Energy Saving Tips: How to Make Your Home More Sustainable
By: John Garcia | Date Posted: October 20, 2021
Table of Contents
The best energy-saving tips are right here. Sustainability is up there with the biggest buzzwords of our time. It’s something that’s on everybody’s mind, to a greater or lesser extent, and looks very much like the wave of the future. It’s also just plain sensible if you spend any time thinking about it.
Energy Saving Tips
Of course, there’s the bigger picture, but even in our own lives, it makes a lot of sense. From initiatives like solar buyback to smarter appliances, folks across the country are finding ways to save energy and money at the same time.
It’s also quite simple. Small changes can give you decent savings in any home. Naturally, you can opt to go bigger on the eco front, but even little things count.
Changing Your Lighting
It may not seem much, but lighting is an area where you can save good money. It all adds up, and when you consider annual savings, it’s more than we think.
Bulbs
First and foremost, you can consider replacing the bulbs in your household. By far, the most common light bulbs being used across the US are the compact fluorescent type (CFL). These bulbs use way more power than modern light-emitting diodes (LEDs), so swapping makes sense.
Settings
By habit, many people leave lights on well after they’ve stopped being useful. A great example of this is outdoor lighting that burns brightly during the day for hours at a time. Investing in a sensor switch that turns off lights when the sun comes out can save a lot of money for your household.
Alternatives
It’s common for many folks to run indoor lighting in the middle of the day, despite it being bright outside. Why not ensure that curtains are open? That way, you can allow natural sunlight to illuminate indoors instead of switching on lights.
Lowering Temperatures
Everyone knows that heating is a major draw on power, regardless of where it’s being utilized. By being cautious with heat usage, your bills can come crashing down.
Heating
It’s not uncommon to see homes where the heating is turned way up while windows are open in an adjacent room. The wasteful use of power has become a feature of modern life for many people.
Keeping the indoor heat stable in the mid-seventies will normally mean serious savings. Each degree the system has to change consumes around 6-8% more power, so whacking it really high or low will burn through your dollars, big time.
Washing
Laundry is another biggie. Most clothing doesn’t need to be washed on a hot cycle, so you can save energy and cash by using the cold cycle a lot more often. It’s not always possible, but it very often makes no visible difference whether the clothes were washed hot or cold.
Especially in homes where there’s a lot of laundry, sorting clothes into hot and cold washes can add up to tremendous energy savings over a year.
Water Heaters
In homes across the land, water heaters are roasting away at near boiling point. There’s absolutely no reason you’d require scalding water to come out of your taps, but it’s still really common.
Bringing down the temp on your heater can reduce your usage by a big number. Most heaters will have a user-friendly dial that you can turn down with no effort. It also helps to turn it completely off if you’re going to be away for a while. Or you can just turn the heater off once it’s done its job.
Insulation Choices
Once you’ve used power to create the ideal temp in your home, it seems a great pity for it all just to waft away down the street. It can pay to look into insulation choices.
Glazing
Checking that you have windows that properly shut all through the house helps a lot. In more severe climates, many houses will be double-glazed to increase the insulation effect. It will be a good idea to look into new double-glazed doors for your own home.
Leaks
Air moves in and out of buildings in many different ways, and each structure will be different. Especially in those older homes, it could be a good idea to thoroughly check vents, doors, windows, and any other spot that could be costing you money.
Roofs
Properly insulating roofs is key to cost-effectively maintaining a comfortable temperature in your home. Whether it’s roasting or freezing outside, a decently insulated ceiling and roof can mean dollars of difference.
Going Big
If smaller savings like those above don’t seem enough for you, there are more substantial methods. There will be outlay involved, but there are several energy-saving options around.
The solar panel option is normally the first thing that comes to mind here. The notion is to turn your roof into a generator, essentially. In sunnier parts, they can power all your homes’ smaller draw utilities, such as lights and TVs.
In addition, you can even join initiatives like net metering or solar buyback… This allows you to feed power into the grid when you aren’t using it, so you are literally being paid for sunlight! The more folks who join into this, the better for us all.
Installing newer, more efficient heaters in the home is another major saving, and putting in new insulation has a big impact too. All this will cost a little but is bound to pay for itself within no time at all.
Some Thoughts
One thing’s for sure; we can’t keep burning our way through the planet like we have been doing. At some point, we’re all going to have to learn to be smarter and less wasteful about it. A lot of this is down to us, the individuals. Small changes at the end of the day can add up to a big saving while at the same time protecting the environment.
New technologies are arising all the time, and the hope is that we’ll have very clean-burning power sources soon. But, even if we do, it still seems sensible for us to be less casual about how we use things.
Thank you for reading!
