Reduce Energy Use At Home: How To Easily Cut Back

There sure is a lot of energy being spent on the energy debate lately. Sometimes it's best to hone in on what you can do, personally, at home, before getting riled up over what's being debated on a national scale.

Flip off your light switches, unplug your appliances, put your computers to sleep and you will drastically reduce your home's energy consumption. Currently, Americans use more than 26% of the world's energy supply.

Ecologue suggests 5 energy saving solutions to combat the overuse of plugged in electronics:

Americans, on average, currently own 20 gadgets that utilize standby features. These features accomplish everything from monitoring refrigerator temperatures to charging cell phones. [...] In most homes, standby power accounts for about 7 percent of a home's total energy consumption. In some homes, this energy consumption is as high as 20 percent.

Low Impact Living offers 10 creative ways to conserve energy at home, including:

Spend one night each week in candlelight. It's romantic, fun and inspires new conversation. If you've got kids, how about turning off the TV one night and playing a board game by candlelight? Clue would be particularly spooky!

Plant trees!
Placing deciduous trees on the South side of your home is a great way to block summer heat, but keep the sun shining on your home in the winter when you need the warmth.

Conservation has been the topic of conversation in the last 48 hours or so even on the presidential campaign trail, as energy plans and rebuttals have flown back and forth over the airwaves.

While both campaigns struggle to find a way of producing energy without all the expenses of infrastructure, drilling and time (or, heck, with the expenses of infrastructure, drilling and time) -- not to mention the environmental costs, it turns out that good old fashioned conservation is not only the path of least resistance but also the path of greatest returns.

Once you've got your standby electronics properly managed, watch as a Republican strategist tries to dance around the issue of conservation versus increased drilling and oil use during an interview on MSNBC:

Related:
::Read about bicycles as energy efficient transportation on the Huffington Post.
::More on energy from the Huffington Post.

Comments

[SCG2]

The largest users of electicity in the home, are any items which heat up or cool down

Agreed on fans. Air out house at night when cooler, to lower house temps.

Undersize your air conditioner, use a small rm model to handle a few rooms (we do 4 with a 600 watt 6000 btu window model), circulate the air with fans, this will make for very dry air, that's even comfortable at 75 degrees, in addition to doing the above night time cooling, when cooler nights allow.

Learn to adjust and use the moisture sensor on your dryer, if so equipped. Electric dryers are big power users, and there is no point running the dryer 40mins, when your clothes were already dry at 30mins.

Consider clothes lines or inside drying racks. Use when able, and especially large water laden items such as blankets, jeans, hang dry, then toss in dryer briefly to finish and remove wrinkles if desired.

Turn coffee maker off after coffee is brewed. Coffee only gets bitter sitting on the heat, and it's easy to reheat a cup in the mircowave as needed. Also, consider investing in thermal carafe models, which brew your coffee directly into a insulated carafe if your in the market for a new one.

Use lids on pots, shut burner off a bit early to "coast" cook. Try the same with oven, shutting it off 5-10 mins and let it "coast" to a finish.

[DRaymond]

Forget the little things. The biggest thing you can do to save energy is to turn off the home air conditioning and use open windows and fans. Many of my neighbors here in So Cal have summer electric bills in the hundreds of dollars while mine is less than twenty (which is also because I signed up for maximum air conditioner cycling...and since I never use the AC anyhow no problem)

[Mr Grey]

Candlelight to save energy? if you got kids? How dangerous is the combo of kids, matches/lighters and candles? Enough candles to give off substantial light could be a serious fire hazard. Don't forget to take all those candles with you when you go to the bathroom. You don't want to leave a bunch of flame sources unattended. Now planting trees that is more like it. Recycle, carpool and monitor tire pressure, all good, candles not so much.

[KillTheMessenger]

Yep. You are getting a lot of horrible nonsense these days from people who don't understand the problem, yet feel that they have something to say about it. Like growing veggies next to car exhausts. Or mistaking herbs for food. Or using candles (light output 0.1W) instead of compact fluorescent bulbs (light output 10W).

There is also the wood burning oven faction who actually thinks that we can heat a significant number of houses with wood without deforesting all of North American within a single winter.

The general lack of understanding is, IMHO, a basic failure of American educators to teach QUANTITATIVE reasoning. 1-10-100-1000 are different orders of magnitude but a lot of people do not treat them as such. While they would never commit the fallacy of mistaking a leisurely one mile walk with a 1000 mile transcontinental expedition on foot, as soon as we replace miles with Joules or Amps or Watts, the very same numbers seem to lose all meaning and the same people begin to argue based on false intuition rather than based on numerical facts.

[Sumocat]

Fire was used for light and warmth for a long time before we harnessed electricity. Kids used to stoke the fires of stoves and carry candles to bed. I'm not endorsing a return to that life, but history has shown that children can be taught to responsibly handle fire. Problems arise when they are not taught to do so.