It's easy being Green!
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The Accidental Environmentalist
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March 21st, 2009 No commentsOk, I admit it, I’m obsessed. I can’t stop checking up on it. My charges keep racking up. No matter how hard I try, my family keeps working against me.The best I can do is tread water. It’s the wee hour of the morning, I’ve done all I can do.
What am I talking about? I just purchased TED. The Energy Detective. It’s a little device that wires into your circuit breaker panel that allows you to monitor your power consumption in real time.
As soon as I was able to install and configure it (without reading the manual of course), I noticed that we were consuming 2.6 kilowatts of energy and the Heat Pump was not even working. Ouch, that’s the equivalent of 26, 100 watt incandescent light bulbs burning in your house.I took immediate action. I whizzed around the house looking for anything that “glowed”. I unplugged the plethora of wall warts that have invaded my electrical outlets. I turned off lights, computers, unplugged coffee pots, printers, night lights. With each “Victory” I ran downstairs to see what effect I had. Just when I figured that I had done all I could do, I noticed a blue light behind a computer I had just turned off. It was the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), which admittedly is a good idea, However this particular unit was drawing 200 watts without the computer even being turned on.
TED was still displaying 1.6 KW. The family was watching American Idol on our 50″ plasma TV. I refrained from turning it off immediately but later I found that it was drawing 800 Watts. My next investment is going to be a coin slot for the television so that we all understand what the real costs are.
I installed TED on one of our kitchen counters, the next day I noticed that my wife had been paying attention to it.
VICTORY!!!!, That’s it. I’m all in. Compact Fluorescent light bulbs, Energy Star rated appliances, High Efficiency Heating and Cooling equipment, whatever it takes. You can’t measure what you can’t see.
Every homeowner needs to invest in energy monitoring. It pays!
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How should I spend my $1500 Energy Tax Credit?
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March 21st, 2009 No commentsThe American Recovery and Reinvestment act is chocked full of goodies. You’ve determined that you are going to do the “Right Thing” and stake your claim on a juicy $1500 tax credit for investing in energy efficiency. But what should you buy? There are sooooo many choices. You need a recipe book like they give you with a bag of Jelly Belly’s.
Before you pick up the phone and call your Heating and Cooling contractor consider hiring a Certified BPI Home Performance auditor. A building performance auditor will inspect your entire property, make recommendations and provide you with Savings to Invesment calculations so that you can make informed decisions. The auditor utilizes a sophisticated instrument called a blower door to depressurize your house so that he can locate the air leaks.
The first rule of Home Performance is to reduce the load. Before you purchase expensive HVAC equipment it may be that you could spend a modest amount of money on insulating, sealing your ductwork as well as your building envelope so that your energy dollars are not being flung into the atmosphere.
Once your house is nearly airtight (Even humans require a little bit of air now and again) the auditor will return to verify that insulation contractors did their jobs effectively. Once your house has been sealed and insulated properly it is quite possible that you can invest in smaller heating and cooling systems that are less expensive to purchase and much less to operate.
It is also very likely that your Utility company has a program to pay all or a portion of the Home Performance Audit. Here in Kansas City, KCP&L offers a rebate up to $600 for energy efficiency improvements recommended by a BPI Certified Home Performance Auditor.
Warning: mktime() [function.mktime]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/Chicago' for 'CDT/-5.0/DST' instead in /var/www/vhosts/nrgblog.net/httpdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 41
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