2011年7月8日 星期五

Retrofitting Your Home

Retrofitting Your Home
One of the most direct ways you can live a more environmentally sustainable life is to retrofit your own home. By retrofitting, I mean making relatively simple repairs in order to improve efficiency. Almost every home and building in America is in need of at least some energy-saving improvements. Such repairs will have an immediately positive impact on both the environment and your wallet. The energy savings from retrofitting will put more money in your pocket while conserving energy for the future and emitting less greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We're not talking about cutting back on anything here - this is simply about living smarter and reducing waste.

Beyond the microeconomic benefits to your household income,While using compact fluorescent light bulbs energy saving light helps conserve energy, it is important that the bulbs are collected and recycled properly to protect our environment retrofitting has the potential to be a job-creating stimulus project for the entire country. By making needed repairs to buildings all across America, we will become less wasteful and a leader for the world to follow. Former U.S. President BIll Clinton,Compact fluorescent light bulbs convert a led tube considerably higher percentage of their energy into light, which is why they are significantly more energy efficient than traditional filament bulbs. featured recently in Newsweek for his plan to reduce American unemployment, has pushed retrofitting as an energy-saving, job-creating investment opportunity that we must seize.

"We could put a million people to work retrofitting buildings all over America," Clinton said in his Newsweek article. Clinton has first-hand experience. His foundation recently financed a retrofitting of the Empire State Building. Johnson Controls, the energy company which oversaw the project, "guaranteed the building owners their electricity usage would go down 38 percent," according to Clinton. Beyond the savings of $4.4 million per year in power usage, the project created 252 jobs. So if the Empire State Building can be retrofitted,Compact fluorescent light bulbs convert a led tube considerably higher percentage of their energy into light, which is why they are significantly more energy efficient than traditional filament bulbs. then certainly your house can be too.
1) Switch all of your light bulbs to compact fluorescent

How hard is it to change a lightbulb? This is perhaps the simplest retrofit. Compact fluorescents will cost you a few dollars more, but they last much longer and require less energy to put out the same amount of light.

2) Install a programmable thermostat

If you do not already have a prorgammable thermostat, I highly recommend it. The advantage of these is the ability to have the inside temperature automatically adjusted based on the time of day and outside temperature. If you work during the day, it can be programmed to be turned off right when you leave the house in the morning and come back on 20 minutes before you get home. Why run the air conditioner all day when no one is home?

沒有留言:

張貼留言