September 23rd, 2008
Clean or replace your air filter.
Change out your AC filter regularly. Changing the filter not only allows your HVAC system to run more efficiently, it also keeps the air in your home cleaner and healthier. That’s a big deal since indoor air often contains 2-5 times the amount of pollution that outdoor air contains. Meanwhile the amount of energy you save is nothing to sneeze at either. A clean filter can subtract 1-2% off your electric bill each month. If you really want to crank things up a notch, buy filters made from recycled materials.
September 16th, 2008
Get a programmable thermostat.
Does your home really need to be the “perfect” temperature while you sit far away at work? For a $30 investment, you can save yourself over $100 a year! Programmable thermostat’s allow you to let your house get warmer or cooler that you might prefer when you’re not home yet kick on in time to have it just right when you walk in the door. Once you get your programmable thermostat, try taking it easy on the temperature. We usually keep our house about 78° F in the summer and 70° F in the winter (and open the windows in the Fall and Spring), and have found that if you keep a fan going (which uses far less energy than an HVAC system) to circulate the air, those temperatures are quite comfy.
September 9th, 2008
Cover leftovers.
Break out the shrink wrap (or better yet use reusable containers!), and keep your food items covered when you place them in the fridge. The moisture in uncovered foods and liquids evaporates in the dry air of the refrigerator making the compressor have to work even hard (and run even longer). New refrigerators are about 10 times more energy efficient that their ancestors but the fridge is still one of your homes biggest energy hogs. Anything you can do to ease the power your fridge uses makes a big impact.
It takes alot of energy to burn off those extra calories at the gym. Why not capture that energy and use it to power the TV? That’s what Green Microgym in Portland, Oregon is doing. For the moment the new gym is simply using it’s stationary bikes to charge batteries that are then use to power entertainment systems. The power output is small, but it’s “free,” and it’s a great idea. Imagine though if not only the bikes, but every treadmill, stair climber, elliptical, weight machine and even the aerobic room floor were plugged in and generating power. Now you’re not just keeping the TV running but perhaps the lights and maybe even at least taking the strain off the HVAC unit. Multiply that across every gym in the country and the power savings would be immense.
Now the reality is that “human-power” will likely never give us back the amount of money we spend growing and shipping the food the fuels that human-power, but really, that’s the cool part of this kind of “out of the box” thinking; it allows us to reclaim some of the energy we’ve already used. It’s the ultimate expression of the Reuse and Recycle parts of the Three R’s. There’s no question that we need to find new ways to harvest “new” energy, but once it’s harvested, why not get the most out of it by using it to it’s fullest potential? What if all the surfaces we walked on day in and day out were similar to the (uber-cool) electricity-generating dance floor at the Sustainable Dance club mentioned in the news story? What if we all had steam turbines built in over our showers? Or in our chimneys? I’ve also heard of hydraulic systems being experimented with in some cars that capture and store the energy lost in braking; it’s the same idea. There’s no way to “create” energy, however all most everything we use energy for is incredibly inefficient. Huge percentages of the energy we put into our daily tasks is wasted. Can you imagine if we could collect and re-purpose even 1% of the waste energy we produce in the activities and processes we do and use daily?