LEAVE THE THERMOSTAT ALONE

Lil Monahan of Pompano Beach, Florida was really sad to read about all her former neighbors in Queens, New York, who were enduring weeks of power outages while the sun raged down and temperatures hovered at 90 degrees.

Reading her local paper at the library, Lil saw lots of articles on power outages scattered across the country. She was frightened to read that the country's surplus electrical capacity was down to 17 percent, and 15 percent was the point when blackouts, brownouts and outages were sure to occur. Lil got really nervous when she read about a big outage on Gladiolus Boulevard in Ft. Myers, Florida, only about 120 miles west of her condo.

Worried, Lil called Marian, her best friend at the condo, and they talked about it. Proving the old expression that "two heads are better than one," the ladies came up with a plan. They would get everyone in the condo to turn up the thermostat five degrees to take the pressure off the electrical grid.

Would it work?

If everyone in the country turned their air conditioner settings up five degrees, would the nation's electricity problems be solved this red-hot summer?

In the first place, not everyone would do it. It is hard to sustain patriotism when you are perspiring in the kitchen and the mold grows in the bathroom.

Second, air conditioning doesn't use up that much electricity. A window air conditioner uses 1,200 watts a day, max. A 10,000 BTU central air unit grabs up only about 1,500 watts a day (WAD). Turning up the thermostat would save only a couple of hundred WAD, far short of bailing out the electricity shortage.

Is individual initiative hopeless in the face of a national shortage?

No, there is a solution. I call it the "Modified Rosie the Riveter Plan" ("Rosie" for short).

Rosie was the typical World War II woman who saw her man go off to fight the Germans or the Japanese. Needing money, she scooped her hair up into a bandanna, donned a pair of men's dungarees (being that there were no women's dungarees in 1942) and marched into a factory to run the machines which would produce "the arsenal of democracy." At the end of her shift, Rosie trudged home to fix dinner for the kids, wash the dishes by hand, push the carpet sweeper, do a wash, and hang the clothes on the basement lines to dry. (In Rosie's day, there were no dishwashers, few vacuum cleaners and no clothes dryers.)

In Rosie's typical work day lies the direction for solving today's electricity problem. There are three parts to the "Modified Rosie the Riveter Plan."

The first part involves dishwashing. A dishwasher, used once a day, sucks up about 2,400 WAD, or twice what a room air conditioner does. If Lil would start washing her dishes by hand every other day, she would save enough WAD to make up for all her air conditioner's electricity. A little more work, sure, but she wouldn't break a sweat.

The second part of the Rosie plan involves the vacuum cleaner. Being a scrupulously clean person, Lil vacuums twice a week, which comes to about 10,000 watts per week. If she would cut it down to once a week, she would save 5,000 watts, or the equivalent of half a week's worth of air conditioning electricity.

Lil's third place to save is the dryer, which feasts on 10,000 watts per hour. Lil, like the average person, runs her dryer about 3.5 hours per week, which adds up to 35,000 watts weekly, or 5,000 WAD. If Lil would copy the energy-saving action of some hotels and stretch a retractable line over her tub, she could hang out her undies to air-dry. And by accumulating and packing her dryer more carefully, she could probably cut back dryer time from 3.5 hours per week to two hours. By doing this, Lil could save 15,000 watts per week, or over 2,100 WAD.

Now let's add it up:

Her current air conditioner uses 1,500 WAD.

By following the "Modified Rosie the Riveter Plan," Lil could run her air conditioning flat out and still lower the nation's electricity demand by 2,500 WAD.

If all 100 million homes followed the plan, we would subtract 250,000 megawatts from the nation's daily demand of 863,000 megawatts. The Rosie Plan would reduce daily demand to a mere 613,000 megawatts a day.

Which means that our surplus electrical capacity would rise from 17 percent all the way to 42 percent.

It would be the end of heat wave generated outages, blackouts and brownouts.

Be like Rosie, Lil. Pull on some rubber gloves and immerse yourself in some sweet-smelling Ivory suds.

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