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This is the first article in a four-part series on how to green your electricity. We will give you practical tips to help improve your environmental footprint, as well as your monthly energy bills. Your house might even become more comfortable in the process.
Most of the things we own have two kinds of impacts on the environment. The first has to do with how they are made and shipped to us. The second impact, and this is the theme of this series, has to do with the energy that they use during their useful lives.
A television has an impact when it is built and shipped, but it also has one every time you turn it on. Same with a computer, as well as all of the things powered by electricity in a house.
The optimist will look at this and see a great leverage point: If you green your electricity, you green everything that runs on it by ricochet. So lets get started, shall we?The first step is to get information. You won't know where you're going, and you certainly will have a hard time getting there, if you don't know where you are now. We recommend a complete energy audit.
There are two ways to do that: You can do it yourself with the help of a software-based audit tool, something that we wrote about in detail here. You can also get help from a professional auditor. The benefits of going with professionals are manifold, but the most obvious one is that they have equipment not available to most people, such as infrared cameras and special fans to pressurize your house and determine how leaky it is.
Depending on where you are, some programs by government or local utilities might subsidize the audit. We recommend that you search in Google for "energy audit," plus the city where you live or contact your utility.
Both kinds of audits will give you information about the current state of your electricity use, and suggest ways to improve things, which we will cover in the next article in this series on how to green your electricity.
Difficulty level: Easy to Moderate
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