February 26th 2008

Some quick and affordable energy savings Ideas.

We all are wanting to safe and conserve energy but face it ....it is not cheep to get started.

Here are different ides that you could implement in due time and safe money and energy in the long run.

Sure everybody knows about that energy friendly light bulbs but have you ever thought of your appliances?

Most homes when they are older do still have the old appliances like the dishwasher, washer and dryer, water heater and many others.

(I hate to admit I am one of them.)

When it comes time to change the appliances out you might shop around for more energy efficient appliances. Today you can find very reasonable priced energy efficient appliances and when you time it right you can get some of theses appliances on sale and for a much better price. Today's washers, dryers and dishwashers are using so much less on water and energy it is amazing that they still clean but they do.

The water heater could later be replaced by a tank less water heater that heats the water when you need it. It does not have a tank that has water sitting inside it that has to be heated once in a while to keep the temperature up. When you don't have to buy a new water heater consider turning the water temperature down just slightly and this will help conserve some energy.

I was the other day in one of our local Home improvement Stores and found that more and more of them carry low flow faucets and shower heads. So...when you are remodeling or thinking of updating your kitchen and bathrooms consider shopping for low flow faucets.

Now I know you are asking yourself...do those faucets work...sure they do.

Have any of you ever been down in Florida, or maybe in Hawaii or on the Bahamas, on a cruise ship and have you taken a shower while you where there? Did you come clean? Did you notice that you have enough water to take a shower? In theses states and on she cruise ships there is a mandate for years that as much water has to be preserved as possible and guess what? They do it with low flow faucets.

Another place you can conserve water is also in the bathroom, the toilette. When you don't want to buy a new toilette you can find water saving inserts that you can put inside the tank to minimize water use or you could change out the toilette to a low flow toilette that are reasonable priced.

Have you ever looked very closely at you old thermostat? I did and I discovered that I was personally wasting a lot of energy in times when I was heating or cooling the house when I was not at home. Strange...I was heating and cooling the house for who?

Again a trip to my Home improvement store and I found very nice programmable reasonable priced thermostats that can be programmed to keep the heat cooler when we are not home and to warm things up when we need and the same goes for the cooling.

Surprisingly this small change saved us over 50% in our heating and cooling bill. When everybody had a heating bill that was in the $200 plus I had mine in the very low $100's. I was amazed!!!

So when you are replacing items in your home, just see if you can not replace them with energy efficient items and save money in the long run.