Pam's Home Improvements

So we have a two story home, and no we did not get to put the new air conditioning system in yet but that will be installed next week. What we are trying to do right now is make our home as energy efficient as possible. This can be done several ways and I am going to go over some of the things that we have been doing around the house to make it stand out in the energy efficiency area.

One of the first things that we did is get rid of all of the standard round light bulbs and replaced them with fluorescent ones. Now I know what you may be thinking, that those bulbs are around 4 or 5 bucks a piece compared to the 99 cent standard bulbs, but there are several advantages to fluorescent bulbs. One is that they use less energy. Another is that the life of them will last up to 10 times longer than the standard light bulb will.

So once we switched out all of the lights, that was our first step in making our home more energy efficient. I had already talked about getting the air ducts inspected, and it came to be that there were no leaky ducts. Which is a good thing as that can be a quite expensive home improvement to get the air ducts replaced. Another thing that we did was checked all of the doors to make sure that there was a nice tight seal, which there wasn't and I had my husband install some weather stripping around the frames of the doors. One good rule of thumb to check this is if you can see any sunlight at all from the frame of the door, when the door is closed, then it is time for you to replace, or get new weather stripping. The most common part is the bottom, installing a bug sweep can also help this.

We noticed that our windows were kind of old. We installed some wood faux blinds on all of the windows and we also put some curtains up. By blocking out the sunlight from the windows you are slowing the process of heat from entering the home. If you can slow down the process of the heat entering the home then you will be doing your air conditioning a great favor.

Those are just some of the things that you can do to improve your homes energy efficiency, in the near future we are planning on building our own solar panels, which can power almost 50% of your home depending on how big your home is of course. Not only that we also plan on building our own windmills too, which can also greatly help save money on your energy bill, I mean a lot of money on your energy bill.