What is the largest, most comfortable, yet most wasteful thing in your possession? If you answered “my home,” you’re probably correct. Every year, countless people waste tons of cash paying for staggeringly high energy bills. It’s not only financially, wasteful, it’s also a big ecological problem. All the unneeded power your house draws means higher bills for you and a greater carbon footprint for your home. If you can find ways to make your home more energy efficient, you save money and help to save the planet as well! Today we’ll help you fight wasteful spending with five ways to make your home more energy efficient.

Programmable Thermostats

Installing a programmable thermostat is a great way to see some fast reductions in your energy bills, helping to ensure your home is the most comfortable when you’re there to enjoy it. Relatively inexpensive and easy to install, you can program your thermostat to keep your home the coolest overnight as you sleep and allow the AC a break while you’re away from home at work. It’s a fantastic, simple change that can help you save 5-15% a year on heating. While you could also simply reset your thermostat manually, a programmable thermostat saves you the trouble of remembering to constantly adjust it!

Insulation

Insulating your home to retain heat in the winter may seem like a no-brainer, but that same insulation can help to contain your home’s cool air during the summer as well. It’s important to make sure that your ceilings, attic, and walls have proper insulation for all seasons, not just one. Your windows are another important spot to check, as an older window with damage to the frame can become an energy vampire as the temperature controlled air escapes outside. Provided you can fill the gaps and cracks of your home, you can be sure that your inside temperature will stay stable no matter what it’s like outside.

Energy Efficient Lights

Check the lighting in your home. If you still have traditional incandescent bulbs, it’s probably time to go shopping. Replacing your bulbs with light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs will cost more upfront, but the energy savings more than cover the initial price difference. They are that a great way to reduce your energy consumption while producing fewer burned out bulbs as trash. While LED bulbs do not contain mercury, many do contain lead and other contaminants. Check to see if your local hardware stores like Lowe’s or Home Depot will recycle them for free.

Low-Flow Fixtures

Cutting back on your water consumption is a great way to lower your bills, but nobody wants to stop showering. Fortunately, if you install low-flow fixtures throughout your house, you can save water without sacrificing your hygiene. The EPA states that a family of four can roughly save 20,000 gallons of water annually by simply swapping standard 4.5-gallon-per-minute showerheads with 2.5-gallon-per-minute ones. The lower volumes of low-flow fixtures allow will help guarantee that you’re able to increase your home’s water efficiency while seeing significant reductions in your water bill.

Solar Panels

Arguably the best way to combine energy efficiency with financial savings, installing solar panels can help protect both your pocketbook and the environment. Homes with solar panels can reduce or eliminate their reliance on traditional coal-burning power plants, the nation’s top carbon dioxide emitters, while also lowering their energy costs with cheap, clean, and renewable energy. You might also be pleasantly surprised by the price of residential solar panels, with great financing options and tax breaks available. Out of everything we’ve covered, solar power can have the greatest positive impact on both your personal finances and the health of our planet.

Revamping your home’s energy efficiency is one of the quickest and easiest ways to save money. Best of all, the improvements that you make will actively help to minimize your homes contribution to greenhouse gasses. It’s always a good feeling to save money, but recognizing that you’re also saving the Earth is an even better reward. Whether you look for small, simple changes like programmable thermostats, or large, impactful changes such as solar power, there are tons of ways to make your home more energy and financially efficient. With so many options, we hope this list has given you an idea of where to start on your energy-saving adventure!

Carpet

Homes are meant to make a family feel safe, secure, and together. While many people take steps to ensure that their homes are clean and healthy places, there are several considerations you may be overlooking in your endeavors to keep your family healthy. Check out these six areas in your home that might accidentally be causing problems for your family.

Carpeting is a household staple. But carpeting might be making your family feel sick. For one, carpet traps pollen, pet dander, dust mites, and other allergens. Some carpet materials also give off volatile organic compounds. These compounds evaporate and are inhaled, which can cause respiratory problems. Volatile organic compounds don’t just appear in carpeting, either.

To eliminate the problem, furnish your home with items that don’t contain volatile organic compounds by asking at the furniture store. Buy thinner carpeting and keep your home well ventilated.

Dust Mites

Most people with dust allergies are actually allergic to dust mites. The microscopic critters like warm weather and high humidity. When they die, they tend to collect in fabric-based furniture and accessories, like beds, pillows, couches, and the like. So if you or anyone in your family experiences allergy symptoms outside of the typical allergy season, the reaction may be to a dust mite allergy.

There are several steps you can take to reduce the number of dust mites in your home, including keeping your humidity down, regularly washing your linens in hot water, and getting rid of bedroom carpeting.

Drinking Water

The EPA regulates and protects clean drinking water, so most people feel it’s safe to drink straight from the tap. But even with the EPA’s involvement, drinking water may not be as clear of contaminates as we’d like to believe. Trace amounts of pharmaceuticals, like ibuprofen and anticonvulsants, have been found in metropolitan water supplies.

The simple workaround might appear to be to drink water out of bottles, but a lot of water bottles are actually filled with tap water that hasn’t been filtered for these specific contaminates. Consider instead water filtration for the whole house, which has the added bonus of preventing the plastic waste that comes from drinking water out of bottles.

Carbon Monoxide

Most homes have smoke detectors that alert you to the presence of smoke in your house. But unless your smoke alarm specifically also features a carbon monoxide detection system, the dangerous gas might be present in your home without your knowledge. Carbon monoxide is odorless, colorless, and has many common household sources like gas heaters, furnaces, dryers, fireplaces, motor vehicles, and more. To protect your family, make sure carbon monoxide producing devices are properly ventilated, and purchase a detector.

Mothballs

Fumigants are what make mothballs so useful against pests. Mothballs contain chemicals that release into the air and kill pests at high enough doses. But these high doses of chemicals can also be harmful to humans. The side-effects of inhaling these chemicals include dizziness, headaches, vomiting, difficulty breathing, and red blood cell loss. Next time you need to take care of creepy crawly pests, safer ways to treat the problem exist. You can eliminate moths without resorting to mothballs.

Refrigerator

Your refrigerator might also contribute to making your family ill. A packed fridge with incorrectly stored food can end up growing things that cause food poisoning. Plus, if the temperature is off, by even a little bit, it only makes matters worse. Keep your cooked and uncooked foods well away from each other, especially meats. Clean the interior of your fridge regularly. Find out what temperature your fridge should be and check it often.

While checking for mold and having a working smoke detector seem like obvious ways to keep your house clean and your family healthy, you may be overlooking some subtler aspects of the equation. Some of these issues, like dust mites, the refrigerator, and carpeting, aren’t deathly serious, others like carbon monoxide and mothballs can cause serious health problems, especially with prolonged exposure. Thankfully most of these areas are easy to take care of with a little diligence.

Going green before you even break ground is one of the most effective ways to make sure your new house is as environmentally friendly and energy-efficient as possible. From the foundation to the roof, there are plenty of ways to aim for efficiency during and after the construction process. The following six building tips will help turn you new house into a green home.

Plot Out the Lot

There’s a lot more to deciding where you want to build your new home than the lot location, especially if you want to build green. Environmental impact and local zoning codes aside, there are many factors that will affect the future of your home and its green potential.

First consider the climate, as in median yearly temperatures. If you are building in a generally warmer climate, then a lot that provides more shade is your best energy-efficient bet. For colder climates, an open, sunny lot will offer the best exposure for natural home heating and lighting.

Use Sustainable Building Materials

Once you’ve found the perfect lot for your green home, it’s time to think about earth friendly building materials. Sustainable means any materials that are either recycled or have a rapid regeneration. For example, recycled plastics are commonly used to make composite wood for trim and decking.

Likewise, recycled and crushed glass is also used as an alternative to granite countertops. As for naturally occurring green building materials, bamboo is a great alternative to wood flooring because it regenerates faster than commonly used hardwoods. In addition, longer lasting products like cement board siding is more durable, earth friendly, and energy-efficient than regular wood siding.

Keep Your Home’s Size in Perspective

The size of your new home has a huge impact on its overall green potential. It’s important to keep in mind how much space you actually need as opposed to how much space you want. Every square foot you add to the construction translates to more materials and increased energy usage in the long run.

Before you chisel the blueprints in stone, think about your new home in terms of your own lifespan. Will your family expand or are the kids heading off to college? Do you need a spare bedroom and an office, or is that space sharable? When it comes to building a new home, experts are there to help you build a house that’s inspired by you and your square footage needs.

Think Energy Efficient Heating and Cooling

Size, lot location, and building materials all work together to make your new home green, but so does the home’s heating and cooling. Not all HVAC systems are built the same, so if you’re going for peak energy efficiency, then an ENERGY STAR® heating and cooling system can help reduce your home’s energy costs by 30 percent or more.

Heating the water in your new home is almost as expensive as heating the living room and bedrooms, so it’s important to choose an energy-efficient water heater as well. Tankless water heaters only heat the water you need when you need it, so there’s no wasted energy involved with continuously heating standby water. Turning your home green is good, not only for the environment, but for your wallet as well.

Choose Quality Insulation

One of the biggest efficiency pitfalls during the home building process is energy loss due to poor insulation; especially if you’re going for green energy efficiency. So, make sure all exterior walls are properly insulated. In addition, your attic plays a major role in heating costs due to the potential energy loss, so insulate your attic and crawlspaces properly as well.

Post Construction Green Efforts

Just because you built an earth friendly, energy-efficient home doesn’t mean your green efforts have to stop there. From energy-efficient appliances to compact fluorescent light bulbs, it’s easy to go green. Monitoring your water consumption, scheduling your thermostat to heat and cool in moderation, and even planting shade-providing vegetation are all great ways to make your home energy-efficient and green.

Keep in mind these earth and energy friendly pointers during construction, and you’ll have the greenest new home on the block. What’s your biggest conservation concern as you’re building your new home? Please share with us in the comments below.