Any ideas on things i can do to reduce energy?

Question

specifically water use. the bills are always high and i can't afford it.

Answer 1

Here's a great article on how you can conserve energy:

http://www.greenstudentu.com/Energy_Cons...

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

have s*x with the lights off, dont watch TV, turn off your computer, cook food with fire, dont use a dishwasher, or a washing machine.

Answer 3

Also -- when washing your dishes

after soaking dishes with already used water, soap them all up and then rinse quickly w/tap (or turn off tap to soap)

Same method almost in the shower -- use the tap to wet your hair and body, turn off the tap to soap, then rinse quickly.

Recycle as much water as you can

-- reuse changed fish tank water or old dog bowel water for plants or soaking dishes or even yourself.

If you have a tank toilet, put a brick or something similar in the tank part

After the first visit, you don't have to flush for EVERYTHING. use your discretion  -- Of course wash the bowl 1ce a day

Finally, always visit the restroom before you leave to go home.

Answer 4

Shorter showers and catch water off your roof in a barrel for washing vehicles and watering.

Answer 5

Since you said specifically water use, I will say what I do as

on fixed income.  I have a dishwasher that I no longer use.

1.  I have a bucket that I fill to rinse the dishes I wash.

2.  When it rains, I have containers to catch it...only after the

first 30 min. due to acid rain.  Can use for many things.

3.  I asked and received for free, 4 plastic 55 gal. drums that

I placed under my house's rain gutters to collect water for my

garden and other uses.

4.  Yes, make sure all faucet leaks are fixed.

5.  Short showers...my father was military...3 minute showers!

Wet...lather...rinse.  There were 8 of us!

6.  If you want other ideas, let me know.  : )

Answer 6

These are from seventeen.com

Ways to go green

Unplug your power. Ten percent of the electricity used in your home is burned by communication devices and appliances when they are turned off! If every U.S. household just unplugged their computers and cell phone chargers when they were not being used, collectively we'd save over $100 million — enough to provide free health care to every low-income child under the age of five in the state of California.

If you can, send a text message or e-mail from a handheld device or cell phone, instead of from a computer, especially for quick, one-line notes. You’ll save yourself time and conserve energy. Compared to sending a text message, e-mailing and instant messaging from a computer uses more than 30 times the electricity per message.

Use both sides of your plain paper, and recycle. Paper is the biggest form of waste that comes from schools. Every ton, or 220,000 sheets, of paper that is recycled saves approximately 17 trees. The average school tosses 38 tons of paper per year, or more than 8 million sheets!

Buy clothes made from organic cotton. The purchase of one T-shirt and a pair of jeans made from 100 percent organic cotton eliminates at least 150 grams of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides from the environment. If one out of every five Americans purchased a 100 percent organic T-shirt instead of one made from conventionally grown U.S. cotton, nearly 50,000 tons of agrochemicals would be prevented from polluting U.S. freshwater bodies, ecosystems, and wardrobes.

17 Tip: To really stay green, wash your organic threads in Arm & Hammer's Essential laundry detergent. It's the first detergent made of 100% plant-based soaps, and its concentrated formula and packaging make it more sensible for the environment.

Gift cards, concert tickets, restaurant certificates, and movie vouchers can be great alternatives to heavily packaged and wrapped holiday presents. If you buy these items online, you'll not only save between five and 10 pounds of packaging waste, but you'll also reduce the time, stress, and energy associated with traffic, crowds, and long check-out lines. If 50 percent of households replaced just two packaged presents with gifts that could slide inside an envelope, 50 million pounds or more of waste could be saved.

If you're planning to buy a new computer, consider getting a laptop or notebook instead of a desktop. Laptops require less materials and energy to produce than desktops and use a fraction of the electricity to run. If you choose a laptop over a desktop, you'll save an average of 220 kilowatt hours per year and about $20 on your annual electricity bill. If one in 23 households made their next computer purchase a laptop instead of a desktop, the energy saved could keep the lights on for every household in Silicon Valley.

Try to limit the frequency with which you replace your cell phone, and make sure you e-cycle (dispose of it through an electronic waste-management company) or donate your old one. If you keep each mobile phone you buy for three years instead of just 18 months, you'll effectively cut the resources needed to make a new one. If just 10 percent of cell phone users kept their next phone for three years before replacing it, an average of 5.2 million phones could be saved from disposal each year.

Instead of buying a disposable plastic bottle of water every time you go to the gym, consider bringing your own reusable water bottle filled with filtered water from home. You could save an average of $200 per year, as well as 14 pounds of plastic. If one in 20 gym members who generally buy a bottle of water before each workout brought a reusable water bottle from home, the total plastic saved annually would total nearly 29 million pounds, a weight that would take 200,000 people each bench-pressing 150 pounds to lift.

Buy a quality razor with refillable blades. Disposable plastic razors are neither recyclable nor biodegradable, and they take significantly more energy to produce. If for the next year you replaced your purchases of disposable razors with refill cartridges, the amount of energy saved by not manufacturing the extra plastic could brew you five pots of coffee. If half of the disposable razors sold per year were replaced with refills, the energy saved could fly 26,000 San Diego java lovers to pick their own Kona coffee on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Try to do your cardio workouts on equipment that doesn't require an external power supply. Choose, for example, a stationary bike or elliptical machine over a treadmill or stair-stepper. For a 40-minute workout, you could save 0.8 kilowatt hours of energy — the amount of energy you'd burn if you ran seven miles. If, for a whole year, you stayed off the treadmill and rode the bike five times per week instead, you'd save 160 kilowatt hours of energy — roughly the energy you'd expend by running the length of Interstate 5 from Mexico to the Canadian border.

Bring your own workout towel instead of using one that your gym provides. You'll not only reduce your exposure to harsh detergents, bleaches, and other disinfectants, but you'll also help save water and energy as well. If just 1 percent of fitness club members in the U.S. were to start bringing their own workout towels, 4,000 less load of laundry would have to be washed per day — an annual savings of more than 36 million gallons of water.

If you buy bath salts or bubble bath, try to buy concentrated varieties. For example, bubble bath brands that recommend one tablespoon (one-half ounce, or one capful) per bath will last twice as long as those that suggest one ounce (two capfuls) per bath. If you buy a 16-ounce plastic bottle of bubble bath every other month and switched to a more concentrated version, you could save a total of about one-quarter pound of plastic and $10 to $20 per year or more. If one in 100 households decreased their bubble bath purchases in this way, the savings would total 250,000 pounds of plastic. This much plastic could build a wading pool the size of Wrigley Field.

You can minimize waste by buying eyeliner pencils encased in wood instead of pencils or liquids contained within plastic. Wood shavings have the potential to biodegrade, whereas plastics do not. If one in 20 eyeliner users switched from using plastic-encased pencils to wooden ones, nearly 10,000 pounds of plastic could be saved.

If you use pressed eye shadow, choose a brand that provides a reusable compact with slots for refills. Each time you buy a refill instead of an entirely new container you'll reduce your costs, the amount of energy used to produce and ship the hard plastic, glass, or chrome packaging (some of which come with mirrors), and the amount of waste you discard when it's empty. If one in 25 women chose refillable eye shadow, more than 350,000 pounds of wasted cosmetics containers could be saved each year.

If the lotion you usually buy comes with a pump dispenser, you can avoid sending another hand pump to the landfill by purchasing a refill container with a flip-top and just reusing your empty bottle. If 10 percent of U.S. households made a onetime purchase of a lotion bottle without an attached pump, the plastic saved would be an estimated 250,000 pounds — enough lotion pumps to fill nearly 1,200 tanning booths from floor to ceiling.

Use bars of soap versus liquid wash. It's less expensive, and it saves packaging waste. The average bar of soap lasts for about 20 showers, whereas a 16-ounce bottle of body wash lasts for an average of 80 showers. But body wash costs on average more than four times as much as soap. If every U.S. household replaced a bottle of body wash with a bar of soap, roughly 2.5 million pounds of plastic containers could be diverted from the waste stream.

Given that the average woman may inadvertently ingest more than four pounds of lipstick in her lifetime, you'll want to look for lip color made from plant-derived ingredients instead of from synthetic oils, paraffin waxes, and toxic coal tar dyes (look for FD&C or D&C followed by a color and number). If one in five lipstick wearers began demanding plant-based options, total petroleum product consumption would decrease by more than 825,000 pounds per year.

Hope I helped!

-the deviate

Answer 7

Don't use clean water to soak dirty dishes.

Use a scouring pad to remove the oily stuff first, then use the same pad to remove the non-oily stuff. The non-oily stuff will absorb the oils, and then you'll need less detergent.

Use a spray bottle to wet and rinse yourself, instead of showering. You'd be surprised at how squeaky clean you can get with just 1 litre. You'd still use soap and shampoo. It's just a matter of using another way to wet yourself. It'll cool you off a lot, so it'll probably be only good for the summer.

Invent a way for everybody to flush urine down to the sewer for only 1 cup per flush. I think that the solution is to have a thin tube with very little water in it, and to be able to let the user get close without having to touch it, and without having any splashes.

Find a way to easily use grey water for flushing toilets.

Answer 8

Shorter showers using lukewarm water, and turn off the faucet while you soap up.

Not letting the tap run while you brush your teeth, wash your face, shave, soap up dishes, etc.

Avoid watering your lawn (it's not really necessary anyway).

Fix leaking faucets--that's buckets of water that add up that you don't use.

Wash only full loads of clothes, and only wash clothes if they actually need washing.

Install a toilet that only uses 6 litres of water.

Do not flush if you don't have to (for instance, don't flush the toilet if you blow your nose and toss the tissue in it--tissues go in the biodegradable waste bin anyway, not the toilet.)

Wash dishes by hand instead of using the dishwasher.

Answer 9

I will make a lot of assumptions like you use a shower and the shower head is water saving type.  That you do use a dish washer however fill each time you turn it on and not just do a couple of plates and a pan.

In Europe, they wet towels to wash themselves. And I don't mean a little pat here and there. A full all out towel washing. They brush their teeth with water in a small cup (rinse with fresh).

Shave in the shower and actually have a valve which stops the water flow when soaping and then a quick wet down.

As you can see depends on your usage right now you may not be saving any more water but over a year could add up.

Washing clothes. It will take the purchase of those front loading water misers. However the cheapest way is to cold water wash most of your clothing and hang to dry. There are some washer out there that reuse the wash water once before it goes down the drain and are not as costly.

Answer 10

Well, a really easy way to save water is to cut your showers short about 2 minutes. That will save you enough water to fill up a swimming pool at the end of the year. You could also turn off the water when you brush your teeth. Some people use up about 5 gallons just to brush their teeth!