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The rapid increase in human population is putting immense pressure on the limited natural resources like oil, gas and coal. Also the threat of global warming looms large over the horizon and the best way forward to solve these twin problems is to conserve energy. On the domestic front this can be done by living in an energy efficient home.

The residents should follow some basic steps to make their house an energy efficient home and these steps are:

Take the help of a professional home energy auditor so that the leakages in the home can be easily pinpointed. An energy auditor uses equipment such as an infrared camera, furnace efficiency meter and blower door test equipment to show where the house is losing energy. The audit also shows how to conserve heating and cooling energy. It is necessary to take the service of a capable contractor to correctly size up the heating and cooling system of the house. A right estimate about the actual cooling and heating loads of the house is necessary to install or modify the heating and cooling system for an energy efficient home. This will save the resident from installing an over sized system that will use excess energy. A right sized system cuts down on the fuel bill and annual maintenance costs, considerably. Inefficient electrical appliances should be replaced with energy star rated equipments to do away with excess energy consumed in the home. On an annual basis, energy efficient appliances reduce the power bill, significantly. Employing the right insulation practice or taking the help of a professional technician to seal the leaky joints in the heating and cooling system, and other areas of the house. This will achieve the desired level of heating and cooling without putting extra load on the system and translates into lower energy bill for the Energy efficient home. Following a correct maintenance schedule for heating and cooling equipments, and taking the help of a licensed technician will keep  critical equipment like  heating furnace tuned up and avert any major  breakdown in midst of a chilly winter. In hot areas use of reflective material on the roof and shades over windows to reflect off excess heat and prevents the home from absorbing excess heat energy. This puts lesser load on the air-conditioning system of the house and helps the resident to get desired cooling at a lower cost.

Thus by following these basic steps the resident can easily convert his or her house into an energy efficient home and save considerable amount of money thanks to lower energy and maintenance bills. You can learn more about energy efficiency at www.advancedhomeenergy.com.

Technorati Tags: Basic, efficient, energy, Following, Home, Steps

Contrary to what many people think, windmills have been in existence for a pretty long time now. With advancing technology, windmills are finding a greater number of uses these days. Moreover, these days you can also build one yourself. A do it yourself or DIY wind mill is not that difficult to build, as many people perceive it to be. You can now generate DIY wind power, quite easily through the following tried and tested steps.

Create Free Electricity at Home with Wind Power at your Home

1.    The first step involves you being ready with all the components that you need for building your windmill. The first thing that comes to mind as soon as you think of DIY wind power is the rotor blades. You can easily make them using PVC pipes, which are both durable, as well as cost effective. The blades should be ideally made from PVC pipes measuring between 7 to 10 inches in diameter. Of course the size of the blades will also depend on the amount of DIY wind power that you want to generate.

The next component that should be ready with you is the generator. Once the generator is in place, you will then need the shaft and the tower. The shaft has to be carefully fitted in place in such a manner that it rotates in all directions to catch wind. The height of the tower can be decided by you.

2.    The next step involves making sure that you have got all the basic tools with you. These typically include hammers, screw drivers, saw, electric drills and paint. You can seek professional help to connect your DIY wind power turbinewind poweristing wiring system in your home. An electrician is best placed to give the finishing touches to your wind power system. Alternately, you can also do the job yourself by following instructions from a DIY wind power guide too, if you feel that you are adept at it.

Technorati Tags: Bills, down, energy, power, Simple, Steps, wind

So you’re interested in finding alternative energy sources–good for you!

Whether you’re on a quest for cheap electricity or you’re just tired of waiting for your local power company to show real interest in renewable energy, you’re smart to take matters into your own hand and research how you can power your home with wind power. This article will take you through the three steps you’ll want to take first so that you can make the best use of residential wind power.

Step One: Do lots and lots of research. Then do some more.

We’re talking about electricity here and that makes this a potentially dangerous topic. Don’t let that make you afraid, but do be cautious. From power conditioning to power surges, there’s a lot to consider when it comes to the electricity that comes into your home and you’re going to need to take responsibility for learning and understanding the topic thoroughly.

Please don’t let that scare you off! One of the best things you can do for your household budget and for the planet is to research how to make the switch to alternative energy sources. Buying “offsets” is silly when you can just stop using nonrenewable, pollution-generating sources of power. So, just bring a healthy level of caution, and do plenty of research.

I’ll be posting audio and video over on my blog so that I can walk you through some of the more tricky parts of all of this, and I encourage you to really avail yourself of different forms of information–read it, listen to it, watch it, interact with it if you can find a local exhibition. By really immersing yourself in the topic of alternative energy sources, you’ll learn more quickly just what’s involved with generating your own power.

Step Two: Dive in!

You can keep learning forever and it won’t do you a bit of good. Until you actually build your own windmill or solar panel, it’s all just intellectual. And intellectual stuff won’t save the environment or your money on the home electricity bill! So, once you’ve explored the topic and read and watched and listened, it’s time to apply what you’ve learned.

Actually build your residential windmill!

Buy a kit, put it together, build the tower, and install it (preferably with the help of an electrician, especially the first time). See what happens. Like I said above, do be careful–I don’t want you frying your computer because you’ve caused a power surge–but once you’ve learned a lot, you’re going to want to take action.

Step Three: Do it again!

Once you’ve installed your first residential windmill, you’ll be hooked. Just think of saving 10-20% on your first home electricity bill. That’ll be pretty motivating, won’t it? With wind power, you’re going to want to install several windmills to save the most money on your home energy bill, so repeat step two indefinitely.

Each time you build a new wind turbine, you’re sure to make improvements and learn new approaches and that’s great! Just keep applying what you’ve learned, keep making improvements, and keep enjoying your spot on the leading edge of the alternative energy revolution.

I know, right now this all sounds sort of overwhelming. Each of these three steps is going to take some time (building a residential wind turbine typically takes about a weekend, but the research step will likely take several weeks), and it can be hard in the beginning to both keep your eye on the end goal (no more electricity bill and a 100% renewable energy powered home) and on the next step. But, tackle this just like you have other successful projects in your path and you’ll find that in very little time your electricity company will be paying *you* for the electricity your home is generating. And that’s a great feeling!

Technorati Tags: alternative, Easy, energy, Install, power, Sources, Steps, Three, wind

If you’re like many Americans, you have a desire to “Go Green” in your home, but lack the knowledge of how to do it without spending thousands of dollars in the process. In this article, I will show you several energy efficiency strategies that cost little to no money to do and save you hundreds of dollars when you do them:

Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #1

Boil only the amount of water you are going to use – by only filling your kettle or pot with the amount of water you actually need every time you will reduce wasted energy in heating more water than you need or use. If your family did this for one week it would save enough energy to light up your house for a day, or run your TV set every evening for a week.

Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #2

Keep a lid on all the pans being used in cooking – that’s because water will boil around 6% faster in pans with a lid on, thereby saving time, electricity and your money, as well as giving the environment a break.

Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #3

When you cook in the oven, keep the door closed – nearly every modern oven has a see-through door to let you see what’s happening inside. Use it! Around 20% of oven heat is lost every time the door is opened. If you’re trying to bake a cake, for example, and you keep opening the door to see how it’s getting on, then you are cooking at 80% of the correct temperature, while wasting energy and money!

Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #4

Stop using commercial cleaning products in your kitchen – these cleaners are expensive to buy and expensive to produce. You can make your own cleaner from a mixture of vinegar, salt and baking soda. It will clean perfectly, and it will contain no toxic chemicals, thereby helping the environment. It will cost a great deal less too. Not convinced? Think about this… We dump some 32 million pounds of damaging toxins down our drains every year, just from household and kitchen cleaning products alone.

Here’s another simple recipe for an all-purpose cleaner, courtesy of Greenpeace:

½ cup pure liquid soap
1 gallon hot water
¼ cup lemon juice
Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #5

Switch from sponges to brushes – if you use one of those sponges with a plastic scrub pad on one side for a week or so you and throw it away and start using a new one – you’re just throwing money away each time you replace it. Consider using something more permanent that will last a very long time, and will get the dirt off too. A good old-fashioned scrubbing brush will do that. It will last for months, if not years, and it can be recycled over and over again.

Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #6

Stop preheating your oven – you’ve been taught by cookbooks and by following package directions to preheat. You don’t have to pre-heat an oven for every dish, unless for bread and pastries. Just shove the dish in the oven and switch on, setting it at the right temperature. Use that preheat time to cook your food and simply adjust the amount of time down from the package times. Your food will cook just as evenly and you’ll save money in the process.

Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #7

Eat at home more often – Americans eat out on average around five times a week! Meals that are prepared commercially are costly and many contain chemicals, ingredients, and preservatives that really aren’t good for you. You could find yourself saving around $100 a month from eating more meals at home. By eating more organic foods in the process you will not only save money but reduce the number of hormones and unwanted chemicals entering your family’s bodies.

Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #8

Eat more fruits and vegetables – you can save around $2,000 a year on health costs on average by simply eating enough fruit and vegetables. Here’s how – the average weighted price of fresh vegetables is around 64 cents per pound and the average weighted price of fresh fruit is around 71 cents per pound. The average price of a pound of beef is around $4.15.

Not only is this healthier for you, but is helps the environment too – A lot of the costs are in bringing the end product to the market. Vegetables and fruit are cheaper to produce. Their production is less harmful to the environment too. Consider also that vegetables are plants and most fruits grow on trees, which both absorb CO2 and give out oxygen. Cattle, pigs and sheep don’t do that. In fact, they do the opposite. Cattle especially produce a lot of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #9

Feed you family pot roast – consider that cooking a chicken in a slow cooker for seven or eight hours uses one third of the energy that cooking it in an oven does. The same applies to any meat you might want to cook, as well as vegetables and whatever else you can think of. If you have cheap electricity at night, which is common in some places, then make use of it to slowly cook something overnight to save even more money.

Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #10

Feed your family Organic foods – besides reducing the hormones, chemicals, and pesticides from your diet, the carbon dioxide (CO2) effects are dramatic as well. CO2 is captured and stored in organic soils much better and more effectively than in ordinary soils. This makes organic foods much more friendly to the planet. If we grew all our corn and all our soybeans in organic conditions, some 580 BILLION tons of CO2 would no longer be pumped out into the atmosphere.

Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #11

Stop throwing away food – Americans have a wasteful habit of serving up too much food. This leads to an amazing amount of waste. On average, 30% to 50% of the food we buy gets dumped! And that’s whether we eat at home or eat out. Americans throw away a mind-numbing 14 million tons of food a year! That works out at about 100 pounds a year for each of us just dumped in the garbage can.

Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #12

Drinking water doesn’t need to come from a bottle – if you buy drinking water in small plastic bottles, you could be throwing away a whopping $1,400 on average every year! Worse than that, only around 5% of the empty plastic bottles ever get recycled. That means 95% of them end up in landfills. Instead, uou could invest around $100 for a multi-stage water filter to fit to your existing water supply. It’s already safe to drink, but this will make it taste great – every bit as good as bottled water, and you’ll save around $1,300 a year on average. If you still need to carry water in bottles, consider using reusable bottles. You can get stainless steel water bottles, for example, that will last a lifetime. Consider this: Americans burn some 1.5 million barrels of oil every year just to produce all the plastic bottles of water we use. How many cars would that power for a year? Around 100,000! That’s the number of cars in a fair-sized city.

Energy Efficient Kitchen Strategy #13

Put a sink faucet aerator to the kitchen sink – this will reduce the amount of water you use. Some 15% of the average household’s water consumption goes on faucet use. A faucet aerator provides water under increased pressure, but less of it, so it does a similar job. It gives you a needle spray pattern that’s actually more efficient too. Cost to buy? Minimal. Benefit to your pocket and the environment? Immense!

Those are just a few of the many energy saving options you can easily incorporate into your daily lives. Just remember that it doesn’t have to cost you a lot to save you a lot when you make your kitchen more energy efficient. Obviously upgrading your kitchen appliances will help save you money as well, but that’s a whole different article.

Help Others Save Energy

One way you can help other is to become an Energy Auditor. If you’ve ever thought about having a “Green Career” now is a great time to get started.  The Energy Audit Institute is now offering online training programs in Home Energy Auditing. You can get trained and certified in this “in-demand” career field in about about 2 weeks for less than $250. Learn more about getting started at the Energy Audit Institute.

Technorati Tags: efficient, energy, Kitchen, Simple, Steps

Using less energy is the easiest and quickest way of reducing global warming in the future.

We have put together some simple tips to show how you can cut the amount of energy you use without it costing you a penny, as well as some, low cost actions you can take which will pay for themselves in little or no time.

For instance, did you know that the quickest and most cost effective way of improving your energy efficiency is by installing insulation? Insulation made with recycled glass (glasswool) is particularly environmentally friendly – and insulation requires no maintenance and will provide energy savings year after year, performing as good as the day it was installed. That’s why so much of this site is dedicated to different ways to improve your home’s insulation.

Tips to improve energy efficiency.

1. Turn down your central heating by 1°C It could cut your heating bills by up to 10%. If you feel it’s too cold, just pop on an extra layer of clothing like a T shirt under a shirt or a jumper or cardigan.

2. Don’t leave appliances on standby. How often do you leave the TV on standby when you go to bed? That TV, DVD player, HiFi, video recorder are all munching electricity – so turn them off.

3. Unplug mobile phone chargers. It’s handy to leave your mobile phone charger plugged into the wall, but if its switched on even without the phone attached it will be using electricity.

4. Set your hot water to 60°C. For most people, setting the cylinder thermostat at 60°C/°F is fine for bathing and washing.

5. Don’t overfill your kettle. It’s easy to over fill a kettle, but try and only boil the amount of water you need (Always remember to ensure you boil the minimum amount for the safe use of the kettle – see your kettle’s user guide if in doubt).

6. Turn off lights when you leave the room. Always turn lights off when you leave a room and adjust your curtains or blinds to let in as much light as possible during the day.

7. Use economy mode on the dishwasher and 30°C to wash your clothes. Try and use low temperature programmes, and ensure you wash full loads.

8. Draw the curtains. Close your curtains at dusk to stop heat escaping through the windows – even in rooms you’re not using.

9. Take a shower not a bath.
Water requires a lot of energy to heat it up, and a typical shower uses just 20% of the hot water a bath uses.

10. Put a plug in it!. Always put the plug in your basin or sink. Leaving hot water taps running with it removed is akin to washing money down the plughole.

Technorati Tags: Easy, efficiency, energy, Homes, Improve, Steps

Yes, wind will make environmentally friendly electricity, but a home made wind turbine will not work everywhere. But if you have a steady enough wind speed you could make a wind turbine to generate enough electricity to lower you energy bills. Making a home wind turbine can be a fun weekend project that won’t take long to create, with the right plan and instructions that is.

Here is why you should build your very own home made wind turbine:

Here are the top two benefits to making a home made wind turbine; saving money on bills and help save the environment. But wait that is not all, below you will find the most important benefit to making your own wind turbine at home:

Building your own home made wind turbine has to a great benefit over ordering a wind power system. The real problem with doing this is that you will have to spend up to $1000 dollars and even up to $10,000 dollars probably even more too. By spending anywhere from $1000 to $10000 dollars it could take year before it actually pays for itself. So that is why you would want to create your own wind turbine, you will save a lot of money plus it will cost a fraction of purchasing a wind power unit.

Here are some basic steps that you could use to create a home made wind turbine system:

1. Take the propellers off the flower. With the propeller of, it will be used to spin the axle. Use a propeller from a larger pinwheel floor will work the best.

2. Put the spools between the plastic sheets and then glue them on. Then you have to place the small spools at the corners of the plastic sheet. Super glue will work the best here, once super glued let it dry. This will serve as the casing for the wind turbine generator.

3. be sure to measure the metal rod before you drill holes into the plastic. The hole that you drilled will be just for the metal rod. Be sure that the holes are perfectly aligned on both sides of the sheet. When you get the hole in perfectly aligned you can then place the metal rod through them.

4. Put the magnets in the casing. Here is something that is very important; you have to have enough room for them to rotate freely around the axle that is spinning the magnets, if you do not do this it will not work. Attach the magnets together with spacers. If you see that you don’t have enough room between the spacers to insert the axle, then the magnet will not work to generate electric current when the axle spins.

5. Then put the rod into the hole, after you have done that wrap wire around the generator. This is important part; wrap the wire around the casing about 225 to 300 times.

6. After you have done that, attach the propeller to the axle. Make sure that the propellers are large enough to catch the wind. Then you have to place the propeller on a metal rod, use super glue again to attach them together.

7. Remove the insulation from the wire. Then after you have done that, attach the lead to the end of a low voltage and amperage light bulb.

8. Once you have this finished, place the wind turbine that you just built in the breeze of the wind. You are doing this to see if it will provide enough power to light the bulb. But if there is not enough wind speed the make the wind turbine spin, and then just turn the propellers manually to see if it works.

Technorati Tags: Follow, Home, made, Simple, Steps, these, turbine, wind

You really need to be ready for a small, simple, large and sometimes complex challenge when wanting to construct a homemade wind generator. So many say its easy, but after completing a couple myself… They aren’t simple, but they are very rewarding. Get started by following these 5 simple steps!

Determine Wind Speed in your area to ensure you receive maximum results. This seems obvious, but there are many people who have set out to build a wind generator, only to complete their project and not produce near the amount of energy they imagined! Keep in mind, if wind speed is below 5 miles per hour building a homemade wind generator may not be the most economical choice. Do you have space? Wind generators require space for the tower and room for the blades. The ideal space would be free of trees and tall buildings. Keep in mind, wind generators vary in size. The space you will need will be determined on the scale of your project. To ensure you complete a homemade wind generator that works, you need to make sure you have an easy to follow set of plans. If not, you might just be taking a shot in the dark and end up with a pile of metal! Phew! We avoided a great catastrophe with tip number 3! Now that we have wind, space and plans we can move forward! Step #4 is really about making sure you have budgeted for your project. For many, a few hundred dollars is an investment. It will pay for itself in the long run, but please be realistic with the out of pocket expense. There are a few websites online (sites where you can bid on materials!) that always have great, high quality parts for low prices. Check them out, you will save yourself a pretty penny. What are you doing still reading this? Step #5 is about getting started! Oh yeah.. And please finish! Gotta love all the projects around my house that aren’t quite finished!

That’s all folks. 5 simple steps to help you build your homemade wind generator. I know, I didn’t quite walk you through step by step how to actually construct one, I have to leave that up to you. There are so many DIY homemade wind generator plans available that will help you.

Take the time to share this project with someone, if you have kids get them involved! This is our planet, and by deciding to create alternative energy you will be lending a helping hand in cleaning it up. Start making a change today, visit Home Made Wind Generator for a great DIY project!

Technorati Tags: Generator, homemade, Simple, start, Steps, these, wind