Lately I have been making small changes to my house to reduce energy and water usage. All of these are easy to accomplish and fairly cheap with a short payback period.

The first of these was to blow another 8 inches of insulation into the attic and start blowing it into the walls of the house. I did this using GreenFiber from Home Depot. You get the machine rental free with the purchase of so many bags of the insulation. It took a couple of hours total and was less than $100 to finish the project. In the future I will be be finishing the rest of the walls and possibly putting at least another 8 inches in the attic.

The next thing I did was replace door sweeps and weatherstripping. This cost about $20 and reduced many of the drafts I was feeling while moving around the house.

The combination of these with the new double-pane windows reduced last month's heating bill by $30.

I also installed ultra low-flow faucet aerators that run at 1.0 gallon per minute. I am anticipating this reducing my water consumption considerably.

Earth Day was yesterday, did you do something to celebrate it? It is a little sad that we devote one day to the planet and then commercialize it by having Earth Day sales where we promote items that although are better for the environment, may be otherwise be purchased, except for that they are on sale.

We should celebrate Earth Day every day and reduce the amount of goods we purchase, reduce the packaging we use to purchase those goods, and care for the planet like it should be cared for.

Plant trees, shrubs, and other plants around your yard. It will increase oxygen production and could lower your heating and cooling bills by shading your house in summer and blocking the wind in the winter.

Switch out your light bulbs. I am not advocating taking perfectly good ones and throwing them out just to switch to CFLs but you could start by changing a light that is used most frequently and as other bulbs burn out replace them with CFLs. Just make sure to dispose of CFLs properly when they burn out since they contain a small amount of mercury.

Wash your clothes in cold water. This will save you energy, money, and will keep your clothes lasting longer.

There are many great ideas throughout this site and at the other sites linked to from this site, so check them out and Happy Earth Day every day.

Some people might say, 'What is vermicomposting and why do I want to do it?' Well vermicomposting is 'worm composting'. You simply catch and release some worms and let them eat 'til their hearts content. (Ok, it is a little more involved than that, but it is really easy to do.)

If you want to get started vermicomposting, the first thing you will need is a bin to put them in. An 18 gallon or larger plastic tub works well. You will want to drill holes in the sides and top of the container to allow plenty of air in.

The next thing you will want to do is create some bedding for your worms. You can mix shredded paper and existing soil to create a fluffy mixture. You will need to change this once the worms have broken down the paper into soil.

To feed your worms you will want to start out by placing small pieces of food scraps into the corners of the bin and burying them in the bedding. As you accumulate more worms and they are eating more you will be able to spread new scraps right on top of the soil.

Make sure the soil is damp but not too wet. If it is too wet you could injure the worms.

To begin your vermicompost you can start by taking some worms directly from your yard as you are working the soil throughout the year. Once you get a few in there they will multiply on their own.

Once your worms are established they are pretty low maintenance. You will want to keep them fed and make sure they have fresh bedding when the other stuff has been decomposed. If the worms are getting too thick you can return some of them to your garden to work their magic out there.

Vermicomposting is an excellent way to compost table scraps throughout the year, especially during the winter when it might be hard to get out to the compost pile.

Everyone talks about reducing their carbon footprint, but what exactly can we do to achieve that and not spend thousands of dollars? Here are a few simple ideas to reduce up to 142 pounds of carbon a week.

Wash your clothes in cold water. Your clothes may last longer and you will save up to 9 pounds of carbon a week switching from hot to cold water.

Use a rack to dry your clothes. Clothes dryers really can't get any more efficient, so try to avoid using one. Drying your clothes on a rack will also add humidity to the air, reducing the amount of time your humidifier needs to run.

Seal and weather strip your home. All of those little cracks and leaks really add up and you could be throwing away as much as 30% of your heating costs right out the window.

Add some insulation to your house. There are many options available to help with this including recycled denim and newspaper insulation.

Wrap your water heater and turn it down. Water heater insulation kits are easy to install and cost around $20. Turning your temperature down from 140 to 120 degrees can save as much as 479 pounds of carbon a year.

Run your dishwasher only when full.

Turn off electronic appliances with a surge protector or power strip. All of those electronics still use plenty of electricity when they are off in what is down as a "phantom load".

Clean out your fridge. All of the junk that is cluttered in and around there could be preventing your fridge from running efficiently.

Compost food scraps. By throwing them away the sit in landfills and create methane gas which is up to 21 times more heat-trapping than CO2.

Ride a bike, walk, or take the bus. Each of these is more fuel efficient than driving to work. Walking and bike riding is also an excellent way to lose those holiday pounds.

Although it is only January, now is the time to be thinking about spring and gardening. Growing your own garden will reduce the amount of emissions used to haul produce to your supermarket and can be a great way to relax and enjoy the outdoors. Over the next few weeks I will be adding content to help you garden effectively, things you can make with the items in your garden, and other outdoor tips to get yourself ready for spring when it arrives. Find these new articles under the yard and garden section.

With a new year comes resolutions to lose weight, be more productive, or spend less money. Why not make this year's resolution to be greener, which could also help save money along the way.

I have decided to make my resolution for the new year to reduce my environmental impact even further. Sometimes it might seem harder to find additional ways to save energy, reduce waste, etc after the initial changes you make to your lifestyle and it may seem like some energy-saving ideas cost more than you can afford, especially in today's economy.

I have come across a way that will help you keep track of daily savings. I will be using these savings and putting them into a "Green account" that I can use for those major energy-saving projects. You can create a physical account at your bank for these green projects or simply keep track of the amount you saved and when you have enough money saved up, use that towards your green projects.

I began by purchasing a small notebook to keep track of my savings, green projects, monthly energy and water usage, weekly fuel usage, and any other items I want to keep track of. Try to find a recycled paper notebook. On the first page I am writing down my current gas and electric use each month. This sets a baseline that I can work towards reducing. You can usually find your past energy usage on your energy bill. If not, you can contact your energy provider and ask them for the information.

In 2009, I will keep track of any reduction in energy use each month and deposit these savings into my "Green account".

On the next page I will keep track of my water/sewer usage and any reductions in that usage and deposit these savings into the account as well.

The next page will contain my fuel usage and driving habits. When you have these written down, it is very easy to see how you can reduce the number of trips you make and the miles you put on your car each week. Any reduction in these miles and savings in fuel will also be deposited into the account.

The idea is that as you track your impact throughout the year, you will be able to more easily find ways to reduce your impact. When your account has a sizable amount of money, you can use that money to add more insulation to your house, buy more efficient appliances, or find other large green projects that you would like to accomplish. You can also keep track of these projects as a list in your notebook.

Other things you can do to help you reduce your impact include setting a goal, of say a 10% reduction, and try to achieve your goal. Another way is to get some friends involved and turn it into a friendly competition.

Additional ideas to keep track of in your notebook:

Amount of waste produced and which items you are currently recycling.
Amount of waste composted each week and items you are composting.
Smaller items you purchase to reduce your impact: resusable shopping bags, CFL lightbulbs, low flow aerators, travel coffee mugs.

During the next year and at the end of the year, look back on what you have saved, actions you have taken, etc. and find additional areas where you can improve for 2010.

Many people are concerned this time of year with whether it is greener to get a real tree or to buy an artificial. The answer might actually surprise you. It is actually greener to buy a real tree for Christmas. Most tree farms plant 1 to 3 trees for every one that they cut down.

Artificial trees are made of PVC which is made from petroleum and can off-gas in your house for years. They are also mostly made in China so they have to be shipped over here, using more energy and creating more pollution.

If you are going to buy a real tree this year, you can make it even greener by buying from an organic farm that is as close to your home as possible. If there are no organic farms, you can still buy locally and save the greenhouse gases needed to bring the tree home.

When Christmas is done, be sure to recycle your tree. Many communities offer curb-side tree recycling and then offer the residents the compost created for free or a reduced charge.

Chlorine bleach consists of a weak mix of water and sodium hypochlorite and is used for whitening clothes, disinfecting surfaces and purifying drinking water.

What is wrong with it you might ask?

Bleach can damage eyes, skin and lungs, and can ruin your clothes. If combined with ammonia-containing cleaners, it can produce potentially lethal vapors called chloramines.

There are safer alternatives available that work just as well to whiten and disinfect:

Sunlight - is free and will remove any tough stain.

Hydrogen peroxide - if you add a half cup to your laundry it will whiten just as well as bleach.

Oxygen-based bleaches - whiten with percarbonate or hydrogen peroxide-based products and are readily available at grocery stores. Some brands include Seventh Generation, Ecover, Bi-O-Kleen and even Clorox.

Lately it seems that more and more companies are trying to jump on the green bandwagon and tout their products as being good for the environment. Many of these companies are making a difference by producing natural products that don't harm the earth.

Many other companies are just simply trying to sell more goods by slapping a green label on their product. Other companies are walking a fine line between calling their products green and actually being green. One of these products that I have recently used is Palmolive Eco dishwasher detergent. I was at the store a while back and needed some detergent and scanned the aisle for a natural product and did not find any. I then spotted the word Eco on the Palmolive label. I quickly flipped the bottle over to see what was so 'Eco' about this detergent.

From the looks of the label the only thing I could find was that it did not contain phosphates. This really isn't an 'Eco' endeavor as many other detergents have stopped using phosphates years ago. Natural products at least contain an ingredients list. That seemed to be absent from the Palmolive. I couldn't help but think that this looked a little like green washing to me. I bought a bottle of it and justified it in that it is better to get the semi-eco product than one that is not eco-friendly at all.

It is hard as a consumer to determine which products are actually better for you and the environment. One way is to check the ingredient label. If there isn't one, that is a good sign that the product is not environmentally friendly.

As a recent homeowner I have become more aware of the amount of garbage or waste that a house produces in a given week and the areas that can be greened cheaply. I changed the lights to CFLs and recycle all products that can be recycled.

One of the areas that I am in internal conflict about is the lawn and lawnmower. Any green person will tell you that mowing the gas produces enormous amounts of greenhouse gases. When I bought the house I received a gas powered mower for free and feel that getting rid of it to buy a push powered mower would be just as un-green as using the gas mower. This is one of the things that we face everyday when trying to live a greener life. The first rule is to reduce our consumption so we are told to not buy items we do not need. So to reduce consumption do we use a gas mower that pollutes the air every time we use it?

Over the weekend I moved into my house and began the first steps to greening it and reducing my footprint, in water, carbon dioxide, and energy. The first things I did was go through the house and replace all of the incandescent lighting with CFLs. There are a few that need to be changed yet due to a challenge in finding dimmable spiral CFL bulbs. The incandescents that were replaced were kept for a specific location in the house. There is one light bulb in the basement that is at the bottom of the stairs that I will be leaving incandescent for now until I use up the remaining bulbs.

The next step I took was to replace the shower faucet with a low flow one that still produces enough water pressure to get clean. This will reduce the amount of water used each day. Another step in the water area was to check the toilets to see how many gallons per flush they used and all of the existing toilets were low-flow 1.6 GPF so I did not need to replace those.

In the house we are utilizing natural air flow to cool the house and ceiling fans in the bedrooms to reduce the need for air conditioning. More to follow on the results of this as the weather has turned cooler for fall.

Upcoming steps include changing the furnace filter to increase its efficiency and having it maintained as well as turning down the thermostat on the hot water heater.

The first thing that I noticed has greened in the last few years in relation to paperwork is that you no longer need to fill out paperwork and mail it back and forth. With the technology to scan documents, fax from and to email, and digital signatures, there is less of a need to use paper to fill out paperwork for such things as loans, mortgages, and other formal things.

For my house mortgage, I used a scanner to scan to PDFs and was able to fax them back to the mortgage company using a fax through email service. This heavily reduced the amount of paper used and the length of time required to process the paperwork.

With scanners available at reasonable prices and the software available to scan to multiple formats, it is really quite easy to reduce the amount of paper you use when performing official business.

I am in the process of buying a house, which presents many opportunities to practice green technologies and reduce my environmental impact. The idea is as I implement green ideas in my own home I will share my experiences (both the good and the bad) and demonstrate what it takes to make a difference one house at a time.

Keep posted for future posts documenting the changes.

As a background about the house, it was built in 1926 and is a two-story frame style house with a two-car detached garage and a fairly large backyard. It has 3 bedrooms, bath and a half, and a full basement. The roof, electrical, and plumbing have all been re-done in the last 10 years and the furnace and hot-water heater are less than 10 years old. The stove, dryer, hot-water heater, and furnace are all natural gas. The washer is a top-loader. The floors are solid wood except for the bathroom and kitchen.

Many of us worry about the amount of electricity we use, if not for the environment, then to lessen our monthly energy bill. We buy CFLs, make sure lights are turned off, and find other ways to reduce our use. One thing that you might not think about are all the chargers and appliances that are plugged in but not in use or turned on.

If it's not turned on, then it must not be using any power, right? Wrong, there is a thing called phantom loads, even when you have such things as your cable box, tv, and chargers not in use or turned on, they still draw energy. Although each item uses only a small amount of energy, if you add up all the electronics that you have in your home and multiply the amount of energy they use by 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it really starts to add up.

There are easy ways to reduce the amount of phantom loads in your house. You can unplug chargers and electronics when not in use, or a simpler solution is to plug them into a power strip and turn off the power strip when not using the electronics.

You may not notice a drastic change in your electric bill but every little bit adds up.

Most people are willing to green up there house to save energy, water, and money, but when it comes to greening up apartment living many people figure why bother. I don't own the place. Hey, you might not even pay the heating or eletric bill. This does not mean you can't reduce your carbon footprint and save some money (for those people that do pay their own energy bills). Here are some tips to help green your apartment:

1. Reduce - Buy only the things you need and buy items that come with reduced packaging or minimal packaging.
2. Reuse - Reuse items from other people. Buy used furniture and shop at garage sales or second-hand shops.
3. Recycle - if your apartment complex offers a recycling service, use it. If not, ask your landlord to start one. Persuade other residents to recycle as well.
4. Switch out the lights - Usually you wait for a lightbulb to burn out and then call the maintenance man to come change it. If you switch to CFLs you will reduce your electric bill and won't have to call the maintenance man as often to change bulbs since they last up to 10 times longer than regular lightbulbs.
5. Use cold water - Wash all your clothes in cold water. This will reduce the energy needed to heat the water and will make your clothes last longer. Newer detergents will wash the clothes just as well in cold water as in hot.
6. Compost - Even though you live in an apartment complex, you can still start a compost pile. Use a 5-gallon bucket and make sure to add more brown items than green to reduce the odor. This will reduce the amount of waste you produce each week.

These are just a few of the many things you can do to live a greener life in your apartment. If your neighbors start seeing the changes you have made in your life, they may be more apt to also begin a greener life.

If you think it is costly or a lot of work to go green, take a look at the following site: GreenMadeSimple.com. The site allows you to search by ZIP code for rebates and tax incentives as well as people doing Green projects and products that you can buy to make your life greener.

Besides being good for the environment, renewable energy resources are good for Michigan's economy. Green energy is leading to the creation of wind farms and anerobic digestor (run off cow manure). These bring new jobs and opportunities for Michigan's future. Michigan is poised to be able to provide renewable energy to the rest of the country.

Ways you can help progress this initiative include signing up for Consumer's Energy Green Generation program or Detroit Edison's GreenCurrent program. Both of these programs generate electricity through renewable resources.

April 22nd is Earth Day. Many events are happening around the world. For more information on these events contact your local government or check out the Earth Day Network.

To Hibernate or Not To Hibernate

The long running debate of power saving advantages vs. hardware wear and tear, which power saving features can create, is far from over. Most of the debate can be boiled down to personal opinion and experience.

In older equipment, the biggest concern revolved around thermal cycling. This theory states that changes in temperature could cause expansion and contraction at solder points, causing stress fractures. These fractures could then result in hardware failure. Another theory concerns hard drive failure. Many believe that the stress put on a drive from spinning it up and down can lead to its failure.
Today’s hardware is built using materials that are designed to disperse heat and are made with fewer solder points, nearly eliminating the effects of thermal cycling. Hard drive failure is still a leading cause for concern, however, there is still no real evidence pointing to powering on and off a drive can lead to its failure. This is where the personal opinion and experiences come in to play. One person may have a drive that bas been powered on and off hundreds of times over a long period of time. Another person may see a failure only after a few months of operation. The problem is that people remember these incidents and keep them as a base for future opinions and decisions.

Before going any further, let’s take a look at what the operating system can do to help conserve power. These power settings are known as the Power Management features of Windows. The introduction of the ‘Hibernation’ feature allows you to save your system state to the hard drive and power down the machine. This means that not only will the system boot faster when you turn it back on but the system will go through a normal POST test, making sure the system is functioning normally. The stand-by or sleep feature puts the system into a low-power consumption state by spinning down disks, turning off the monitor and disabling processing.

With this in mind, here are a few ways to configure your workstation to help conserve power. The assumption is that the operating system used is Windows XP.

• Power Management options can be found under the display properties. Right-click anywhere on the desktop and click ‘Properties’.
• On the display properties, choose the screensaver tab.
• Click the button called ‘Power’ near the bottom of the screensaver tab.
• Here, you can set durations for when the system goes into stand-by and/or hibernation. For desktop PC’s, standby will disable processing but will normally keep some or all of the fans running. For best energy saving results, it is recommended to use hibernation. You can also choose to turn of your hard drive and monitor after a specified period.

With this in mind, the question of hibernating or not hibernating is left in the hands of the user. I tried to present this information without bias, to help you make an informed decision. However, with that being said, it seems that the benefits of powering down your computer far outweigh the consequences of possible hardware failure.

Look for more posts to come with more information on making your electronics ‘greener’.

http://www.lockergnome.com/windows/2007/07/27/leave-my-pc-running-or-turn-it-off/