Shrinking your Carbon Footprint

AMC Outdoors, November 2008

How to Reduce Your Home Energy Bill and Help the Environment

Energy efficiency specialist Paul Scheckel provides more tips below on how to lessen your household’s carbon load, drawn from suggestions AMC received from members and from his own experience. 

Read the accompanying feature story in the November 2008 issue of AMC Outdoors where Scheckel outlines his top 10 recommendations to save energy (and money).

Additional online energy-saving resources:

• U.S. Department of Energy’s Do-It-Yourself Home Energy Audits
• The Home Energy Saver: An Internet-based calculator for estimating home energy use
• Energy tips from AMC’s conservation newsletter

Paul Scheckel’s tips:

1. Reduce, reuse, recycle.
   
2. Use it up, make it do, do without. Limit what you buy. Recycle “waste” into crafts or gifts. Sell or re-gifts things you would rather not have. Return electronics and batteries to the manufacturer, and hangers to the Laundromat or dry cleaner. Try www.freecycle.com to find or give away goods.
   
3. Reduce the volume of trash you produce by composting organic material.
   
4. Carpool.
   
5. Buy “green tag” energy. Ask your utility if it offers any options for buying renewable electricity.
   
6. In cool weather, keep your heat thermostat as low as you can stand it when you’re home, and turn it down ten degrees while you’re sleeping or away from home. Reducing the temperature by one degree Fahrenheit can save 3 percent of your heating energy. A programmable thermostat can help by doing this for you without forgetting.
   
7. Use a ceiling fan instead of air conditioning to help keep you cool.
   
8. Turn down the hot water temperature. Every degree you turn down your water temperature can save about 1 percent of your water heating energy use.
   
9. Install a solar hot water heater. A solar water heater may cost about $8,000 to have professionally installed and provides about 70 percent of your hot water needs on an annual basis. A family of four with an electric water heater can burn through about 4,500 kilowatt-hours of electricity each year.
   
10. Switch to an on-demand hot water heater. These can be 25 percent more efficient than tank type heaters as there is no heat loss from the large volume of stored water. You’ll never run out of hot water but beware of using too much hot water just because it’s available.