http://www.econsciousmarket.com/eco-times/fast-cheap-and-easy-green-home-upgrades/
The first step when considering any size of green home makeover is to identify the “low-hanging fruit”-those things which are weighing down on the efficiency of your home that can easily, quickly and inexpensively be improved to have a considerable impact. Here we identify two of the easiest, lowest-cost, highest-impact improvements you can make, and also provide a suggestion for a tool that you can employ yourself to identify some of the other energy-hogging culprits in the place you live. In all cases, we have one eye keenly focused on maximizing the “bang for your buck.”
Green Light Means Go
You’ve probably heard this one before, but it’s so easy, relatively inexpensive and impactful that we would be remiss in failing to mention it as possibly the best way to immediately improve energy efficiency in your home: replace your incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). Long gone are the days when CFL’s gave off a harsh, greenish-white light and cost over $7.00 each. Typically a package of eight, soft-white, 60-watt-equivalent CFL’s is $9.98; that’s just $1.25 per light! While it remains true that a 60-watt incandescent bulb costs less than $0.50, if each CFL saves a minimum of $37 in electricity costs over its lifetime compared with its equivalent incandescent, it is clear which makes the wiser purchase. Further, CFLs last about eight times longer than incandescents do, so they make more sense from a replacement cost perspective as well. Over the expected life of one single $1.25 CFL you will have had to replace an incandescent bulb eight times, for a total cost of $4.00 (8 x $0.50).
Bonus: Only about 10% of the energy used by an incandescent bulb is converted into light, while 90% of that energy is released as heat. CFLs produce significantly less heat than incandescents, which is a relief on hot summer nights, reducing your need to power a cooling unit. In winter, the heat thrown out by incandescent bulbs will slightly reduce your heating load, but the cost of running those inefficient little bulbs is much higher than the costs you bear by running your furnace, boiler or baseboards. Even an old, inefficient furnace is a much more efficient home heating source than a bunch of incandescent bulbs.
Go With The (Low) Flow
One of the quickest, cheapest and easiest things you can do to dramatically reduce household water usage is to install low-flow aerators and shower heads in sink faucets and showers. The aerator is the little device you will find at the very end of most faucets and can easily be unscrewed for replacement. Many “standard” aerators allow water to flow through at 2.5 gallons per minute (GPM), and older fixtures often have even higher flow rates. Replace these with low-flow models-0.5 to 1.0 GPM-and you can effortlessly cut your water waste by at least 50%. The even better news is that despite the lower flow, because the water pressure remains high, you probably won’t ever notice the difference in day-to-day use.
If you are unsure if your aerators qualify as “low-flow”, simply time how long it takes your faucet to fill up an empty 1 gallon jug. If it takes exactly one minute, then your aerator allows 1 GPM of water flow. If it takes less than 30 seconds, then your aerator is 2 GPM or greater. The longer the better!
Low-flow aerators can be purchased from most any hardware store and run $5 - $7 each. You may want to take in your old aerators to make sure you buy replacements that will fit properly.
How much of an impact can this really have? Here’s the math: let’s assume that you have 3 faucets in your house, one in the kitchen and one in each of two bathrooms, that are in use for 10 minutes per day, on average. If each of these faucets has a 2.5 GPM aerator installed, then your faucets are pouring out 75 gallons of water per day (2.5 GPM x 10 minutes x 3 faucets). That’s 27,375 gallons per year. If you were to replace each of the aerators on your three sinks with a moderate low-flow aerator of 1.0 GPM, you would reduce your faucet water use to 30 gallons per day and save 16,425 gallons of water per year! Go all the way to a 0.5 GPM model and you will save 21,900 gallons per year. That’s enough water to fill a large, 18 x 32 foot swimming pool!
Bonus: Saving household water does more than just save water, it also saves energy because when you’re using hot water, the heater has less work to do.
Invest In A Kill-A-Watt
There is a well-worn adage such that “You can’t improve what you can’t measure.” It is difficult to target inefficient electrical devices if you don’t know how much energy each of the various devices you own actually uses. Luckily, there’s a cool little product that costs less than $25 called a Kill-A-Watt, made by P3 International that measures the electricity used by whatever you plug into it. Simply plug the Kill-A-Watt into an outlet, and then plug whatever it is you want to measure into the Kill-A-Watt. After a few hours (ideally 24 hours or more), come back and look at the display to see how much electricity that stereo/TV/fridge/whatever has used.
Although the device will display any of several different measures, the two that matter the most in this case are 1) elapsed time, and 2) total kilowatt hours (KWh) used. With those two measures and some simple math, you can determine how much energy the thing you’re measuring uses in a day, week, month or year. Multiply that by how much you pay your utility company per KWh of electricity and you can determine exactly how much the thing you’re measuring costs to run. You can then target the biggest energy offenders in your household and take appropriate action against them. “Appropriate action” in this case can be as simple as unplugging things when they’re not being used (or connecting them to a power strip and turning it off) or as drastic as replacing the very worst offenders with more efficient models.
We recently plugged the old upright freezer in our office into the Kill-A-Watt. It turned out that the beast was costing over $280 per year to operate (2,967 KWh per year at 9.5 cents per KWh). We found many equivalent new models of Energy Star-rated freezers, all of which used a small fraction of the energy used by the old freezer, and all of which would cost from $50 to $75 per year to run. Of course, the up-front cost in this case of $300 to $600 or more to buy a new appliance could not be ignored, but the $230 per year in electricity cost savings would end up paying for the new freezer in just a couple of years. We would also be saving those same $230 each year, for as long as we owned the new freezer! That’s what you call a “no-brainer”.
As overwhelming as greening your home may initially sound, the first small changes cost a fraction of what you will save in the long run. Start small and build out until your shack has a tiny footprint and you feel proud to call such an environmentally responsible place your home.
Andy Mazal
Inhabit - Green Building Consulting
andy@inhabitconsulting.com
www.inhabitconsulting.com
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