• Save Money on Heating and Cooling
• Reduce The Size of Your Living Area
• Small Energy Efficient Air Conditioner
• Small Energy Efficient Space Heaters
• Insulate Your Small Room to Save Even More Energy

Save Money on Heating and Cooling

According to the US Department of Energy, heating and cooling represent approximately 56% of energy use in the typical US home. There should be a prioritization when it comes time to work out the energy efficiency of your home — and you should start with the biggest energy wasting culprits and then work down the line. Heating and cooling are the biggest culprits. Before you consider spending tens of thousands of dollars converting your home to solar, it makes good sense to save money on heating and cooling and reduce your overall power consumption first.

Reduce The Size of Your Living Area

Perhaps you are like me — you work at home. Perhaps you were at one time like me — with a huge office area. Heating or cooling a large area is extremely inefficient for energy use. In my case, I selected our smallest bedroom and this became both my office and bedroom. During extremes of temperature, this is where I spend 95% of my time in our home. This had some obvious benefits:

• If I need to heat, I am only heating one small room.
• If I need to cool, I am only cooling down one small room.
• It is far cheaper to insulate one small room.

It costs money to heat and to cool, but it also costs money to upgrade your house.  Stopping air leaks, heavy insulation and energy efficient windows are all great ways to conserve energy — but it can be a tough pill to swallow if you need to upgrade your entire home at once and you are on a budget.  Start with a very small room — this will give you immediate savings for a small investment.

Small Energy Efficient Air Conditioner

[amazon-product align="left"]B003F4TH6G[/amazon-product]The Frigidaire FRA052XT7 5,000 BTU Mini Window Air Conditioner has excellent reviews at amazon. 5000 btu is just about the smallest aircon you can buy. This size air conditioner will cool a space of about 100 to 150 square feet. Again, this Frigidaire air conditioner has excellent reviews — 17 at the time and they have 4.5 out of 5 stars (about the best of any similar air conditioner I was able to find).

One of the most amazing things about this air conditioner is what it does with the excess water. As I’m sure you all know — air conditioners constantly drip water. Nearly 100% of the air conditioners available on the market today simply treat this water as an irritating annoyance that you have to find some where to drip it all — usually out your wall and into a bed of rocks or something beneath.

This air conditioner does something amazing with the water. It makes your air even that much colder — using science. When water evaporates, energy is absorbed into the air, taking heat with it. This is why, when you sweat, that you feel cool when a breeze blows on your body — the evaporating water creates a cooling sensation on your skin. There are actually air conditioners available out there that only use evaporating water to cool the air. (Unfortunately, they consume lots of water — making them very wasteful in another area as they save you money on electricity).

That is where the beauty of the Frigidaire 5,000 BTU Mini Window Air Conditioner comes in. It plugs into your wall as all conventional air conditioners do, but it also takes the excess dripping water produced by air conditioners and evaporates it on the outside of your house to cause pre-cooling of air before it enters the air conditioner. This little bit of technology both makes the air conditioner far more efficient, and gets rid of the accumulating water in a non-annoying way. For more information on this amazing small and energy-efficient air conditioner, click the amazon link above and order securely from amazon.com.

Small Energy Efficient Space Heaters

[amazon-product align="left"]B000TGDGLU[/amazon-product]People have so many great reviews of this product — after researching small energy efficient space heaters I decided this is the one I would point my readers to.

After reading many reviews (the DeLonghi EW7707CM Oil-filled Radiator has 204 helpful reviews so it was easy to research) — the impression is that it is silent, it does not over-heat or “burn” the air as many ceramic type electric heaters do. One reviewer put it as “gentle heat” without a sound.

With a name that has “oil” in it, it may make you think that this heater actually burns oil. It does not. Instead, it warms oil on the inside which gives off radiant heat. This is still an electric heater.

Here is a description that one person gave, one of its 204 reviews — “I had these two units, one running approximately 12 hours a day for a month and it raised my electric bill $30. This is in comparison with running my gas heater (which is terrible) for two weeks for $30.” Essentially she found it the same price as her gas heater, but without the smell and other problems that can occur from gas heaters.

The DeLonghi Oil-filled Radiator is one of many options of space heaters you could get to heat just the rooms you are using, conserving energy by only heating one room instead of your entire home.

Insulate Your Small Room to Save Even More Energy

According to the Department of Energy, 30 to 40% of heat loss escapes through uninsulated attics. In addition, they claim that 30% of your home heating and cooling bill can be reduced through proper insulation. Energy Star windows can again reduce heat lost from your windows by 30 to 40% (amazing how everything is 30 to 40%?)

In summary, the gist of this entire article is that heating and cooling are the biggest part of your overall energy use. By confining your activities to a smaller room and only heating and cooling that one room — you can reduce your power bills by a significant amount, perhaps even thousands of dollars a year.

I realize that many people come to this site to learn how to make solar panels. As much as I love solar panels and think everyone else should too — the bottom line is that most homes out there aren’t ready for it. They aren’t ready, because there are far more things that are simpler, easier to do and you don’t need a guide for which will save you more money than solar panels will save you. Take the time to learn how to properly reduce your energy consumption. Then when you believe you have done a respectable job of it — and are impressed with how low you have brought your electricity consumption, this is when you do a solar panel installation. Then, you will have a true view of how much electricity you consume when you are conserving energy, so you can better estimate how large of a solar panel system you will require in order to break-even on power consumption.