Here are some tips to save you some money by adjusting your household habits and making some changes around your house:

Light bulbs

Replacing your regular incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) will require 70 percent less energy, and while they cost more than regular bulbs, they will last much longer.

Install dimmers on light bulbs to save energy and extend their life. Timers work well for front-door and security-related lights; sensors, which turn on lights only when needed, are ideal for outdoors.

Potential Savings: At least $90 a year.

Total Energy Savings: If every American home swapped just five incandescent bulb fixtures for Energy Star CFLs, it would keep 1 trillion pounds of greenhouse gases out of the air and save $6.5 billion in energy costs.

Electronics

Unplug DVD players and TVs, or plug them all into a power strip you can switch off. Sixty to 80 percent of the electricity they use is consumed while they’re idle, powering light displays and “instant on” features (such as the remote’s ability to talk to the TV).

Unplug “wall warts,” or plugs attached to a black transformer box (like a cell-phone charger). If they are plugged into an outlet, they are sucking up electricity whether charging another device or not.

Ideally, unplug or turn off your computer when it’s not in use. If you can’t do this, use its power-saving sleep mode, which uses 60 to 80 percent less energy than full-power mode. Visit www.energystar.gov to learn how to activate your computer’s power-saving mode or to download free software that enables these options on computers that don’t have them. At the very least, turn your monitor off instead of using a screensaver.

Turn off printers, copiers, and fax machines when they’re not in use. Don’t rely on sleep mode.

Potential Savings: As much as $175 a year.

Green Point: Using power management on your desktop computer could save 900 kilowatt-hours a year. That amounts to 1,500 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of driving a medium-size car from New York to Salt Lake City.

Appliances

Replace a top-loading washing machine with a front-loader, which generally uses 50 percent less energy and a third less water. With those savings, it will pay for itself in six years and should last for 10.

Do several loads of laundry in one stint every week, and dry the loads back-to-back to capture residual heat in the dryer.

Run only full dishwasher loads. The most efficient machines use a third of the water of hand washing. About 80 percent of a dishwasher’s energy use goes to heating water. Select “unheated air-drying” to cut that by 12 percent.

Potential Savings: $400 a year.

Green Point: A front-loading Energy Star–certified clothes washer saves enough energy annually to light your entire home for a month and a half, and it saves as much water in a year as the average person drinks in a lifetime.

Source: Real Simple Magazine

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