It's Easy Being Green

At some point in your life you’ve probably encountered a pesky, leaky toilet. You know the one that kicks on all of a sudden to fill it’s leaking tank back up or the one that just makes that continuous noise of water spurting out the little fill valve, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s been estimated that a leaky toilet can waste up to about 80,000 gallons of water over the course of the year. That’s more than enough water to top off that Olympic sized swimming pool you’ve been dreaming about putting in the backyard for the last two summers!

If you do have a leaky toilet, just dive on in and fix it. The repair is pretty simple, doesn’t require a plumber and will only cost you about $10 and a few minutes with your hands in the empty toilet tank. You can either buy the pieces parts to fix your current flush valve assembly or you can just buy a simple kit and replace the whole shebang. Here’s how to do it:

1) Head to your local home repair shop or hardware store and pick up a “toilet tank fill valve replacement”. Just ask for a little assistance once you get to the plumbing department and they’ll for sure know what you’re looking for.

2) Once you’re ready for the repair, turn off the water to the toilet. This is usually done on a little valve underneath the toilet by the wall.

3) Try reaching into the tank and re-seating the tank stopper in the flush valve. The flush valve is the tall assembly with the float attached to it.

4) Bend the float arm down or away from the tank wall and replace the float ball which may have filled up with water.

5) Now, drain the tank and replace or clean the flush valve seat.

6) Check to see if the tank-fill tube is cracked, then oil the trip lever and replace any faulty washers.

7) Fill up your toilet by turning on the water valve again and marvel at the fact that it doesn’t run constantly anymore!

Not only should you feel better not letting more than 80,000 gallons of precious water simply disappear down the drain but your water bill should reflect some improvements too. It doesn’t seem like a lot of water while that leaky toilet is running but it really adds up over time.

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A lot of people want to cover up or get rid of odors in their home whether it’s from cooking, pets, smoking or the occasional dead mouse you haven’t been able to locate yet.  But it seems the easiest thing to reach for to improve the smell of our homes are room sprays over loaded with fake fragrances and chemicals.  It’s super easy to freshen the smell of your home while keeping it more natural by using essential oils.

Essential oils are just oil extracted from a particular plant or botanical through distillation.  By buying an essential oil warmer (usually powered by a candle or power outlet) you can scent a room with natural fragrances.  They won’t only make your house smell good they’ll also help your mood too!  Here’s some suggestions:

Would you like to lift your mood and spirits?   Try Almond Extract, Lavender, Orange Blossom, Vanilla or any other scent you like.  If you’d like to reduce anxiety, try Roman Chamomile, Lavender or Orange Blossom.  If you want to reduce agitation, try Lavender or Lemon Balm.  If you want to feel revived, use Rosemary.  It’s easy to find essential oils at local stores and Googling the term “essential oil” will show you a ton of online retailers.  One simple way we freshen up our home is to simmer a small pot of water on the stove with orange slices and a pinch of mulling spices.  The orange spice smell infuses your entire house and I think smells pretty darn good.  While mulling spices can be expensive, one tin has lasted me more than five years for the occasional air freshening.

Do you have a natural tip or trick to keeping your home smelling fresh without the use of chemicals or overpowering room sprays?  Let us know about it and share your tip too.

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Here’s a little treat to share with all of my readers.  I’ve talked about Green Cleaners in the past but now you can actually get a free sample of one of those products.  Head over to the Ecover website to enter for a free sample of an eco-friendly cleaner.  You can also register in their contest to have your home completely cleaned top to bottom in an eco-friendly way.

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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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Would you like to take a few simple steps to make sure your Super Bowl party is a little friendlier on our environment? Well you can and it’s pretty darn simple just by choosing a few key products that help us all tread a little lighter on our planet. I’m not talking a smörgåsbord of vegan food with a bicycle powered television pumping out the highlights of the game either!

Every Super Bowl party will inevitably have beer. So why not go the sustainable route and pick some beer that’s not only tasty but eco-friendly. New Belgium brewing company, brewers of Fat Tire and a variety of other lip-smacking good beers take pride in helping out our environment. The all employee owned company runs its brewery off of wind power and even takes extra steps like turning the steam generated in the brewing process into even more electricity. I’ve also heard they compost their leftover grains and hops. Frog’s Leap Wine is a great choice if you’d like to sport a little vino in your red plastic cup. The winery uses organic grapes and water-saving farming methods. They’re also 100% solar powered.

But what about chips you say? Pick up some bags of Kettle brand chips. The Salem, Oregon snack food company has restored damaged wetlands at their corporate headquarters where blue herons have now returned en masse. They also operate one of the largest commercial solar power arrays in the Pacific Northwest, saving 65 tons of CO2 every year and they buy wind power for the rest of their electrical needs. Agricultural waste left over in the potato chip process is turned into animal feed or compost and their used cooking oil is turned into bio-diesel, powering a fleet of company cars. That’s pretty cool!

Maybe you need some plain yogurt to make dips. Stonyfield Farms, a New Hampshire based company, supports many organic farms. They have a tree planting program to offset their CO2 emissions and they give 10% of their profit away to environmental causes every year. That amounts to about $3 Million dollars in donations every year.

Want dessert? Try some pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Though they’ve been bought out by Unilever, the company is still doing good. They donate about $1 Million annually and donate to local community projects. The company started an alliance for dairy farmers. It’s a way to keep them in business while improving their environmental practices.

If you need some pre or post game enery, try a Clif Bar. The company’s products are certified organic and are packaged in recycled goods. They moved a bakery near a distribution center to reduce greenhouse gasses, their employees get paid for volunteering in the community and they can get money toward the purchase of a hybrid or bio-diesel vehicle.

Last but not least, when it comes time to cleanup, you can use environmentally friendly cleaners made by Seventh Generation. I’ve talked about the company before. You can read their benefits on the environment and look into other green cleaners by checking out this blog post. Simple steps and easy products to make your gathering greener.

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Our night turned interesting rather quickly!  I ran home from work to have dinner with Talina like I do most weeknights.  We had just sat down to a meal of chicken and asparagus when she started smelling something weird, like a burning smell.  Like most guys, the smell didn’t hit me for a few more minutes after my better half already noticed it.  Concerned about the smell, I ventured into the kitchen to see what was going on, expecting that maybe a small bit of food was burning in the oven or the burner on the stove was left on.  I found neither.  In fact the stove and oven had been turned off for more than an hour but yet there was a thin, blue smoke pouring out of the vents on back of the unit.

The fumes were burning my eyes and lungs but I figured simply unplugging the cord that provides electricity to the igniters on the gas stove would solve the problem and get rid of the smoke.   A few minutes later, smoke was still wafting from the back of the stove and filling up the house.  At this point I decided it was out of my hands and called 911.  They told us to evacuate the house until the fire department arrived.  Luckily we didn’t have to stand in the snow and cold for very long because the firehouse is right around the corner from our house!

The firemen were perplexed but decided to shut off the gas and haul the still billowing stove out into the snow in our backyard.  They used their nifty infrared heat device to figure out what was burning inside and began methodically taking the stove apart to work their way into the internal components.  Inside, the firemen found that one of the igniter wires for the burner had arched with another piece of metal or wire and started the insulation burning.  A few handfuls of snow and a couple cups of water later, they deemed the fire officially out.  Whew!  We dodged the big bullet on that one.  There was no damage to the house but it wreaks of electrical fire now and we’re without a stove.  Now we’ll have to get in touch with the property management company to get us a new one.  What fun!

Talina posted some pictures of the mayhem on her blog.  Check it out!

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It’s warmed up to a balmy 17-degrees outside today but with the wind chill it feels more like 4-degrees.  It was bitter cold last night and the car wasn’t too excited about starting up for the drive home from work.  This morning the house felt more like a meat locker inside…making us realize just how truly un-efficient this rental house is.  If you’re faced with high heating costs or just the aggravation of trying to keep your house at a comfortable temperature, you should think about doing your own energy audit.

It’s pretty simple.  You just need to walk through your house and begin considering where you could be losing heating and cooling efficiency.  Unless you’re doing a remodel or buying a house, there’s not much you can do about existing insulation in your walls and ceilings.  However, if you can find out what the insulation value is inside your walls  you can determine the efficiency of that.  A lot of common home insulation is rated around “R-11″ or “R-19″.  The higher the number, better the insulation is.  Some homes will have r-values reaching into the 30’s or 40’s.  According to the Department of Energy, eco-friendly homes built with straw bale walls have an R-50 value!  You can read more about their test homes and the different insulation comparisons by clicking this link.

The biggest source of decreased heating and cooling efficiency is air leaking in and out of your house.  The home we rent is only outfitted with single-paned windows.  That’s extremely inefficient because there is such a rapid exchange of cold air through these windows into the house.  It’s the opposite for summer, with a rapid exchange of heat into the rooms.  The house is outfitted with honeycomb shades on most of the windows.  If lowered prior to dark and kept closed until the sun is well up, they seem to do a decent job of retaining heat and keeping the chill out.  But if the house was outfitted with double-paned, “Low E” windows it would feel much more comfy in here.

There’s also a set of French doors off the dining room and kitchen that are poorly sealed.  You can see the light coming through gaps in the frame and weatherstripping on the door.  About $10 worth of weatherstripping and caulking and a half hour of work could greatly improve the cold air that moves through these doors.  We also hang curtains over it to keep the cold draft out and place an old rolled up blanket at the base of the door to prevent that draft too.

If you’re faced with any of this dilemmas, you should check out the Energy Department’s Home Energy Audit.  It’s easy to click through and tells you all the potential trouble spots in your home.  Best of all, it’s something you can do in just an hour or two or even spread out over several days.  In the long run it could help you save money and keep your house a little more comfortable.

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