Save Green Going Green

What’s the point? It seems that everywhere you go today, someone is discussing the cause and effect of “Global Warming”.

There are many opposing views on the subject and we can all make our own minds up as to the validity of arguments on both sides. Global warning is an issue that could critically effect future generations. Decide how you will, but my point in opening up this new blog and website, www.savegreengoinggreen.com, is much closer to home and the struggles that we are all going through in “Today’s World”!

Money, finances, cash flow, pocket change, whatever you call it we have less! Learning to streamline a budget is the primary focus of what we have done and the wisdom of which I hope to impart to help others to.

When we began on our quest to cut energy costs (save green), we found that many of the excercises that we were undertaking were also good for the overall environment (going green). Thus our brainchild was born: www.savegreengoinggreen.com.

During the process, over the last 12-18 months, significant improvements have been made particularly in our energy consumption. Two very simple, quick-fixes made a difference of approximately 20.5% in our monthly energy bill, which includes a 16.8 INCREASE in fuel costs! (electric & gas). The two simple fixes you can read more about HERE!

On the website you will find some other useful areas: Quick tips for saving money, Organic Gardening, Home Composting, and Greenbuild, along with some of our favorite online places to visit. Being based in Baltimore, there will be links for Maryland based people and companies that have a very local following, as well. Be sure to check out the videos from The Greenbuild Society, Davd Bach (Author of “Go Green, Live Rich”-one of my favorite books!), and the “G” Girl-for Garden Girl on some great gardening and recipe tips!

Avid Gardeners will delight at the “G” Girl Seed and Plant exchange. As you will see in the following video, we have lots of plants, and therefore seeds, that will be advertised for trades with other avid gardeners. Check the seed and plant exchange often to see if there is anything that new that you need for your dream garden.

Please visit often and feel free to send us your comments, suggestions and success stories. You can be a big part of the education of the public to “Save Green Going Green”

Steve & Jen

Save Green planting Green!

    Today, I want to share with you the easiest way I know to save lots of money on your grocery bills!  It doesn’t involve clipping coupons and or traveling to different stores around town to find advertised specials.  Some of you might have guessed the way most people can save lots of green is by starting your own garden! Planting seeds will help reduce your gardening costs in the beginning.  If you choose small plants you can also get by inexpensively for the amount of food you get in return.  

 

                                         Top Reasons for a Vegetable Garden

·       Good return for your money

·       Knowledge of how the food was raised

·       If grown organically can reduce exposure to herbicides, pesticides, etc.

·       Flavor is much better in produce you just picked and put right on table

·       Vegetables and herbs retain their nutrients when eaten quicker

·       You may have extra to share with your neighbors or even sell extra produce at the farmers market and make a little cash

·       Your family won’t go hungry if you become unemployed

·       Relaxing and therapeutic to actually provide for the family with your own hands

·       Can preserve some of your harvest for the winter months

·       Diversity-you can experiment and try new vegetables and herbs

·       Great exercise for you and your family

·       Reduces need to ship veggies from thousands of miles away (eco-friendly)

·       Fun to plant different plants and watch them grow

·       Best of all- you save green growing green!

 

Jenny & Steve

For more great saving green tips and gardening ideas:

www.savegreengoinggreen.net

 

 

Making Green ,Going Green

Cut back, conserve, save, aren’t the only options in this economy-why not increase your income with a business that is growing!

Recession Proofing Your Budget

 Are you about to give up yet? Bills got you down? Right now, a lot of us are concerned about finding less green in our pockets. Ironically, most of the ways we have found to increase our bottom line are very eco-friendly.

There are many things you can do right now to save money and reduce your expenses. First, it is important to become conscious of what you are doing in your daily life. Make it a game with your spouse, significant other, or your entire family. Look for areas where you are wasteful, find ways to spend less, stretch your groceries, and reduce energy costs. Let me share a few of the things we have found that have worked for us, when we took a good hard look at our personal lifestyle.

My hubby used to buy a soda or coffee out everyday because of the time he spends on the road, in meetings, or presentations. We found that just one a day at $1.50 per cup meant spending $547.00 a year, and most days he might get 2-3 cups! Unbelievable how quickly small amounts can add up to huge savings if you pay attention.

Our family drinks a lot of ice tea. I was making a half-gallon pitcher of tea two times a day, using five tea bags and five sweeteners each time. That meant I would turn have to use the gas stove to boil the tea twice. I started making tea once a day, saving the expense of burning the stove fuel twice. I also found that by making one large pitcher, I could use eight teabags and eight sweeteners instead of the ten I had used previously. Making this one small change in the daily routine saved money, energy and time!

Another huge expense was buying my lunch out everyday at work. I was spending as much as $50 per week for this convenience. I started to pack my lunch using leftovers from supper or an occasional TV dinner when I did not have leftovers. We also took a serious look at how many times we were going out to eat at home-the money we were spending astounded us! When we stopped dining out, we joked between us that were the reason the economy made such a sudden down turn.

One morning while I was getting ready for work, my husband noticed that I had squirted an excessively large amount of shampoo on my hand. I had enough shampoo to wash my hair three times! Over the course of a year, this small savings could buy a couple additional bottles of shampoo.

I think the biggest savings that we noticed was when turning the heat down at bedtime. Of course, we do not have babies in the house to worry about kicking off the covers, so use your own discretion about turning down your heat. Our heat resets to 64 degrees automatically with the programmable thermostat at 9 pm. Before we get up, at 5:15am the programmable thermostat kicks the heat up to 68 degrees. When we start getting ready for work and school the house has started to warm up so we do not notice how cold it was. I am still elated over the fact that our gas and electric bill went down $132 a month!

I am sure that these ideas would not save money individually but when you combine them with everything else, you will start to notice the savings. I hope you find many of these ideas useful to your daily life and wallet. It is our desire to pass on as much money saving information as we can, so that everyone can get through this struggling economy. Be sure to check our website-Save Green Going Green-for more ideas on how to save you money and recession proof your budget.

Jenny

A womans perspective on saving money & energy

I just read my dear hubby’s post about our energy bill reduction. He called me at work to tell me the gas and electric bill had went down from $342 to $210 a month on the budget billing. I could hear the excitement in his voice. He is analytic, analyzing the numbers like he did in his post. As a woman, mother, and wife saving on the gas and electric bill means $132 more dollars a month that we can put on other bills, such as the house payment, groceries, or gas for the car.

We bought a fixer upper 4 years ago. We kept taking out the equity on the house and doing the repairs the house needed. As a result, we have a huge house payment. We were paying our bills on time, but lived paycheck to paycheck. My husband is a realtor. I am a nurse. We currently have 1 child in high school. Everything was going good, or so we thought.

The older adult children moved back in with the grandchildren because they couldn’t afford to live on their own. Then the real estate market tanked. The icing on the cake was when the health insurance my employer “gave us” increased to $800 a month for three people! The big question is how did our family get into such a financial crunch?

To answer this I guess I have to look in my own backyard to find some of the cause. I had been wasteful. How could we decrease our bills? We decided we had to be more conscientious of our actions. We started paying attention to ways to conserve on resources and our budget. We decided that it was very wasteful and unnecessary to eat out at restaurants. Every day I would order out at work. Now I take my lunch to work. We save at least $200 a month not dining out. Recently, we have started to clip coupons and compare store prices.

Then we looked at ways to cut energy costs. (This had started when the gas prices were going up to $4.00 a gallon.)We stopped unnecessary trips, and no more leisure drives. If we were going to a different part of town we would do everything we had to do on that side of town on that one trip. We realized some of our bills were not flexible, like our mortgage payment.

We looked at things like the gas and electric bill because that was something that we could change. We started reminding everyone in the family to turn off the lights when they left a room. Then we started doing research and found that the CFL’s(Compact Fluorescent Lighbulb) were a lot cheaper to run than regular light bulbs. We took a couple of months to buy and replace with the new energy conserving light bulbs, so it didn’t cost a lot at once. When it got cold outside we would walk around the house and find the drafts. It was easier to find the leaks on a windy day. We followed the drafts to the source and closed them up.

Our living room has always been very cold in the winter or very warm in the summer. A cold draft came from under the stairway by our front door. We went downstairs and removed a flimsy piece of wood. We found two huge holes where the electrical wiring went outside to the porch. The cold air was just rushing into the house like there was no wall at all. We used insulating foam to fill the holes.

Another thing we did was have a seamstress make us living room shades with insulation in them. They work like putting a quilt over the windows: the shades keep the cold out. The living room is actually warm now. I am hoping that they will also keep the heat out of the living room in the summer. The shades are worth every penny we paid for them. We went through the house with some caulking and foam insulation and filled more cracks.

We actually put plastic on a couple of old windows we hadn’t updated yet. We realize the plastic isn’t eco-friendly but when compared to how much energy we were wasting/using we think it is still eco-friendly. We are going to continue to use the plastic over these windows when it warms up so the summer heat doesn’t warm up the house. Plastic they have for windows now doesn’t look bad, you really can’t tell it is there.

When our grand daughter goes to bed our programmable thermostat turns the heat down to 64 degrees automatically. Pile on the bed covers! We are all in our bedrooms tucked in by that time, and actually we all sleep much better. The thermostat kicks the heat up to 68 degrees at 5:15 am to start to warm the house before we start getting up at 5:30 am. Of course this temperature works for us, but for some people 64 degrees in the house would be too cold for some. During the day, after the grand-daughter goes to school the thermostat turns the heat back down to 64 degrees again, until she comes home from school and it will be go back up to 68 degrees. The programmable thermostat is wonderful and very helpful in conserving energy.

We take a walk through the house at bedtime to make sure everything is turned off. We make sure all the “energy vampires” are turned off, like the microwave and LED lighting, and the TV in the front room. We use the computer Smart Strips so that they turn off all the peripherals on the computer.

The bottom line is that we created our financial situation ourselves. But we know we can work together to correct what we did. We will be more conscientious of our spending and being wasteful. Just making simple changes helped us save money and energy. Yes, we can make the changes to do this and so can you! 

Be sure to check Save Green Going Green for many money saving ideas!

Jenny

The proof is in the bill!

Today is a great day for our wallet! We have been tracking our energy consumption since March 2007 to see how much difference our simple changes make in our daily usage.

Well, I just opened our Gas/Electric ebill and lo & behold……..our monthly budget dropped by $132 PER MONTH!!! And they reduced it MID- Cycle (normal adjustment is in Sept) because we were using far less energy than in previous years!

Look at the last 2 1/2 years budget:

Sept 2006      $370 per month
Sept 2007      $349 per month
Sept 2008-    $342  per month
March 2009-$210 per month

The numbers don’t lie-In 2 1/2 years, based on budget billing, we have reduced our energy costs, by $150 per month or 40.5%, while the energy company was increasing rates!!

We were very pleased in the first two years with the small decreases because during that time there was an increase in the cost of gas and electric, so while many others bills will going up, we were actually showing a decrease.

Let me share some of the actual savings broken down by kilowatt (electric). I will do the same for our Natural Gas savings in the next post!

Mon/yr	Days in Cycle	kilowatt/ month	Avg Daily Use	Avg Temp
Mar-07	27	818	30.3	29
Apr-07	33	853	25.8	46
May-07	29	822	28.3	52
Jun-07	34	1441	42.4	67
Jul-07	28	1811	64.7	73
Aug-07	31	2358	76.1	77
Sep-07	33	2421	73.4	77
Oct-07	28	1447	51.7	70
Nov-07	29	824	28.4	64
Dec-07	33	646	19.6	46
10 Mo Avg	30.5	1344.1	44.07	60.1
Jan-08	30	658	21.9	38
Feb-08	29	704	24.3	35
Mar-08	32	796	24.9	37
Apr-08	28	478	16.9	45
May-08	31	464	15	55
Jun-08	33	587	17.8	61
Jul-08	28	1336	47.7	75
Aug-08	31	1548	49.9	77
Sep-08	32	1253	39.2	73
Oct-08	30	889	29.6	69
Nov-08	32	421	13.2	55
Dec-08	30	489	16.3	44
YEAR Avg	29	801.9167	26.39167	55.33333
Jan-09	33	622	18.8	38
Feb-09	26	558	21.5	29

Check month over month usage-say March 07 compared to March 08-

24.9 vs 30.3 PER DAY USE-decrease of 5.4 kw  or 162 kw per month (30 day)

Since there is not a full year in 07 lets compare the last 10 months of 07 & 08

YEAR

Days in Cycle

kw/monthused

Avg Daily Use

Avg Temp

2007    

10 Mo Avg

30.5

1344.1

44.07

60.1

2008

10 Mo Avg

30.7

826.1

27.05

59.1

Change

+.2

-518.0

-17.02

-1.0

As you can see significant improvement has been made in our electric bill just by taking the time to be more aware and energy conscious. Did we change our lifestyle significantly- Absolutely Not! We made simple changes to our daily living habits, most were free or nearly free to implement. The largest expense by far was changing our light bulbs to CFL’s, but we did not spend more than 1 months electric bill savings to convert our entire home. (5 bedroom/2 bath, LR, DR, Kitchen, Home Office, Laundry/storage room, and basement built in 1926)

I am actually looking forward to getting March 2009 bill to have a 2 year comparison!  I would have to say I have never been excited about getting a bill before! Be sure to check all the tips we used on our website at:

www.SaveGreenGoingGreen.net

We expand on the things we did to achieve these results. If you have any more suggestions or ideas that you have used, feel free to add them along with a link to your green focused website in the comments!

I will do the next post later breaking down our Gas bill.

Until then, have a great day and join us to “Save Green Going Green”

Jenny & Steve

Global Warming-Is it BS?

Much debate has ensued over the Global Warming Crisis. I have read many articles that seem to contradict previous articles over the cause, effect, or time span of the global warming. Honestly I am tired of reading so many articles that seem to be written strictly to counteract information disseminated in a previous writing. Needless to say, I wanted to see what the “average people” think about the concerns or validity of this issue. Please take just a second to vote below:

Thanks-and come back to check the results!

Steve & Jen

www.SaveGreenGoingGreen.net