What you can do to live more green: Energy Conservation

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Banking on the Environment
Want to have a more energy-efficient home or office? Save green by being green. Purchase appliances and electronics with the Energy Star certification. Begun in 1992 by the E.P.S. to rate energy-efficient computers, the Energy Star program today includes more than 40 product categories, and it also rates homes and workplaces for energy efficiency. Energy Star estimates that, with its help, Americans saved enough energy in 2004 to power 24 million homes, amounting to savings of $10 billion. To learn more about Energy Star, visit energystar.gov.

It's electric!
You can check how much of your electricity comes from renewable “green” power sources, such as wind or solar. Green power produces less carbon emissions, reduces air pollution, and helps protect against future costs or scarcity of fossil fuels. If green power is a consumer option, check price differences from suppliers before you buy.

Top of the morning to you, but don't top off!
During hot weather, don't top off your gas tank. Refuel your car or truck in the early morning or the evening when it's cooler. A small fuel spill may not seem like much, but every spill evaporates and adds to air pollution, and fuel pumps with vapor recovery systems can feed a spill back into their tanks - after you paid for it.

Be an Energy Star
When you do home maintenance, also do a home energy audit to find out how you can save money by making your home more energy efficiency. And if every American home replaced just one conventional light bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes a year.

Energy Stars
Make your home an Energy Star! When you do home maintenance, also do a home energy audit to find out how you can save money by making your home more energy efficiency. And if every American home replaced just one conventional light bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes a year.

Forget Pre-Heating
Ignore cookbooks! It is usually unnecessary to pre-heat your oven before cooking, except when baking bread or pastries. Just turn on the oven at the same time you put the dish in. During cooking, rather than opening the oven door to check on your food, just look through the oven window. Why? Opening the oven door results in a significant loss of energy.

Get a Gold Laundry Star
An Energy Star-qualified washing machine uses 50 percent less energy and could reduce your utility bills by $110 annually. Standard machines use about 40 gallons of water per wash; most Energy Star machines use only 18 to 25 gallons, thus also saving water. Whenever possible, wash your clothes in cold water using cold-water detergents (designed to remove soils at low temperatures). And do your laundry only when you have a full load. If you must do a small load, adjust the water level accordingly.

Hang Up Your Dryer
It goes without saying-clothes dryers are huge energy gluttons. Hints to reduce energy use: Clean the lint filter after each load (improves air circulation). Use the cool-down cycle (allows clothes to finish drying from the residual heat inside). Better yet, abandon your dryer and buy some drying racks, if you don’t have a clothesline. Generally, clothes dry overnight.

Insulate Your House
Good insulation is one of the best ways to reduce your heating bills and cut your CO2 emissions per year and can cut your heating and cooling bills by up to 20 percent. For more information, visit eere.energy.gov/consumer/tips/insulation.html.

Light Bulbs Matter
Switch from traditional incandescent light bulb to compact florescent light bulbs (C.F.L.). If every American household replaced one regular light bulb with a C.F.L., the pollution reduction would be equivalent to removing one million cars from the road. A 30-watt C.F.L. produces about as much light as an ordinary 100-watt bulb. Although the initial price is higher, C.F.L.’s can last 12 times as long. C.F.L.’s are available at most home improvement stores and at bulbs.com.


Play It Cool
Avoid placing your air conditioner next to a TV, lamp, or other electrical appliance that generates heat. A heat source will confuse the unit’s thermostat, causing it to misread how hot the room is and make the air conditioner run longer than it should. You can also program an air conditioner to start running 30 minutes before you arrive home (as with heating). There is no need to cool a home if no one is in it.

Standby No Longer
Electricity “leaks” are no laughing matter. Televisions, video and DVD players, cable boxes and other electronic equipment found in nearly every American home are wasting huge amounts of energy. When these devices are left on standby (the equivalent of “sleep” mode for computers) they use about 40 percent of their full running power. Every year, the energy wasted in this way is the equivalent of annual output of 26 power plants. To avoid the drain of these “energy vampires,” plug them into a power strip and turn if off when they are not in use.

Switch off your Water Heater
After everybody has taken bath,switch off your water heater.Once heated,water mostly stays warm in it till evening,enough for handwashes through out the day.It will save you 6-10$ or may be more a month.

Switch to Green Power
The leading cause of industrial air pollution is electricity production. According to the American Lung Association, more than 50,000 Americans die each year from air-pollution-related-causes. If available, get your electricity from renewable energy sources such as wind, sun, water, and biomass, all of which generate electricity with few environmental impacts, With utility companies in 35 states offering green-power pricing plans, around half of all electricity consumers could buy green, yet only half a millin do. Does green power cost more? Yes, but barely. For example, New York’s Con Edison charges an additional one-half cent per kilowatt-hour for its green-power products. To see if your energy provider offers green-power options, visit eere.energy.gov/greenpower.

Turn Off Your Computer When You Leave at Night
While computers do require a power surge when you first turn them on, they don’t need enormous amounts of electricity to function for lengthy periods. Also, you can set your computer on “sleep” mode, which uses about three watts per hour, if you are going to be away from your desk for more than 15 minutes.

Turn Off Your Chargers
Most cell-phone chargers continue to draw electricity even when the phone isn’t plugged into it. If your cell-phone charger averages five watts per hour and is plugged in all the time, that means a total of more than 40 kilowatt-hours every year, or about 93 pounds of CO2. The same problem applies to your other electronic equipment-your laptop, iPod, digital camera, and BlackBerry. Unplug all your chargers when they are not in use.

Turn Your Thermostat Down One Degree
If you turn your thermostat down by one degree, your heating costs will decrease by about 3 percent. Turn it down five more degrees for four hours a day and reduce your heating bills by almost 6 percent. If you’re going to be away for the weekend or out in the evening, turn your thermostat down. It’s not true that reducing the temperature means it will take more heat to bring it back up to a warm level (unless you have a heat pump in your home). Also, turn the heat down if your are throwing a party-every guest will be the equivalent of a 100-watt heater.