Easy to Begin Living Green
Most people think living truly green is an expensive proposition. Quite the contrary, simple steps will conserve more energy than the person who goes out and purchases some energy gizmo and thinks they are living truly green. The following are a few steps that can be easily done, saving energy and consequently the enviroment.
Plan your trips! Unles you currently live many miles from a city and know that planning your trips is imperative, then you are wasting both time and energy by not planning your trips. The person who lives in the country knows that it is a long way into town, one that they won’t be making every day. So to save gas and the time it takes to drive that long distance into town they plan. They schedule when they are going, where they are going (likely in some logical sequence), and they make a list to make sure they get everything so they don’t have to make another trip.
The closer you live to grocery stores, department and specialty stores the more likely you are to make numerous trips. It seems like common sense that if it’s not too far you could make more trips and not use as much gas/energy as the person who lives in the country. Many studies say not so. In fact you are more lkely to use the same or more. Of course this is easy to deal with by setting a day each week for grocery shopping, developing a menu with a list of items required to prepare the menu and replenish household consumables. Similarily set a day for shopping for those other items. Make a list and establish a logical route. Aside from saving far more gas then you can imagine and saving several hours of time throughout a week you will find another non-energy bonus, you will save money. When you make several trips to the store you rarely know how much money you are spending and you likely don’t go through your coupons when you are only going after a couple items. Knowing what you are spending and using coupons is a powerful tool to save your dollars.
Next on your list of living green is to take those canvas bags with you whenever you shop which I might add is much easier to remember when you are making a planned trip. Plastic bags in our landfills represent huge volumes of waste that don’t deteriorate for decades. Numerous studies have estimated volumes and the life of a plastic bag in a landfill, all of which have different values quoted, most intelligent people don’t dispute they are a bad thing. I leave my canvas bags in the car and try to remember to take them into anywhere that I am shopping. I occasionally forget and will be standing in line when I remember, that’s when I stop and go get the bags or ask someone to get them for me. The enviromental savings are obvious and here again incorporating the canvas bags as part of your planned trip further solidifies this living green excersize.
Next is setting thermostat settings at reasonable levels. Reasonable levels vary in different parts of the country for obvious and some not so obvious reasons. Obviously when you live near a large body of water, water temperature helps regulate temperature and contributes mositure/humidity to the air. And more obscurely if you live in areas of constant extremes like Florida or Alaska you’ll find ductwork that delivers air to the house is designed to deal with just those types of extremes and not like a house that has to deal with all four seasons.
A good example contrast our house in the midwest which is subjected to four seasons of weather. The ductwork needs to be placed to prove some air high for cooling needs and some air low for heating requirements. Our midwest home is passive solar and is well built, but in the heat of the summer the thermostat needs to be set on 72 or 73 degrees to be comfortable. Our Florida home has all the duckwork positioned high in the house to provide cooling (cooling air falls and warm air rises). 76 is very comfortable setting there because the cool air is falling on you.
I hesitate to give you a fixed setting for your house rather use this simple guide. Don’t turn the thermostat down in the summer and then spend the evening covered with a throw. Don’t set the thermostat down low and sleep under a sheet, a blanket and a comforter through the night. In the winter the opposite applies. Don’t set the thermostat up high during the day and be throwing off blankets through the night because you are too hot. A good cheap programmable thermostat will cost you $40. Your return for this investment will be measured in days not months. Heating and air conditioning was invented to provide you comfort so find the temperature that feels comfortable at different times of the day for both heating and cooling and make your bed to match the season for where you live.
Just these few steps can save you a lot of money and substantially reduce your impact on the enviroment not to mention, make you more efficient with your time and more comfortable in your own home.
Simple concepts, huge benefit!