Energy Saver News; WattBusters - Travel, Turkey and the Thanksgiving Flush

For many Americans, Thanksgiving is a time to visit family, eat massive amounts of turkey and watch football. It's a festive time of year (unless you happen to be a turkey) and there's usually not even the germ of an idea about energy or water savings going on inside of our brains. I can fix that - or break it, depending on your point of view.

Your family doesn't magically appear at your doorstep. They have to travel. Whether it's by car, plane or train, they've used energy for their transportation. In 2003, somewhere close to 36 million people nationwide traveled 50 miles or more from their homes over Thanksgiving weekend. If they all traveled by car and only went 50 miles (100 miles round trip), a vehicle getting 20 miles per gallon would have used 5 gallons of gas. That means that the 36 million people would have used 180 Million gallons of gas! I realize that not everyone piloted their own vehicle but many people traveled much further than 100 miles and I didn't calculate any fuel costs for the holiday fliers. The point is, we use a LOT of fuel during the holidays just to get around.

What would Thanksgiving be without that succulent, juicy turkey? In 2003, over 45 million turkeys were cooked for Thanksgiving. (I can almost hear cows rejoicing all over the country). We'll figure our imaginary turkey is a small 10 pounder. Now, let's ponder some of the energy and water use for our tasty bird.

The best way to thaw a frozen turkey is in the refrigerator. It takes about 24 hours for every 5 pounds. (Note: Never thaw a turkey at room temperature because surface bacteria can rapidly multiply to dangerous levels at temperatures of 40 degrees F and above.) If you are like many Americans, you need to 'speed-thaw' the bird. Keep the turkey in the original tightly sealed bag and place it in a clean and sanitized sink or foodservice safe pan. Submerge in cold water and change the cold water every 30 minutes. The turkey will take about 30 minutes per pound to thaw. Our imaginary turkey is 10 pounds so it would take 300 minutes with 10 changes of water. If you used only 10 gallons of water each time, it would add up to 100 gallons per turkey. If 1/2 of the turkeys in the US were speed-thawed, that's over 2 BILLION gallons of water. Any way you look at it, we use enough water to create a sizable Turkey Lake just to get Mr. Gobbler ready to cook.

Mr. Gobbler is now thawed and ready to cook. There are all kinds of charts that give cooking times for various sizes of turkeys but we'll go with 20 minutes per pound at 325 degrees (approximate only.. your turkey may vary). That gives us 200 minutes for our turkey. To simplify, we'll call it 3 hours. Using an electric oven, an hour of cooking on 'medium' setting uses around 2kWh worth of electricity. Multiply by 3 (hours) and we get 6kWh of electricity to cook our bird. If 1/3 of people use electric ovens, that's 90 million kWh to just to roast up our little buddy. Now, imagine the yams, potatoes, pies, etc., PLUS the amount of natural gas the rest of the population uses for cooking. It kind of makes a bowl of Wheaties look a bit more alluring.

Thanksgiving dinner was gourmet success and the family is engulfed in a wallowing afterglow. "Are you ready for some football?" Oh yeah. Approximately 30 million of us will watch football after the meal. Energy use drops quite a bit now. The ovens are generally done with their tasks at this point but televisions, coffee makers, some lights and automatic dishwashers kick in now. (Hey kids: Dishwashing used to be a community, manual labor endeavor in years past.) The next spike occurs at halftime of the football game. Just like clockwork, American toilets will flush 30 million times and use 108 million gallons of water - enough water to fill an entire football stadium! Water efficient toilets would save 62 million gallons of that water. The peculiar thing about our Thanksgiving Flush is that time zones don't affect it. With the meal, time zones in the US go from east to west and stagger the energy and water use. The football game happens in real-time and much of the country hits the bathroom at the same time.

The point of all this is not to have you eating bologna sandwiches for Thanksgiving, but as you let your belt out after dinner, you may want to give thanks for living in a time and place that allows such enormous energy and water use. If the Pilgrims only knew...