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The City of Berkeley has launched a “Money for Energy Efficiency” Program. The program will allow 120 homes to receive up to $8,500 in rebates for energy efficiency improvements.

The rebates can be applied to:

o   Comprehensive Energy Audit

o   Attic, Wall & Floor Insulation

o   Draft and Duct Sealing

o   Energy Efficient Lighting Improvements

o   Door, Window, Furnace & Water Heater Replacements

The funding comes from federal stimulus money awarded to Berkeley by the U.S. Department of Energy under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act and will be awarded to homeowners though a lottery.

To sign up for the program go to the program website and submit your application before the July 20 deadline.

Remember, energy independence starts at home.

-Nat Smith

As we approach the end of Save Money, Energy and Water Week, you may at this point be wandering around your house glaring at your appliances accusingly, wondering just how much juice each one is guzzling anyway.  There are a couple of ways to find out:   A free method is an on-line tool that tells you how many watts common household appliances use and approximately how much they cost to run.  For example, you may surprised to learn that your iron is costing you $28 a year–I know I was, since I don’t own an iron.

For total accuracy, you’ll need to buy a Power Cost Monitor which tells you exactly how much electricity any appliance in your home consumes.  But before you start clicking your way toward buying one of these devices, ask yourself whether you’ll actually use it to help yourself become an energy miser.  Bear in mind that there’s a lot of embedded energy and rare metals in portable electronic devices so, unless you really think it will help you conserve electricity, stick with the free on-line tool or consider going in on a Power Monitor with a few neighbors.  On the other hand, if you have a gadget-crazed family member who would make the most of a Power Monitor, go for it–it would make the perfect Father’s Day gift for the right kind of Baby Boomer dad.

One final tip–if you don’t like CFL bulbs and have been squirreling away incandescents in anticipation of the national phaseout in 2012, take a look at LED lighting.  It’s more expensive but has important advantages over CFLs, including zero mercury, a warm quality to the light, and incredible longevity.  A 9-watt (40-watt incandescent equivalent) LED bulb at Home Depot goes for $40, but it will last for 20 years and use 15% less energy than a CFL, so you’ll break even in the end.

We wind down the Home Energy Smackdown today on Bike to Work Day.  We hope that, over the course of the week, you’ve experimented with some lifestyle habits that require less gas, electricity and water.  Drop us a line and let us know how it’s going.

–Erica Etelson

Okay, let’s jump right into it.  You’ve heard about all the rebates available for making medium-to-large home energy retrofits.  But here are a handful of simple, free steps you can take right now.  Some of them involve changing lifelong habits which can be challenging.   Enlist other members of your household to remind each other to stick to the new rules.

If you need inspiration, consider the fact that Americans use 50% more energy in their homes today than they did thirty years ago, and I don’t think most of us were suffering too badly for lack of electric conveniences back in 1980.  If you really want to trip out, consider the fact that the average American uses as much energy as two Europeans, five Chinese, seven Mexicans, 28 Indians,  and 146 Sudanese.  That said:

• When you leave a room, turn out the light.
• “Off” doesn’t necessarily mean a device is no longer drawing electricity:  If it blinks, unplug it from the wall.  Plug all your electronics into a power strip, and then turn the strip off at night.  We call this one “slaying the vampire.”
• Minimize the number of cordless phones in your home–they suck power 24/7.
• Put a note on your computer saying, “Turn me off at bedtime.”  I know what you’re thinking–that it takes more energy to reboot the computer than it does to leave it on all night.  Without getting into all the studies that have been done on that, suffice to say…”Wrong.”  Turn it off. (If you get in the habit of turning off your computer and using power-saving features, you’ll reduce your carbon emissions by more than a ton and save between $50 and $75 a year).
• Wash your clothes and hands in cold water.  They get just as clean and, if you use soap, the germs are just as dead as if you used warm water.
• Hang dry laundry–you can do this in all seasons on a drying rack inside the house.  Clothes dryers are one of the biggest household energy sucks.
• Run the dishwasher only when full and use the air-dry cycle.
• Set your water heater at 120º.
• A watched pot boils faster with a lid on it.
• Don’t open the oven while it’s on-the temperature drops 25 degrees every time you do.  Preheat only for baking bread or cake, not for roasting meat or vegetables or for reheating leftovers.

Tame your fridge

• The fridge and freezer can be set to the warmest temperature settings without causing food spoilage–don’t make these units any colder than they need to be (fridge at 38º, freezer at 5º).
• If your refrigerator or freezer isn’t full, place jugs of water in it–it runs more efficiently when full (for the freezer, don’t fill the jug more than 3/4 full because it will expand when frozen).
• Don’t store stuff on top of the fridge.
• Vacuum the coils in the back of the fridge every few months (go ahead, put it on your calendar right now) and, if possible, try not to have the fridge right next to the oven (duh, I know, but guess where mine is?)

Climate control

• For every three degrees you lower your heat, you reduce your greenhouse emissions by half a ton.
• Put a note on the inside of your front door reminding you to turn off the heat/AC and all lights when you leave home.
• If you have a programmable thermostat, you can set the AC for 79º (or higher) while at home and 85º  while you’re away (though if you’re going to be away for more than a day, just turn it off).  Set the heat at 68º when you’re home (or as cold as you can stand it, put on a sweater for God’s sake), 60º while you’re asleep and 55º while you’re away (or, again, turn it off if you’re going to be away for longer than a day).  You can also program it to start warming up/cooling down about an hour before your anticipated return.
• Use shades or curtains to prevent the sun from heating up a room.  Generally, keeping the windows closed until later afternoon and then opening them to bring in cool air is the most effective strategy but experiment for yourself.  Houseplants can also help keep your home cool, seriously!

Water-wise tips

• Compost your food waste instead of using a garbage disposal.
• Turn off the faucet while brushing your teeth or washing dishes.  Letting the faucet run for five minutes uses as much energy as a 60-watt light bulb on for 14 hours (which of course you would never do!).
• Take shorter and/or fewer showers. You’ve heard that one a million times but give it a try.
• When it comes to the toilet, you know the saying, “If it’s mellow, let it yellow…”
• Cars don’t need to be washed.  Ever.
• Catch cold shower water in a bucket and use it for flushing the toilet or watering plants.
• Water the garden in early morning or after 8 pm.  Don’t overwater–stick your finger in the dirt, and only water if it’s dry more than two inches below the surface.  Water slowly and deeply to train plant roots to go deep.
• Mulch heavily in the garden.
• Keep grass mowed high or simply lose your lawn and re-plant with drought-tolerant vegetation.

Okay, that’s a lot of advice, so don’t expect to do everything at once.  Choose one or two tips a week and see if you can retrain those habits.  Once you’re successful, target another couple of habits.  Celebrate with a beeswax candlelit raw food dinner followed by a nice relaxing cold shower (ha ha, just kidding, sort of).

If you want to geek out, compare your utility bills to the same month’s bill from last year to see how much you’re saving.  I was able to cut my water bill by a third and my electricity down to almost zero (I have solar panels).  Natural gas has been the hardest to smack down but, by keeping our heat at 63º this winter, my family was able to get nudge it down a good bit.  If I can do it, so can you…good luck!

(By the way, feel free to share any other free/low-cost energy saving ideas in the comment section below).

–Erica Etelson

As promised, today we kick off Save Money, Energy and Water Week here on the Sungevity blog.  And lo’ and behold, perfect timing…Last Thursday, the House passed the Home Star Energy Retrofit Act of 2010, a $6 billion rebate program that will help homeowners pay for energy efficiency retrofits that will save them $9.4 billion over the next decade.

President Obama will definitely sign the bill once the details are reconciled between the House and Senate.  In the meantime, many California utilities already offer generous rebates-get started with what’s available right now and you’ll be able to tame your energy and water bills this summer:

LADWP customers can receive free shade trees and rebates for energy-efficient refrigerators, air conditioners, pool pumps, windows and high-efficiency (HE) clothes washers.

Southern California Edison offers rebates for energy-efficient lighting, refrigerators, electric water heaters, pool pumps, air conditioners, whole-house fans, and evaporative cooling systems (aka “swamp coolers”).

If you’re in the Riverside Public Utilities district, check out their triple rebate on insulation and other rebates for refrigerators, dishwashers, air conditioners, ceiling fans, shade trees, irrigation, drought-tolerant plants, and HE clothes washers and toilets.

San Diego Gas & Electric ratepayers will find rebates on attic insulation, natural gas furnaces, refrigerators, pool pumps, air conditioners, whole house fans, and dishwashers and can get a free water conservation kit.

If you’re a PG&E customer, take advantage of rebates for clothes washers, dishwashers, water heaters, room air conditioners, cool roofs, attic and wall insulation, gas furnaces, duct sealing, whole-house fans, pool pumps and motors and fluorescent lighting.  PG&E has also just begun offering rebates for solar hot water heaters, but the details on how to access this program are not yet clear.

Alameda Municipal Power customers can get rebates for refrigerators and insulation

EBMUD customers can get a free water conservation self-audit kit as well as rebates for HE clothes washers and toilets, sustainable landscaping, mulch and irrigation.  EBMUD will also send you freelow-flow shower-heads, faucet aerators, toilet low-flush bags and garden hose nozzles.

San Francisco Water offers rebates for HE toilets and clothes washers and provides free HE toilets to low-income residents.

Also, be sure visit the home page for the city you live in to see what it has to offer, especially for low-income residents.  Some of the municipalities in California we know have programs include Sonoma County, Santa Monica, Berkeley, San Francisco, Alameda County Water District, Palm Desert, and Ukiah.

And lastly, heads up Do-It-Yourselfers, here’s a guide to how to caulk and weather strip your home all by yourself.  If that sounds too ambitious, even a DIY knucklehead can at least install a programmable thermostat (33% savings on heating and cooling), set your water heater to 120º, and switch to CFL bulbs (75% less energy than incandescent and bulb lasts 8 times longer) or LED lighting (90% less energy and bulb last 40 times longer).

Most of the energy efficiency improvements outlined today require at least a small initial investment that will pay itself back and then some over time.  For those of you who are ready to start smacking down your utility bills right now without investing a dime, tune in tomorrow for the Free Home Energy Smack Down.

–Erica Etelson

You’ve put up your solar panels, turned down the thermostat, and spent a frustrating afternoon trying to make foam weather stripping stick to your window frames instead of your hair.  Meanwhile, your neighbor’s living room could be mistaken for a sauna but for the six-foot high plasma TV that’s on all day.  Why bother?

Your peers may be more influenced by your miserly ways than you realize.  Utilities, including SMUD in Sacramento, Opower in Virginia and National Grid in the Northeast, have discovered that when they show their customers how their energy usage compares with that of their neighbors, usage drops.  Information about how much energy others are using, especially information showing that others are taking steps to conserve energy, seems to exert peer pressure to conserve.  No one wants to be seen as the neighborhood energy hog.

An Opower customer’s bill contains a bar graph like this:

The utilities’ peer pressure strategy is informed by advances in behavioral sciences that seek to understand what motivates individuals to change their energy use patterns.  In the March 2010 issue of Science, researchers from MIT and Harvard report that the cost of programs designed to encourage individuals to conserve energy pales in comparison with the cost of other greenhouse gas reduction tactics.  Eliminating a metric ton of CO₂ with wind power, for example, costs $20; carbon capture at coal-fired power plants:  $44; behavior nudging programs:  -$165 (notice the negative sign there?).

One might think that with savings like that, the federal government would be falling over itself in its haste to ramp up programs aimed at improving individuals’ energy habits.  But when Congressman Brian Baird (D-WA) proposed a modest $10 million Department of Energy program to simply study the prospects, talk radio host Glenn Beck warned of government mind control, and the bill was scrapped.

But the nudge strategy isn’t going away so fast.  Slate is running an “Efficient Life” contest where you can submit your favorite energy-saving ideas and vote on ideas others have posted.

So yes, keep up the good work-tighter windows, smaller TVs, warmer sweaters-just be sure to tell everyone all about it.

–Erica Etelson

I know winter is drawing to an end in most places, and already done in some, but I ran across a great article in Real Green, Winter-2010 entitled “Winterize Your Home, Save $, Save Energy.” This is the kind of knowledge that is timeless, and always worth knowing. Season independent!

• Check for air leaks. It doesn’t matter how much you heat your home, with air leaks it’s never going to be enough… and that costs money.
• Adding insulation can keep your home warm with less energy.
• Check your windows. If they are drafty, you can do several things such as installing storm windows, putting plastic insulation on them and closing your curtains at night.
• Use a programmable thermostat. There is no sense in heating your home when you aren’t even present.
• In a similar vein, shut the vents in the rooms you don’t regularly use.
• And finally, the one I found most surprising is to humidify. In addition to easing congestion from colds, and moisturizing lips and skin, humid air feels warmer than dry air at the same temperature.

While some of these solutions might cost a little bit up front, your eventual savings will far surpass the cost. In the US, 45% of residential energy bills went to heating in 2008. With those kinds of numbers, every little bit can help.

-Nat Smith

Energy Star is a great example of a way a conscientious homeowner can save money by making his or her home more efficient. Started in 1992 by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the program is designed to help consumers find energy efficient appliances in order to save money while reducing greenhouse gases. In order to get the Energy Star seal of approval the appliance has to use 20-30% less energy than the current federal government requirements. The Energy Star appliances range from refrigerators to telephones to furnaces and are widely available.

Every year the average household spends an average of $1300 to $1900 on electricity. That’s a lot of dough, but with the Energy Star appliances, these households can save between $400 and $600 a year. With that kind of savings, Energy Star appliances quickly pay for themselves and then some. In addition to those great savings, the Federal Government has recently announced a “Cash for Appliances” rebate program. The program, similar to “Cash for Clunkers,” will make it easier to recycle your old appliances and provide rebates for new Energy Star appliances. For most states, the program is going live in February and March.

No matter how you choose to make your home more efficient, it’s important to realize that it isn’t hard to do. Whether you unplug your laptops, purchase head-turning gadgets or stick to tried and true Energy Star appliances, you will consume less electricity and save money, a win-win situation.

Over the next couple of days, I’m going to be looking at a few easy ways for homeowners to make their dwellings more energy efficient with the aim to save money. Overall, I’ve found that the quickest and easiest way to accomplish home efficiency is to merely brush up on a little home energy use knowledge.

For example, did you know that the average household has 20 phantom loads? A phantom load refers to the power consumed by devices when they are switched off or in standby mode. In a snowstorm, the individual snowflakes are insignificant, but for anyone who has ever shoveled snow, you know that when combined they can weigh a ton. Phantom loads are the same. Alone they don’t consume very much energy (an average of 3-20 watts), but when added together, they can cost a household an additional $200 a year. Sally Deneen from The Daily Green writes, “Here are some clues to identify your energy suckers: They’re appliances with remote controls, such as TVs, VCRs and audio equipment. They feature a continuous digital display — like those glowing clocks on stoves. They feature rechargeable batteries, such as cordless phones (which use energy even after the battery is charged). And they’re appliances with external power supplies, such as inkjet printers and iPod chargers.”

All of this talk of phantoms and the damage they do is pretty scary, but thankfully we don’t need the Ghostbusters to take care of them. There are a couple of really easy ways to beat these power guzzlers. The first, and most certainly the easiest way to deal with phantom loads is to simply unplug the device when you aren’t using it. Similarly, if you plug everything into a power strip, you turn can them all off at once. What could be easier?

The next time you need a little motivation to bend over and unplug your cell phone charger, just think what you would do with an extra $200 is your pocket?