It's Easy Being Green

Here’s four more tips showing you it really can be easy going green:

5. Adjust your home’s thermostat to be lower in winter and higher in summer. Learn how to heat and cool your home simply by venting windows at certain times of the day and when it’s cold, bundle up and put on your sweat pants!

6. Clean and replace dirty air filters in your home’s heating and cooling system. A dirty air filter can use 5-percent more energy while your a/c unit is running.

7. Replace the standard incandescent light bulbs in your home with the new compact fluorescent bulbs.

8. Help your water heater to be even more efficient by wrapping it with an insulating blanket specifically designed to go around your water heater.

Check back tomorrow for four more easy green living tips!

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Five days and counting to Earth Day so enjoy the easy ways to go green tips I post as we head to the big celebration:

1. When it comes to doing the dishes with your dishwasher, use the energy-saving setting. If your dishwasher is older and doesn’t have one of those settings, just let the dishes air-dry. Don’t use the heated option.

2. Reduce the energy needed to wash your clothes by washing in cold or warm water, not hot. We do all of our laundry with cold water, sometimes warm if some stain treatment or sterilization is needed and we’ve never noticed a problem with our clothes!

3. To save on energy used to heat up hot water, turn your water heater down to about 120-degrees. I have to confess, that’s a hard one for us to stomach because we love our hot showers and baths!

4. As you replace appliances in your home, pick out on the best energy efficient appliances. A lot of new appliances carry the Energy Star label which tells you that particular appliance is designed to save you money. If you’d like to learn more about what appliances to look out for, head over to the Energy Star website.

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Just less than six days away, people all around the world will celebrate our blue planet and share their mindfulness to protect our only home. Senator Gaylor Nelson, realizing that conservation was a much needed movement even in the 1960’s, persuaded President Kennedy to tour the nation. He spoke about conserving our precious resources and it began to get the country thinking. However, the Vietnam War was overshadowing the environmental movement at the time. Anti-Vietnam war demonstrations called “teach-ins” had spread like a wildfire to college campuses across the nation. Senator Nelson realized a similar mass demonstration could be just the key to get people thinking about their environment.

In September 1969, Senator Nelson announced that in the following spring, he would sponsor a nationwide grassroots demonstration on the environment and invited everyone to participate. Word of the demonstration spread and on April 22, 1970 Earth Day was born. Today many communities around the world put on Earth Day events and most calendars come marked with the “holiday” already on it. There might even be an Earth Day event going on in your neighborhood. Just follow the link to an Earth Day website where you can punch in your zip code and find out what’s planned for your area.

Over the next few days I’ll post some easy tips to help you go green and celebrate our Mother Earth.

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The house we’ve been renting for the past six months has apparently been sold or at least there is now a contract pending on the place. That means once again we must pack our lives back up and move to the next place that will hold us and our possessions for another six months when my current contract expires and the possibility of moving to another place with more stability exists. In the meantime, I’ve been wading through some of the stuff that has collected around here: old vacuum (wasn’t sucking very good so we bought a new one), old DVD player (we won a new one at a company party so we don’t really need another) and an old computer tower, the result of a family member’s upgrade.

While it’s simple to chuck these items into your garbage bin and let the landfill take hold of it, it’s not an environmentally sound idea. Electronic waste or “e-waste” for short, is a growing problem and it’s only getting worse. In fact, some estimates now say that 75% of old electronics are just sitting in storage. We know they shouldn’t go into the landfills and contaminate our groundwater and soils but at the same time we’re not really sure what to do with them.

Luckily there are several ways you can put your old items to a better use and perhaps give someone else the opportunity to have a job or learn a new skill set by repairing and fixing these items. Or there just might be someone else who can use what you don’t want anymore. Freecycle is a great way to get rid of things you have just cluttering up the house. Why spend all the time running a garage sale for a few bucks when you can just give something away? Maybe there’s something you could really use but just don’t have the cash in your budget for it. Take a gander at your local Freecycle and see what’s happening. I use my local group all the time both for giving things away and picking up something I really need.

Here in Arizona, I just stumbled across a website setup by the Arizona Environmental Strategic Alliance and ADEQ. The website, Reuseaz, allows people to post just about anything that could be used again instead of just throwing it away. It doesn’t look like it gets much usage right now, which is a shame. Maybe we can all change that! Also, if you live in Arizona and have an old computer that needs to disappear why not think about donating the unit to the Strut Program. Strut takes the old computers and trains high school students on A+ computer repairs and teaches them skills necessary to enter the workforce. Plus, once the computers are fixed by the students they’re then donated to needy schools and families who don’t have computers. That’s a great way to make something old, new again!

But, before you donate anything with a hard drive on it, you need to think about protecting the data that is stored deep in that hard drive’s recesses.  Remember you may have deleted information or cleared off that hard drive but it’s not enough to protect you.  Pretty much any information on a hard drive is recoverable because it never fully disappears.  Check out Talina’s blog post on “Protecting Your Identity” when it comes to hard drives.  Then, you can donate your computer!

Do you know of a program that relates to these three? Post it here and give us a link so we can all check it out and keep these things out of our landfills.

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Did you make a New Year’s resolution to take a college class or learn something new this year? How about taking more online classes if you’re already a student, saving you the money spent on gas to get to campus? Well, another fun blurb in this week’s edition of U.S. News & World Report is about the free, online classes offered by major universities like MIT, Yale and the University of Tokyo. The caveat of course is that you don’t get credit for taking the classes but I think it’s a pretty cool way to expand your mind and learn something new from the comfort of your home. I think it’s a pretty cool idea, although I wish you could get the credit for it!

Nonetheless, MIT offers the most free classes online with dozens of complete courses available. Just click onto the MIT Open Courseware site, pick some classes and start learning! They also launched a new sub-site aimed at high schoolers this year. It offers fun, “how-to” courses like building stereo speakers and guitars and even some AP courses for science and math students.

Yale offers full video versions of it’s most popular courses in astronomy, poetry, philosophy and psychology. They say they have plans to add up to 30 more classes in the near future. Check out their online courses by going to Open Yale.

There’s also an Open Coursework Consortium that can link you to dozens of free courses from Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins and several schools overseas.

If that’s not enough and you’re still yearning for more education, you can head to iTunes University. There you can find free audio and video lectures from Berkeley, Duke, Standford and several other schools and download them to your portable device. Now get out and learn something new!

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