With Earth Hour on Saturday, here are some safety tips that should be exercised during lights-out.
Toronto Fire Services recommends not using candles but instead use battery-powered flashlights. But if you are using candles, below are some fire safety tips (courtesy of Toronto Fire Services):
- Extinguish all candles when leaving the room and before going to sleep.
- Don’t use candles in bedrooms.
- Keep candles at least one metre away from anything that can burn.
- Keep candles, matches and lighters hidden and out of the reach of children.
- Use sturdy candle holders that won’t tip or burn. Those with glass shades or chimneys are safer.
- Extinguish candles when they burn to within five centimetres (two inches) of their holder.
- Make sure that you have working smoke alarms on every storey of your home.
- Practice your home fire escape plan.
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Oh, yeah – forgot to mention – any candles that I use are made of beeswax.
Not a fossil fuel.
Karl
Just to make a point, I pull the main breaker to the house, and run for a couple of hours
on Solar energy alone. The fridge and freezer don’t suffer for that period of time, and I can
still watch my favourite show if I absolutely have to. (Which I don’t.) I run a couple of oil lamps
for which I have made the fuel myself, using used cooking oil to fabricate biodiesel.
It’s nice to exercise the system in case of a real emergency.
Karl
But the wrong way of doing it. Candles are a fossil fuel and emit far more carbon into the atmosphere than the energy used in a light bulb. Power plants will not slow down their turbines just because we turn off our lights. And our lights are probably the lowest usage of electricity in our households. Perhaps if we turned off everything, Refridgerator, washer, dryer, TV, game systems, freezer – but that would mean missing my favorite show! Conserve too much and the electric companies will increase our bills as they won’t be getting as much from us. It’s a vicious cycle and alas I don’t see any way we can avoid destroying our world. Mother nature will shrug us off like a bad cold.
Earth hour is a great idea to enlighten the world on conservation. It would be great for the world if we praticed it on a daily basis. However, Hydro One and all Public Utitlity companies would never alter the bill charges for lower usage. You can sit in the dark for 2 hours a day, and your monthly bill would remain the same. And the excuse you would get from the Hydro company is that – they have equal billing set in the neighborhood, sorry.. I would do more Earth hours if I saw a sizeable decrease in my Hydro bill.
I like the idea of going for a walk and get to know your neighbours. Or we can have family time without turning on light to experience what our ancestors used to spend their night.
I believe in conserving energy and Earth Hour is a good way of reminding people to save energy. it would be nice if we all practice this on regular basis by not having the lights on of every room but only where we are sitting. Value what we have …..
I think it is a great thing to do this Earth Hour, we should do it more often as think of how much energy we do save. Hope everyone does it. I do it every year & conserve all the time, as much as I can, daily.
Thanks for the safety tips. However, its seems funny that people waste a lot of time, money and energy trying to be “green”. It took a lot energy to make those candles. First they had to be made in a factory. Then wrapped in a lot of packaging (that was also made in a factory) that is usually not recycleable. Then they had to be transported from the factory to a ship (if made outside of North America), then from the ship to a port, then from the port onto another truck to a distribution centre, then from the distribution centre to a warehouse, then from the warehouse to the store, than from the store (which we probably drove to in a car) to your home.
Why burn candles if you don’t have to. Also, some will probably use battery operated devices so that they can say they had their lights turned off for 60 minutes. Please, instead of making it a cute game, let’s really start conserving our utilities. Go for a walk and get to know your neighbours.