Your Questions About Save Energy At Home

admin answers:

I save energy and get my exercise workout by mowing my lawn with a push mower.
I also hang my clothes, only use the dryer to “fluff”.
Cold water wash only.
Smart light bulbs throughout the house.
Use only the wattage needed.
Energy saver appliances.
Added insulation to save on both heating and cooling.
Turn everything off when not in use.
Ride a bike to corner store and nearby destinations.
Take 3 minute showers.
No brag, I have the lowest electric bill around.

admin answers:

When you are at home sit down put your feet up and go to sleep until bedtime or better still go into your neighbour’s house and use there appliances.lol

admin answers:

It sounds like you are doing a fantastic job, especially compared to many others.

I would have to have more details to know exactly what you can do better. I have a home in New England myself and also one in Florida. But here are some general ideas, many of which I have implemented myself.

The first thing that I would do is to install a new thermostat for the heating/cooling unit of the home. I personally like the 7 day 4 time frame/day programmable unit. This is somewhere from $30-50. In the winter, allow the house to get cold during the day when you are not home, and set it to heat up so when you get home it is warm.

Next check and make sure that there is a significant amount of quality insulation in the walls, and attic/roof of your home. Then look at the windows and doors, for insulation value. When I got both of my properties they had single pain windows, that were allowing heat and cold to flow in and out of the house. My home in NE I was able to turn down the thermostat about 6 degrees after new windows were installed.

The next biggest user of electricity is usually your hot water heater. I installed what is called “The little gray box” which is similar to the programmable thermostat but it is mechanical. This too is a tremendous help. If you have a gas hot water heater…this will not help. Insulating the pipes and tank is a very good idea as well.

I took my home in Florida to the next level on my hot water heater and installed a solar powered hot water heater. With this, I use electricity about 2 weeks a year in total to heat my water for a family of 4.

Next having Energy Star rated appliances is a great next step. Then lighting, using CFLs is a great jump as well.

Many times your utility company will come out and do a free energy check of your home to see what is going to be best implemented. USE THEM!!!

As for a reference, my home with a family of 4 we work out of our home and we average about $65/month in electric, which is all of our utility cost.

admin answers:

It’s actually better to leave the air running consistently. Turning it off and on will make it work harder because it has to cool down the air and the walls each time.

Even if the air conditioning upstairs was set to 78, that’s still a lot cooler than over 100.

admin answers:

Ways to Save

1) Turn off everything when you leave your room. Although you may not even think about it, leaving computers, speakers, lights and printers on when you leave your room is wasting a lot of energy. You obviously don’t need any of these on when you’re not there, and doing so just wastes money that could be spent on Floralia.

2) Don’t open your windows to cool down when the heater is on right below them. It makes sense, but people do it. Most heaters in dorms can be turned off completely, by setting it to “0” or the snowflake. If yours can’t, contact physical plant to have them come look at it. The worst thing you could do is to let all the heat that’s raging out of your heater out into the environment. Take off some layers, if it’s hot. On a similar note, try and keep your room as cool as comfortable. If everyone turned down their thermostat by one degree (I know we don’t actually have thermostats everywhere, so go as far as you can), the school could save nearly 20,000 gallons of fuel this winter! When you’re gone or sleeping, turn it down by even more.

3) Put computers in sleep mode after 15 minutes, and turn them off at night. Computers are nifty because they have a bunch of settings to help you out. One that will really help you and the rest of the school is setting your computer to sleep after 15 minutes. This easy switch will have your computer using only about three watts of power per hour instead of the 45-250 that it normally does. It is obviously still best to turn it off at night, and unplug laptops especially. Note: A screen saver doesn’t do anything to reduce electricity use.

4) Unplug Chargers. Most people don’t know that a charger still charges when it’s not plugged into your phone or iPod. Unfortunately, about 75% of the electricity that chargers use is literally going into thin air while you are not charging your electronic. This “phantom energy” is a huge problem. If it’s hard to unplug your chargers every night, get a power strip and plug in your chargers, computer, T.V. And DVD player and flip the switch when you’re not using it.

5) Use CFL’s instead of incandescent bulbs for extra lighting in your room. If every American household replaced one regular lightbulb with a C.F.L., the pollution reduction would be equivalent to removing one million cars from the road. A 30-watt C.F.L. Produces about as much light as an ordinary 100-watt bulb, and they are available from the Renewable Energy Club for FREE.

6) Do big loads of laundry. Laundry is possibly your highest per-use contributor to electricity use. Both the washer and the drier use huge amounts of energy, so if you can consolidate a couple loads every month you would be saving a bunch of money.

7) Make sure that lights are not left on in empty spaces. How often have you walked by an empty class or room in Cro, or even your bathroom and seen all the lights on? They most likely don’t need to be. Take initiative to turn lights like this off, and if your friends think you’re becoming too much of an environmentalist, just tell them that you’ll rock out harder at Floralia knowing that you helped to get the killer band there.
Encourage your teachers to do reduce copying, and tell them that they don’t need to keep the lights on in class (unless they need to).

9) Take shorter showers, and use cold water while brushing your teeth. Heating water takes a huge amount of energy. If you can cut a couple of minutes off your shower, and use cold water when brushing your teeth, you could save a lot of energy.

10) Buy Energy Star Rated electronics. Energy Star is a government rating system that certifies electronics that use the most efficient technologies. These products are usually similarly priced, but will save you money in the long run.

Every little bit helps.

admin answers:

It probably would. There probably are some things that you don’t immediately realize are using electricity. Eg, my microwave has a clock. That would have to be balanced against how much trouble it is to turn the breakers off and on, and whether you might have a need for a light for which the breaker is off. For me, the breakers are out in the garage, behind some stuff, and hard to get to.