What’s more important – the environment or your comfort? It’s a direct trade-off for many people because lowering your carbon footprint means making changes to a lifestyle you love. Considering your home should be your cozy castle, it’s easy to see why you don’t take your home’s CO2 emissions seriously.
However, the planet is everyone’s, and we should leave it in a healthy position for our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Plus, it doesn’t take much to drastically alter energy and water wastage, making your home greener.
If you’re searching for inspiration, here are four effective tips you can implement instantly.
Calculate Your Footprint
The problem most homeowners have is that they don’t understand how many pollutants they’re releasing into the atmosphere in a given week, month, or year. Therefore, the first step is to work out your home’s carbon emissions to allow you to make the necessary changes. The EPA website has a useful tool that’s easy to follow. With their calculator, you can see where you stand in the grand scheme of things and determine how many alterations you need to make. It’s estimated that a person’s average annual carbon footprint should be 1.87 tons as a guide. In the US, the average currently stands at 18 tons.
Buy Efficient Appliances
Old appliances take a huge amount of energy to run. Your fridge, washing machine, tumble dryer, dishwasher, oven, kettle, toaster, hairdryer and lights all contribute to that big energy drain, so when each one reaches the end of its life, recycle it and replace it with an energy-efficient model with a strong energy rating. Even after doing this, however, you might still find that you have high energy usage. This could be down to your home having old, inefficient wiring that loses energy to heat. Navigate to https://barnettelectrical.com/electrical/electrical-panel-services/ to get your electrics updated and modernized and you should find that your electricity bills go down dramatically.
Clean With Natural Products
Cleaning is an activity you do every day. After all, it’s hard to maintain a welcoming environment when there is dust everywhere! Unfortunately, typical products are full of harsh chemicals that eat away at the ozone layer. With that in mind, the easiest way to reduce your home’s CO2 footprint by a significant amount is to switch to homemade cleaning items. If you can’t be bothered doing it yourself, a professional cleaning company will take care of your requirements. Also, using an expert who specializes in eco-friendly treatments pretty much guarantees success.
Sign Up For Green Energy Sources
Whether you turn down the air conditioning unit or boiler, you’ve got to power your home. So, it makes sense to ensure the energy is clean. That way, you won’t have to commit to bigger usage cuts, and your routine won’t be impacted as much. Thankfully, it’s not a tough switch to make since you can find green-e certified providers by following the link. Even if your supplier isn’t one-hundred percent eco-friendly, they might source electricity and gas from renewable hardware, so it’s worth speaking to them about their policies. Or better yet, you can try switching to solar energy. Installing solar panels is always a good investment considering the clean energy and reduction in energy bills you can benefit from.
Avoid Buying Meat
You don’t have to be a vegan or vegetarian to realize meat isn’t healthy for the environment. Almost 15% of all greenhouse gases are created by livestock, most of which are bred to land on dinner tables worldwide. What makes it useful is that there’s no reason to stop eating meat entirely. The majority of people don’t know that sticking to fruits and veggies for a single day will impact your CO2 footprint by eight pounds. Doing it one day a week can result in a yearly drop of more than four-hundred pounds.
All of the above are accessible. Not only that, but you’ll hardly notice the changes!