Nine Green Home Projects You Can Do Today

The Design of Everyday Life > Allison Arieff on April 29, 2010 at 5:00 am PDT

Between the economic meltdown and the push for green buildings, saving energy, water and money in your home is more popular than ever. Fortunately, greening your home doesn’t have to be time consuming or expensive. We caught up with Eric Corey Freed, principal of Organic Architect, and author of the new book, Green$ense for the Home. Here’s his list of nine simple things anyone—renters and homeowners alike—can do in their homes today.

1. Change your light bulbs already! How many environmentalists does it take to change a light bulb? There are several answers to this joke (none of them that funny), but the real answer is: “all of them.” In your home, lighting accounts for nearly 30 percent of all electricity use. By using compact fluorescent bulbs, you can cut lighting costs by 30 to 60 percent, while improving the quality of the light and reducing environmental impact at the same time.

2. Convince your toilet to use less water. More water is consumed per person in the United States than in any other country. More than a quarter of all of the water used inside the home is flushed down the toilet, which is, literally, a waste. The toilet is the single largest user of clean drinking water inside the home, and it is also the easiest place to conserve water. Before you run out and replace your existing toilets, there are simple and effective things you can do to trick your old toilet to use less water, from flush adapters to flusher adjustments and tank tricks. And when the time comes to replace your working toilets, make sure you buy a low-flow or dual-flush model.

3. Use less water in the shower. Showers add up to nearly 20 percent of all indoor water usage and are the largest users of hot water. By simply installing a low-flow showerhead, you can save up to 4,000 gallons of water annually, and for every gallon of hot water you save, that’s gas or electricity you don’t need to use to heat it. If your average shower is 10 minutes long, upgrading your old showerheads to a low-flow model will save 25 to 55 gallons of water for every shower you take, and potentially shave 30 percent off utility bills!

4. Keep vampires at bay. In the average home, 75 percent of the electricity used to power home electronics—cable boxes, DVD players, video games, stereos—is consumed while the products are turned off. That’s money that could stay in your pocket. If something is plugged into the wall—a TV, a cellphone charger, an appliance- even if it’s not on, it draws electricity. We call this demand of energy “phantom loads” or, more appropriately, “vampire loads,” since they suck energy. While the amount of power used is relatively small, they can add up to more than 10 percent of your electricity bill.

There are several simple ways to slay vampire loads: Unplug any appliance with a standby light. Get a power strip for appliances, and flip the switch off when not needed. Or, consider Smart Strips, which sense when power is being drawn and shut off automatically—as simple to install as a regular strip, and you don’t need to worry about vampire loads ever again.

5. Install a programmable thermostat. A programmable thermostat operates only during the times you set. For example, a programmable thermostat could lower the heat at 10 p.m. every night, when you’re bundled under the covers in bed. It could also be programmed to return the room to a more comfortable temperature 30 minutes before you wake up. The average household spends more than $2,000 a year on energy bills—nearly half of which goes to heating and cooling.  You can save $150 a year just by properly setting a programmable thermostat. Once set correctly, a programmable thermostat can cut your heating and cooling bills by 20 percent to 30 percent annually.

6. Put a coat on your hot water heater. If your home is like most, hot water is produced in a hot water heater. This large tank usually sits in a garage, closet, or basement and slowly heats up a vat of water, and keeps it hot all day and night. Nearly 20 percent of all of the energy used in the home goes just to the water heater, making it the second-largest energy user in homes after heating and cooling. Insulating a water heater tank reduces the heat losses by 25 percent to 45 percent. This translates into as much as a 9 percent savings in total energy usage.  If everyone in the U.S. insulated their hot water heaters, nearly 11 billion kilowatt-hours of that energy would be saved—enough to power 11.9 million homes in a year.

7. Weatherize windows. The largest source of energy loss in your home is your windows. If you add up the area of all of the cracks and leaks around the windows of your home, it would total about the size of an entire window. Installing new windows can solve much of this problem, but that can be a big job. Simply weatherizing—sealing the cracks and leaks around your windows and exterior doors—can have an immediate impact on your energy savings and can be completed in an afternoon.

Purchase only caulking with low or zero Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). Figure that six to eight tubes at a total cost of no more than $65 should be enough to seal a 3,000-square-foot house with 15 to 20 windows.

8. Install a solar powered clothes dryer: a clothesline. Today, 80 percent of households have a washer and dryer, but this convenience comes at a price. Electric clothes dryers eat up 10 percent of a home’s energy. Each load of laundry gives off around 5.6 pounds of carbon dioxide per load. That adds up to more than 2,000 pounds of CO2 a year just from drying clothes. A solar-powered clothes dryer is a smart and highly energy efficient way to dry your clothes. Also known as a “clothesline,” this idea has been around for centuries and provides an affordable, easy alternative to the high cost of clothes-drying convenience.

9. Compost and recycle. The average American produces 4.6 pounds of trash a day, which totals up to 251.3 million tons a year. Landfills pollute our water, take up enormous amounts of space, and (surprise) no one wants to live near them. Most people don’t realize the biggest problem with landfills is the emissions they generate, namely methane and carbon dioxide gas, which contribute to global warming. By composting and recycling, we can reduce the trash in landfills and do long-lasting good for our environment.

Recycling and composting require nothing except the desire to do it. Contact your local trash pickup company and request a free recycling bin (you may also be able to get a free compost bin). While not every town recycles, many do and will have specific rules for how to separate the items.

Each of these steps will pay for themselves in less than a year. Plus you’ll rest easy knowing you are doing your part for our environment.
This post originally appeared on www.refresheverything.

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Voluntary simplicity as hedonism

Posted July 24, 2007 – 16:09 by Philip Brewer

Filed Under: Frugal Living

When people talk about voluntary simplicity (or living a frugal lifestyle under any of its many names), they often do so in terms of deprivation. The descriptions are all about doing without stuff. To me, that’s completely wrong. Voluntary simplicity is fundamentally a hedonistic lifestyle.

What do hedonists do? They do what ordinary people seem only to do when they’re on vacation. They go places that are interesting or beautiful and they linger in them. They go dancing and go to parties. They read good books. They hang out with cool people. They hike in the mountains and swim in the ocean and go sailing. They play golf or tennis. They eat good food and drink good wine. They listen to music or play music. They go to museums and theaters. They do whatever gives them pleasure until they’re tired, and then they lie in the shade and take a nap.

To me, voluntary simplicity is exactly the same thing. You think about what gives you the most pleasure and then arrange your life so you can do exactly that.

I saw a poster once that said, "My tastes are simple: I like to have the best." It’s a sentiment that probably resonates with everyone. But you can’t have the best of everything–where would you keep it? So, you have the best of only a few things, the things that matter the most to you. And, if you get rid of the other stuff–stuff that doesn’t matter as much to you–then your whole life gets easier. With less stuff you can live in a smaller house, or an apartment instead of a house, or a smaller apartment.

But a small apartment doesn’t mean a small life. A small apartment is a means to an end. The end is a life doing whatever you want.

Ruthless Frugality

Posted January 22, 2010 – 06:00 by Philip Brewer in Frugal Living

There are many strategies for frugality: Don’t buy stuff you don’t need. Stock up when you get a good price. Make smart decisions about when to pay up for quality and when to get the cheap stuff. Then there’s what I call ruthless frugality: Always getting the best price.

I’m not talking about stupid frugality — buying the cheapest shoes you can find even though they hurt your feet. Nor am I talking about shopping around, using coupons, and so on. Rather, I’m talking about getting the best price you can without regard for what’s behind the great price.

At the extreme, of course, there’s criminal frugality — buying stolen goods and pretending to believe that they fell off the back of a truck. But short of that, there are all sorts of things that enter the general stream of commerce at prices that embed lots of bad practices — stuff made in sweatshops by children or prisoners or slaves, stuff made in ways that poison the workers or trash the environment.

Most people delegate to the government the job of policing how things are produced. There are, for example, laws about how farm animals have to be treated, and most people hope that those laws are strict enough that the food produced is safe and the animals’ suffering is minimized.

But it’s worth thinking about the costs of ruthless frugality. One good reason to pay more than you need to is to be a good neighbor, such as by buying locally. Patronizing local shops often costs more, but part of the reason the big box stores are cheaper is because they’ve got competition. Let all the local stores die and you can expect to see prices rise at the chain stores. More important, money spent in local stores tends to stay in town — possibly getting spent on stuff that you make or services that you provide. Perhaps more important yet, local production is often more ethical and more sustainable.

I talk about voluntary simplicity as being an essentially hedonistic lifestyle, because a high overall level of frugality frees up resources that can go to those specific areas of your life where paying more makes a difference that matters to you. The upside of frugality is more of what you care about.

I think a little hedonism is great, when it is enabled by thoughtful choices about priorities. But I think a similar amount of thinking ought to go into where really cheap stuff comes from — and whether your values can support the ruthlessness built into the price.