the dustpan this morning - we have a cute designer one that was a gift so I quite enjoy using it; I figure being active is a good thing and all and I feel like I'm saving on energy use by not vacuuming - but then started to wonder. These days, a lot of folks have electrical equipment to replace a lot of the 'old school' items like brooms/dustpan & brush but even electric toothbrushes but is this necessarily a bad thing?

The question I am pondering is - is more energy expended using the electrical replacements which take less time than if we went back and expended our own energy doing these things (taking twice the amount of time or more)?

Food production does use vast amounts of resources and well, we need to eat to have the energy to do these things right?

I'm not sure. What do you reckon? :-)

My husband works for an environmental consultancy so I guess I should go ask him. It's just that he makes it really complicated (they even sell software to help people figure it all out)! He'd probably also want to compare the life cycle of the dustpan & brush to the vaccum cleaner or something. And specifically how much and what I would eat in order to sweep for 5 minutes. Blah. Why does it have to be so hard?

Actually, he'd probably just tell me to get off the computer already. Oops. My bad. What should I give up for my computer habit?! So long as it isn't my daily cup 'o Joe then I should be fine.