Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

close your curtains to keep the heat in your home. In the morning when you wake up, push the curtains back and let the sun shine in to brighten and warm up your rooms. It’s so simple, but it really can lower your heating bill, which saves you energy . . . and gives you more money to spend on clothes and makeup!

It’s important to mention that not all window treatments go on the inside of your home. You can mount awnings outside—particularly on south- and west-facing windows—to block the hot summer sun.

As you know, the sun is much higher in the sky during the summer. Awnings—as well as eaves and overhangs on the outside of a house—will block that really hot summer sun, reducing your cooling costs. When the sun gets lower in the sky in the wintertime, as it moves toward the winter solstice, it’s able to reach beneath the awnings and hit your windows, helping to heat your rooms for free. That is the beauty of the wraparound porches that you see on older homes, particularly in the South.

But you don’t have to do a major remodel to get these same benefits in your home. Relatively inexpensive awnings are a very effective way to turn your home into a passive solar house.

You can achieve a similar effect by planting deciduous trees—trees that lose their leaves in the fall and winter. Plant them on the south side of your home—and perhaps to the west and east as well—where they will shade your house from the baking sun in summer. And in winter-time, what happens? The leaves drop off those trees, allowing the sun to warm your house.

In lieu of double-pane windows—or any of the more expensive window treatments—another low-cost alternative worth considering is window films. These films can be applied to any window to block a portion of the UV rays entering a room. They reduce heat gain dramatically in the summer, and they also help keep your carpet, furniture, and other possessions from fading, while you still enjoy lots of daylight.

Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs

I love compact fluorescent lightbulbs. I love them! When I talk about pursuing the energy-saving low-hanging fruit, CFLs represent an entire orchard.

The SS Begley is lit completely by CFLs—all I have throughout the entire house are CFLs. Some of the bulbs in my house, particularly the ones in my home office, I bought in the early 1990s . . . and they’re still burning. They save an incredible amount of energy and money.

I’m such a big fan of CFLs that I would actually lobby to outlaw incandescent bulbs.

The State of California and several European countries are considering passing legislation to outlaw incandescent bulbs and make the use of CFLs mandatory. People have asked me if I would support that legislation. Not only would I support it, I would lobby for it.

Here’s the bottom line on compact fluorescent lightbulbs:

• CFLs use two-thirds less energy than standard incandescent lightbulbs, yet they provide the same amount of light. A CFL may draw just 18 watts of power, but it puts out 60 watts’ worth of light.

• The average CFL lasts nine times longer than a normal bulb—most people say they’re going to last ten years, and I’ve got some that have lasted as long as sixteen or seventeen years.

• Each CFL saves at least $30 in energy costs over its lifetime vs. a regular lightbulb.

• CFLs generate 70 percent less heat than regular bulbs, making them safer to operate and keeping your home cooler in the summer months.

• If every American home replaced just one standard lightbulb with a CFL, it would reduce greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of nearly 800,000 cars.

And here’s great news: Even if money is really tight, you can still switch to compact fluorescent bulbs. You can get them for free from a utility like the Department of Water and Power, like Pacific Gas and Electric, like Southern California Edison, like Con Ed. A lot of these utilities will give you compact fluorescent bulbs because they’ve discovered that it’s cheaper for them. The cheapest kilowatts they can produce these days are kilowatts saved. It’s very, very difficult to site and build a new power plant—all the expense, all the red tape involved, the environmental review. And the fuel sources are natural gas and coal. What’s the future of that? So utility companies are really on board with saving power, not creating more and more demand from their customers.

The CFL Naysayers

Granted, there are people who look at CFLs and see problems. The mercury content, the quality of light—I’ve heard them all, even from my wife. These people are more comfortable with the old technology that they’re used to, and they don’t want to give it up. I understand that, but it’s shortsighted thinking. So let me address a couple of the issues people raise surrounding compact fluorescent lightbulbs.

1.         Toxic elements in CFLs. There’s an environmental cost to everything. Look at my mountain bike. The plating processes used to create it are toxic. It has rubber tires. Energy was used both to fabricate the mountain bike and to ship it to me. But if you look at the life cycle of that bike, the amount of energy that I’m using by riding that bike around fueled by an ear of corn or a bowl of rice (human fuel, rather than fossil fuel), as opposed to what I’d use getting around in an automobile, there’s no contest. I hope that everybody would agree with that.

It’s the same with a compact fluorescent lightbulb. CFLs do contain toxic elements. There’s a bit of mercury in some of them, although manufacturers have been working to reduce this substantially, and some have a bit of lead in the switch, as well. But these are very small amounts, extremely small. They must be disposed of responsibly and cannot go into a