Smarter Green Lifestyle

Home Solar Power or Changing Habits: Which One Has the Largest Home Energy Savings?

Home Solar Power or Changing Habits: Which One Has the Largest Home Energy Savings?

For many, the idea of buying solar panels as a way to generate electricity and reduce energy bills seems pretty straightforward. But upon deeper reflection, and experience, it’s not so simple. But first let’s start with the great news – our suburban family of four just received its April electricity bill. It was 11 dollars, [...]

Share on Facebook
How To Cut Your Carbon Footprint by 50%: What We Can Learn From Ramit Sethi and Personal Finance – Part 1

How To Cut Your Carbon Footprint by 50%: What We Can Learn From Ramit Sethi and Personal Finance – Part 1

This is the first part of a long post, but worth it.  Go grab a cup of coffee. Our choices and actions aren’t always rational, like lifestyle choices.  This is what science, experience and economists show us again and again.  To make smarter choices we need a path that accounts for that, otherwise, we’ll miss [...]

Share on Facebook

Another Nail in the Coffin of “Tips for Going Green” and The Pursuit of Honest Green Residential Building

As the readers of this blog know, I am highly suspicious of the well meaning, yet misleading and short sighted green home and lifestyle tips peddled at other websites and in books.  That’s why I write in the Lifestyle and Green Hacking parts of this site that you must target the big wins first and [...]

Share on Facebook

R&D.I.Y. – Open Source Urban Gardening

NPR reports on the growing trend of Window Farming: Urban farmers use the Internet to exchange ideas for improving the window farms technology. It’s a process Riley calls “R&D-I-Y” or Research and Develop It Yourself. One window farmer figured out a way to silence the gurgling sounds these window farm systems make — and he [...]

Share on Facebook
The Tipping Point: What If Your Goal Was To Make Your Home Energy Efficient – Step 2

The Tipping Point: What If Your Goal Was To Make Your Home Energy Efficient – Step 2

If you’ve automated your home as discussed in Step 1, you’re ready to optimize. Make it Automatic – Then Optimize Optimization is just fine tuning your settings.  See how far you can turn down the heating temperature at night.  Then see how far you can turn the heat down during the times you’re actually using [...]

Share on Facebook
The Tipping Point: What If Your Goal Was To Make Your Home Energy Efficient

The Tipping Point: What If Your Goal Was To Make Your Home Energy Efficient

As I wrote before, I don’t think “green tips” mean much without attaching them to goals.  To achieve goals you need to be focused.  And the best place to start is with the big wins. Big Wins and Lattes I like to use the analogy of personal finance.  There are some personal finance experts that [...]

Share on Facebook
The Tipping Point: Why Most Green Tips Suck

The Tipping Point: Why Most Green Tips Suck

There are a TON of tips that a simple Google search will find.  People are always asking me for tips, and saying it would be great if I could include even more tips here . . . and it drives me crazy.  The reason it drives me crazy is that the tips are biased (and [...]

Share on Facebook
“The Psychology of Habits and What May Be Holding You Back From Going Green and Healthy Living” – Part 2

“The Psychology of Habits and What May Be Holding You Back From Going Green and Healthy Living” – Part 2

Green Hacking” is a series of posts on how take control of your life and be healthier.  These posts provide a highly strategic system  that’s targeted, smart, enormously effective and is customizable to your life, whether you’re single, married with kids or just plain busy. ************************************************** Want to make a habit stick?  Let’s get to [...]

Share on Facebook
Rss Feed Tweeter button Facebook button Linkedin button Delicious button Stumbleupon button

Smarter Context is using WP-Gravatar