Going green, saving green: Small changes to reduce your energy costs
Lots of us want to do the right thing. We talked with an expert to get the facts about small steps you can take to lead a greener lifestyle at home and save a bit of money in the process.
Bill Spohn owns a company called TruTech Tools, and his life's work is building performance.
“I would say first would be lighting, and that could be all over. So LED bulbs consume so much less energy than even the CFL — the twisty tube — or the incandescent ones coming before that,” Spohn said.
You already know that refilling a water bottle saves you money. It also keeps plastics out of the landfill and out of your life.
Another thing you can keep out of the landfill: Your compostable food scraps. Anything from plant material, some paper products and egg shells can go into a countertop bin, then into an outdoor composter, then to your garden, saving you money on fertilizer and soil.
“We have a big compost bin. And a year's worth of compost, we just spread amongst our raised beds,” Spohn said.
Consider an old-fashioned clothesline. “It's like drying clothes outside instead of running an electric clothes dryer or gas clothes dryer," Spohn said. "If you're able to do that. It doesn't always fit, not always convenient. But I think you have to define for yourself what kind of sort of minor hardships you put up.”
Let's go back to the kitchen. An induction cooktop is a greener option, reducing your energy costs.
“You have to have a special kind of cookware," Spohn said. "Basically, if a magnet sticks to your cookware, you can use it in induction cooking. An induction cooktop actually heats the metal of the pan. It doesn't heat the air around it. It doesn't heat the burner surface. So in that sense, you're really concentrating, focusing the heat.”
You may already have a countertop air fryer, which is just a tiny convection oven surrounding food with heat, again reducing cooking time and saving energy and cash.
“And it's good because it's a smaller appliance," Spohn said, "and if you just need that small space to be heated, that's better than heating a big, big oven or a big space.”
In the warmer months, Spohn says setting your thermostat up a few degrees when you're sleeping or if your house is empty for a few hours can help, and the opposite in the summer.
Don't make big swings in your home's basic temperature, though.
“You can't make it too cold or let it get too hot because sometimes, the recovery from those out-of-bounds situations takes more energy to get back,” Spohn said.
Spohn also urges every homeowner to get a blower door test. It helps you find the small breaches that allow your expensive heated or cooled air to escape.
Proper insulation is good, but it's only as good as how well-sealed up your home is. Spohn compared the insulation of a knitted sweater to that of a windbreaker: You'd choose the windbreaker on a cold day "because of the impact of the air shedding away and taking away heat.”
A blower door test starts at $300; a savings Spohn says you can recoup on energy costs.
“These fixes to seal up those leaks you can think of as a permanent investment in buying a windbreaker for your house," Spohn said. "And that windbreaker is going to last for the life of the house.”
If you stop using your electric clothes dryer, a website called Green America estimates you can save about $100 a year and reduce your carbon footprint by 2,400 pounds a year.
The point is that one change won't make a big difference, but if lots of us make small changes, it will help save the planet and help you save a buck.
