It’s hard to believe,  it’s been since July since I posted to my blog.  Sorry folks, I let life get in the way.  Other than family issues which we won’t get into I have been going to school for Environmental Technology.  Other than being one of the dreams I’ve always had, it is given me a whole insight on where this blog should go.  Instead of focusing just on energy-saving products.  I think I should do a blog that concentrates on nothing but what is on my mind at the moment.

So for today, I want to talk about a search engine called Regoog.  Regoog through it is an environmentally friendly  search engine based on the Google platform.  They use a black screen, which is supposed to save 34% more energy over using a white screen.  I know this sounds inconsequential, but when you think about how many people Google everyday, every bit adds up.

So search away and save green and have a great New Year!

• Plasma Vs. LCD - Which Is More Energy Efficient? photo by dno1967 Is it time to buy a new television set? Because of the low prices and the DTV transition that happens in February, many people are out buying new sets. But you aren't only concerned about price, right? You are also concerned about how much energy the new......
• How Energy Efficient Are Your Appliances? Given the world concern over energy efficiency, there are little steps that you can take to ensure that you are doing your part to minimize your energy use. The biggest source of energy drains in the home are your appliances, so it will improve things a lot to make sure......

I don’t usually like to get political or get involved in the discussion of the national economy, but… It just seems to me that when a company from a foreign country comes in and buys a large portion of an American company it threatens our national security. Just my personal opinion. Now I am reading how companies from Japan and Germany are coming in and buying into American renewable energy to take advantage of new renewable energy initiatives (http://bit.ly/B5Byb). Are we selling ourselves and our wind overseas? I would love to hear your comments on this.

• Lease Solar Panels Or Wind Turbines For An Affordable Various Energy Solution Did you recognize that you can lease solar panels and wind turbines? Solar leasing and wind leasing could be a a lot of cheap manner to use different energy. Solar energy is nice for national and international relationships. It avoids military conflict over oil, will cut back poverty and inequality......
• Introducing The Las Cruces, Green Chamber Of Commerce. Elisa Cundiff works for Energy Concepts, a New Mexico Solar Company. She is also a member of the newly formed, Las Cruces Green Chamber of Commerce. In Las Cruces, New Mexico we have just formed a “Green Chamber of Commerce”, representing the business interests of local, sustainably-minded companies. Already, over......

My wonderful husband has taught our German Shepherd, Duke, to open and close the screen door by himself. It originally started innocently enough. We were remodeling downstairs and often times my husband would be carrying heavy things in and out and nobody was around to open the door for him. Duke would jump through hoops of fire for my husband and quickly mastered this trick. The problem is that now the remodel is over, I refuse to use the energy to turn on the air conditioner so the doors are always open, and now Duke uses the screen door as his private doggy door. Needless to say the screen has been pushed through and ripped and is now a public mosquito entrance.

 I decided to go online and see if any of the local stores carried that pet screening that stretches instead of ripping when an animal jumps up. What I found is a great energy saving screen. A company named Phifer, that makes the pet screening, makes a whole line of screening and fabric. I never even knew there was something called weave technology, where the type of fabric woven in different ways can have different effects. The one that caught my eye was the Super Solar Screen.

 The company claims the Super Solar Screening reflects 90% of the suns heat and glare, improves daytime privacy, and still allows for excellent outward visibility, not to mention it keeps the bugs out. Sounds like the claims on an infomercial, but at the Home Depot site the product had been rated and review by two individuals. Both reviews gave the screening 5 out of 5 stars and both said it performed as advertised.

 This will be a huge benefit for a house like mine that faces northwest. I get full sun at my backdoor every morning in the summer; I don’t like to open the door and shades because it raises the temperature in the house. Then in the late afternoon I get the full effect of the sun as it gets ready to set so I have to close all the doors and shades on that side of the house. I am hoping with my Super Solar Screen, I will be able to get airflow from the windows and doors without the heat and glare from the sun. If I decide to turn on the air conditioner it should not have to work as hard with the Super Solar Screen. But maybe with the heat and sun reflected away from the house I won’t have to turn on the air conditioner at all. Sounds like a huge energy saver to me.

 As for my screen door, apparently there is no pet friendly screen that can hold back a German Shepherd. I am going to replace the screen with the Super Solar Screen and buy pet guards to keep Duke from going through it.

• Do-t-yourself Geothermal Cooling System One form of alternative energy you can use in cooling your home is geothermal energy. This might sound surprising, but you can use the energy found in your own backyard by utilizing geothermal heat pumps. You can save up to 70% on cooling bills.The bad news is that professionally installed......
• Building A Solar Food Dehydrator In My Backyard. After seeing a diagram of what one might look like in a magazine, this weekend I spent some time building my first solar food dehydrator. And while it was somewhat of a success, there are some changes I will be making on the next version that I will discuss at......

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. – Helen Keller

 Sometimes people don’t vote because they think “one vote can’t change anything”. I think the 2000 election proved that wrong, but some people still don’t believe. Now is your time to be counted by your elected officials. If you want this country to move forward with cleaner energy contact you Congressional Representatives and Senators today. It only takes a minute but can help save the earth a life time.

 Click here to email your U.S. Representative and Senators about the NAT GAS Act today!

• Fighting Back Against the 'Too Big to Fail' Banks I'm convinced that the current administration will fail to significantly alter the regulatory framework that governs the investment banking community, as well as the fee based business model practiced by the institutional mega-banks. Regardless of the new regulations that will be drafted, or the old regulations that might be......
• Harnessing Solar Energy - The Sustainable Power Of The Sun For thousands of years Man has been attentive to the facility of the sun - it has continuously been thought-about as a great supply of energy and been thought to be a spiritual thing. It's maybe quite shocking then that solely a fraction of the planets energy needs are being......

When it comes to clean energy, saving our environment and living green, the best and only place to start is energy conservation. For every unit of energy saved, a unit of energy does not need to be produced. That sounds so very simple, yet I see it over looked time and time again. People are so impressed with the newest solar product, the next residential wind turbine or if hydrogen technology will replace natural gas, that they forget that all this technology can replace a greater percent of our energy if we use less energy to begin with. In other words energy conservation and efficiency are very often more economically worthwhile than renewable sources and also helps bridge the gap between demand for and availability of renewable energy.

We have all seen list after list of ways to save energy around our house; these should not be pushed to the side because you “did” the list last year. Like all maintenance around the house, conservation cannot be done once and forgotten about, that is why they call it maintenance. There are always new products coming out that can make energy conservation easier, more efficient and more affordable.

My attic is always the first place I look when thinking about energy loss. I have a cathedral ceiling in my living room and just never feel comfortable in the room during the cold winter months. Obviously I have insulated but I still just feel the heat escaping. So I went up to the attic at night leaving the living room lights on and the attic lights off. Bingo! I was able to identify several areas that were not completely insulated around the recessed lighting (make sure your recessed lighting fixtures are rated to have insulation around them). Next I went up to the dark attic on a very sunny morning, before the heat made it unbearable. Again, Bingo! There were a couple of places along the eaves where I could see daylight. Once these were fixed I started looking at different insulation products for attics that were DIY friendly and wallet friendly. Two products caught my eye: Super Insulating Radiant Barrier and the Battic Door Attic Stair Cover.

The Super Insulating Radiant Barrier is a fold out, insulating, reflective product that goes over your current insulation and/or over the roof rafters to create a barrier that actually radiates heat back down to the living space.

The Battic Door Attic Stair Cover is an insulating box that goes over dropdown attic stairs and keeps heat from escaping. This product is a huge improvement over ones of days gone bye. I have had a similar product for about fifteen years and can see this will pay for itself in very short time.

Take time to look at these and other energy saving products. A dollar spent today could save hundreds over a life time not to mention helping to save the environment. Never under estimate the heat, or cooling, loss in your home. Keep vigilant about conservation, any energy saved is energy that does not have to be produced.

• Ten Tips Toward a More Eco Friendly Home Tip 1 - Turn the lights off any time that they are not needed, even if you are just moving from room to room in the course of your day. According to Energy Star, as much as 20 percent of a home's overall energy use comes from its lighting. Using......
• Grocery Store Savings Tips Few spending categories can kill a budget faster than food. For some families the art of frugal grocery shopping comes naturally. We have to work a little harder, but over time we have developed a few tips to help navigate the grocery aisles. Sign up for customer loyalty programs. Larger......

Thumbs up to Ken Salazar and the Department of the Interior, they have issued five leases to private companies to explore offshore sites for wind energy. All these sites are off the shore of New Jersey and Delaware. I hope this is only the beginning of government being proactive in helping private enterprise develop off shore wind sites.

Here in Massachusetts, where I live, Cape Wind has been fighting an uphill battle, at their expense, to get government approval for a project in Nantucket Sound. Eight years of pushing for wind energy is too long if we are actually going to make wind and renewable energy a reality. In order for individual states to meet any renewable energy quota we need more positive government actions like this.  

Lets all pray that the government will continue to put their money and decisions where their mouth is.

• Green Home Improvement Tips The green home improvement movement is very strong these days.  It seems that no matter which direction you look, you’ll find some new article being written about it.  Some of the articles are written by people that are very gung-ho about ecologically friendly home improvement.  There is nothing wrong with......
• Options for Investing in a Stimulated Green Economy Based on what I've read so far, I'm unlikely to be a fan of the Obama stimulus plan.  But all of us who are skeptics need to be practical about it.  Even though I won't be receiving any direct stimulus money, plenty of others will.  So maybe those of us who will not be......

In a June 1^st article by Dan Cook, in Arizona’s The Daily Courier, he wrote about a Habitat for Humanity home that had been built as a “net-zero energy” house.  The idea is to use smart building products and techniques, as well as alternative energy sources, such as solar, so that the house does not use any energy from the grid or fossil fuel. This is a whole new niche in the building industry and there is an unlimited amount of products and services to choose from. The problem is that builders and prospective  homeowners, we don’t know which products are proven, or will work in our situation, or have a chance to see the product installed or talk to a builder who has actually installed the product.

That is why I found this article interesting. If the companies offering these great new innovative energy saving products donated them to Habitat for Humanity, we would all benefit. First the company would win, getting actual exposure to the public with their product, as well as goodwill, for donating the product. Any builder interested in the product could donate their time to help install the product at the Habitat for Humanity job site. This gives them goodwill for helping, but also gives them experience with new products and techniques that they can sell to their clients. The homeowner wins because they are buying a product that they have seen work and are having it installed by someone who has had experience with the product. The recipient of the Habitat for Humanity home wins with lower or no utility bills. And last, but not least, the environment wins every time we do not use fossil fuel to power our world. This could be the ultimate win-win situation.

• Alternative Energy For Homeowners As home heating costs rise, and energy in general gets more expensive, many homeowners are turning to alternative means to power their homes. While many systems require a lot of effort to implement, there are quite a few that can be easy to install and quite economical. Whether it is......
• Solar Power Homes Have you ever ever noticed homes that have huge tinted windows in them as you drive by? You'll wonder why someone would want such tall windows in their home. There's a reason for that and it is because of they're using solar power to heat their homes and to provide......

According to Boston Business Journal, Boston’s Museum of Science announced this week that it will be putting a wind turbine laboratory on its roof. Apparently they have already done wind studies for a year and have come to the conclusion that there is not enough viable wind in their location to create any meaningful electricity. They already have two turbines up and intend to put up three more of varying shapes and sizes ranging from 7 feet to 40 feet. The idea is to “demonstrate small wind turbines that could be erected on small businesses and homes”.

The problem is that small wind turbines cannot be erected on any building, ever. Mother Nature is a very formidable force to deal with. Any and all wind turbines have an incredible vibration; this can cause both structural and noise problems. Roof top turbines have been known to cause nails to vibrate right out of the roof. While the museum roof may be substantial enough to withstand this, with a full time maintenance crew, the average home is not engineered to withstand these forces. 

Second, there is no usable wind on a roof. When you see a small wind turbine on a roof spinning wildly, it looks like it would be generating plenty of power. The truth is, all that spinning is the turbine trying to find a steady wind in a very turbulent area. Wind is invisible, and most people don’t understand what they can’t see. Think of a stick lazily drifting down a calm stream, making slow but steady progress, then there is a rock in the way, the stick goes around the rock but gets caught twirling in the eddy behind it, there is a lot of movement, but no progress. Wind is the same way, once it hits an object, such as a house or a tree; there is wind turbulence behind the object. Another way of looking at this is a sailboat in the lee of a bluff. You feel the wind on your face, it feels strong, but the sail is slapping madly and the boat is going nowhere. A wind turbine is the same way as it searches for the wind in the turbulence.

The Boston Museum of Science would be doing the public a huge favor by teaching the physics of wind and turbulence using smoke chambers and roof mock ups to show how a nail or a screw can be loosened due to vibration. They should teach the benefits of clean wind energy when placed in the right location and the uselessness of putting it in the wrong location. With all my heart I hope the Boston Museum of Science is not advocating building mounted turbines, not only would they be putting the public at risk physically and promoting a waste of money, they will be putting a black mark on wind energy when these turbines never produce any meaningful electricity.

Look for an upcoming blog on proper wind turbine location.

For more information check out the Warwick Wind Trials data on building mounted turbines.

• How To Integrate Feng Shui & Green Living: Ask Maureen K. Calamia /caption] Feng Shui developed about 4000 years.  It originally is an art form that was developed by the Chinese civilization to enhance the positive life force energy "chi"  within the living spaces. What makes Maureen's Feng Shui consulting unique is that she combines the Green living concepts with Feng Shui. ......
• Is Solar Panels Electricity Widely Acceptable? by Joan T. Ritzborough According to the Energy Information Administration in 2006 around 86 percent of this planet's primary energy production was powered by fossil fuels. This fact alone showed us that despite of the advanced technology we are using in this modern era we are still depending on the......

I just read a blog this morning on how salmonella is unchecked in the frozen foods we buy. The article was more politically oriented and I don’t want to get into that. But it brought up a good point about global warming.

If you buy a head of lettuce grown in California and you live in Maine, how does it get to you? Think about this, the soil is prepared and the lettuce is planted using large fossil fuelled machinery. Then there is mega amounts of water wasted as huge sprinkler systems water the crops and everything in between. Then there is that wonderful fertilizer, the kind you wonder what it contains. Then we get our trusty underpaid, underappreciated immigrant workers to harvest the crop and package it for shipping. Then it is sent to a refrigerated distribution center and put into large, refrigerated trucks to be sent across the country, using diesel fuel all the way. Now once it is on the other coast it goes to another distribution center and sent out in another truck. Finally, about a week after being picked it goes on your grocery store shelve.

That head of lettuce has probably used more fuel to get to the store than you used to run errands this week. A better option would be to buy local produce. Now that summer is around the corner, numerous farmers markets will be selling their goods. This not only saves all that waste of shipping your lettuce across the country, but it feeds the local economy and environment.

Better yet, grow your own. Especially if you have young children, this is a rewarding endeavor. You will be teaching your children a life long lesson that no school could possibly teach, not to mention children are more likely to eat vegetables they grew. As an added bonus your children will not be ingesting dangerous chemicals from artificially fertilized food. There is nothing more satisfying than eating produce you grew yourself and knowing you helped the environment.

If you are new to the horticultural lifestyle try Organic Food Gardening Beginners Manual.

• Green Building Materials Green Construction is the practice of building in a way that increases efficiency of the use of materials like energy, water and other materials and resources while reducing the impact on human health and the environment during the process of building through more efficient design, site selection, construction, operation, maintenance......
• 10 Ways to Prove that Frugal Living is Really Green Living in Disguise. I'm probably the most unlikely Green Living advocate on the planet. I'm an advocate of offshore drilling, I voted for Bush in 2004 (bad call I know), and I drive a crossover SUV. Yet, more and more these days, I find myself being slowly taken in by the tree hugger......

Haven’t you always wanted to go to a convention and find out more information, but you just couldn’t justify the time and expense of going? Now is your chance. Virtual Energy Forum is offering a free two-day converence on clean energy. No plane trip, no hotel room and no credit card bill!

Just sit down at your computer and wonder through the convention. Catch a live presentation by a keynote speaker or ask a vendor some questions. All while sitting at your desk, you can learn the latest about the most important issue facing the world.

This is your chance to find out how you can make a difference in clean energy without wasting any of your energy. Sign up today for free at Virtual Energy Forum. They can’t make it any easier than that. Set the date June 24th and June 25th, 2009.

• Study Shows Homeowners Using Landscaping to Save Energy and Water In this current day and age, where common activities among people include the tightening of wallets and the fearing of soaring energy bills, almost everyone has had to adopt some substantial practices inside and outside of their own homes. Americans are also incorporating techniques in their landscaping that are allowing......
• What is Solar Energy? by Walter Hull The Sun is like a giant power station, making solar energy for us each and every day. Without this daily dose of solar power, Earth would not be even close to the same. Literally the difference would be like night and day. The term solar energy is......