How To Make Homes More Energy Efficient
May 23, 2009 by admin
Filed under Energy Efficient Houses
There are a lot of simple things you can do to save energy in your home and reduce your electric bill. These are the common changes that we here about almost daily, such as turning lights of when leaving a room, turn your thermostat down to a lower setting in the winter or set it higher in the summer and these things all impact our demand for energy to some degree. However, when I’m cold I want to be warm and when I’m hot I want to be cooler. It’s just our nature, we like to be comfortable, and sometimes we forget to do the small things that can make a difference, like turning lights off or taking shorter showers, leaving heaters on when we don’t need them.
To make our homes more energy efficient we basically have two options
- Take the necessary steps to make the equipment in our homes work more efficiently, heating and air conditioning, water heater etc…
- Supplementing or upgrading our current equipment, by purchasing more efficient appliances etc…
Most people would be surprised to learn that they can make huge improvements in energy conservation by making some simple changes in their homes. This doesn’t mean you have to spend thousands of dollars doing major construction just so you can upgrade your insulation or buy the most efficient heat pump, air conditioner or furnace although these are good options when the equipment is due to be replaced.
It’s hard to justify upgrading your heating or air conditioning system and spending thousands of dollars when the old equipment works fine, most of us need to be efficient with our money also. When the time comes for windows, furnace and cooling equipment to be changed for whatever reason, that is the time to upgrade them. Use the same rule for appliances, upgrade them to more efficient models when they need to be replaced. If you build a new house design it to be more energy efficient. You can achieve enormous reductions in you power bill by working with what you have.
The biggest areas of energy consumption
- Space heating and cooling - 53%
- Water heating - 21%
- Appliances - 12%
- Lighting - 8%
- Electronics - 4%
- Other - 2%
You can make big improvements in some of these areas to reduce monthly energy consumption without spending a lot of money. Use energy efficient light bulbs, add extra insulation where you can, do your best to conserve. Often it’s the simplest and easiest to implement changes that will have the biggest immediate impact.
Reducing energy consumption in your home can lower your monthly energy bill substantially. I just read an e-book written by Peter Lindemann called Save On Home Energy. He believes the average home owner can reduce their electric bill by 50% using the strategies in his book. You can read my Save On Home Energy Review and decide if it’s something you may be interested in.
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Making your home more energy efficient is an important step when converting to solar energy or just to reduce your electric bill. There are many easy home improvements that you can do which will have a huge impact on your energy consumption. Energy efficient homes use 50% less energy. Share and Enjoy:
Anonymous on Sun, 24th Jul 2011 11:04 am
Our society was based on fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are still dominant sources of energy. There are two main reasons why alternative energy sources are getting so much attention in the last few years- the fact that fossil fuels are limited resources that will eventually become depleted and also the fact that fossil fuels burning create massive damage to our environment, particularly in form of climate change.