Care your planet

Preventing Global Warming Steps

Step 1: Minimize Drafts In Your Home

One of the simplest and easiest ways to prevent global warming is to make sure all your windows and doors are draft free. Small gaps in your windows and doors can cause you to consume a lot more energy than you really need to in order to heat and cool your home. To make your home free from drafts wait until a cold day, then hold your hand along the edges of your doors and windows feeling for cold air. If you detect drafts, buy weather stripping from your local hardware store and install it wherever it is needed.

Step 2: Reduce Wasted Electricity

When you eliminate phantom loads, you save a lot more electricity- and CO2 emissions- than you might imagine. A phantom load is caused when an electrical appliance draws electricity when it isn't in use. Amazingly, about 11% of residential electricity consumption is used by "phantom loads." For example, your DVD player has an electrically lighted display that stays on even when you turn the power off. An easy way you can eliminate these phantom loads is to plug your computers, printers, scanners, DVD players, televisions, etc. into multi-plug electrical surge protectors. Then, with one flick of the switch, you can make sure that the appliances plugged into your surge protectors are drawing no electricity at all.

Step 3: Use more efficient light bulbs

If every American household replaced just one incandescent light bulb with a compact fluorescent one, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, then over the life of the bulbs 90 billion pounds of carbon dioxide emissions would be prevented from going into the atmosphere. This is like taking 6.3 million cars off the road!

Step 4: Turn Down Your Water Heater.

Just a 10° F reduction on your water heater thermostat can reduce 3% to 5% of your total energy consumption. Most of us have our hot water heaters turned up far too high. You'll have plenty of hot water if you set your water heater between 110-120°F.