Welcome to Naked Sustainability Podcast. This bold podcast helps busy millennials navigate real-life sustainability with practical tips, no-nonsense advice, and a zero-fucks-given attitude, all through a transparent and authentic lens of living in the real world. Join Ginny for lively conversations, expert interviews, and hilarious anecdotes. From eco-fashion to zero-waste living, we’ll empower you to be an eco-warrior without compromising your badass lifestyle. Get ready to kick some eco-ass.
Get Ginny’s quick and dirty tips everyday life tips for saving some fossil fuels, electricity, and put some money back in your pocket.
Hey, hey! Happy Friday, welcome back to Naked Sustainability, the podcast where we discuss living our busy lives as sustainably as possible. It’s Ginny, and today we’re tackling a few more ways to eliminate some fossil fuels, and save money, by being more energy efficient and using less electricity.
It’s been a rough week in our household, and suffice it to say that I’m both writing and recording this episode on the day it’s being released. Bear with me if I somehow don’t connect point A to point B, but I promise to try.
Last week we discussed the dangers of fossil fuels, both for the planet and our health, and touched on phantom energy, switching to LED light bulbs, and combining your showers with a partner. These episodes go quick, so let’s dive right in!
Our homes, our castles of general chaos—just me—can do a lot for us without really lifting a finger. But most home upgrades can cost a pretty penny, or maybe you’re renting and don’t want to spend money updating a house that isn’t yours…don’t worry, I’ve got you!
Insulation is the shit that makes our homes energy efficient. And no, we’re not JUST talking about the pink itchy stuff that you’re probably familiar with. The fact of the matter is that insulation comes in many different ways shapes and forms. Home insulation is not something that you can normally see, but it probably makes the biggest difference in how your home feels. A couple years ago, we tried to get whole home blown-in insulation and attic insulation to help eliminate the shitty temperature extremes in our house. Seriously, the living room would be like 60 degrees F and the bedrooms would be like 85. For the non-Fahrenheit folks, that’s COLD in the living room and too HOT to sleep in the bedroom—at least for our prissy asses.
Turns out, we already had insulation in the walls of our home, so the installer couldn’t add any there, but he did increase the insulation in our attic and let me tell you, that’s made a world of a difference. In the summer the cooler air stays in our bedrooms longer and in the winter, we don’t have to run our heat in the bedroom at all.
But what about some other, cheaper options that can make a lasting difference? Installing weather-stripping around your doors and windows is a fairly cheap, DIY option that can eliminate drafts both in and out of the home—as well as bugs, if they’re not your cup of tea. Other options include using window or door drafts on the windows and doors you know are most drafty. If you don’t own any, you can make your own with items your probably already have at home like rice or repurposing extra plastic bags you haven’t recycled yet.
And if you’re renting and/or not wanting to do something semi-permanent to your home, energy efficient window coverings are an absolute fucking marvelous invention. This includes blinds, and curtains. We have light blocking blinds in our spare bedroom and heavy duty black out curtains in our master bedroom. Both have westward facing windows that can heat the room very quickly in the summertime. If we pull the blinds and draw the curtains, we darken both rooms, BUTT the temperature difference is super noticeable on days when the coverings are closed versus open.
This was helpful when we lost power in April, before our solar system was in place. The nights were still dipping into the upper 30s/40s Fahrenheit and the days were only topping out in the 60s. Which isn’t bad for early April in Western PA, but we pulled our blinds and curtains to trap the heat in our house on the colder nights to try to keep the temperature of our house in at least the 60s overnight.
Other options to upgrade the energy efficiency and electrical use of your home are to look for energy efficient appliances. If you do your research now, when you need a new one, you’ll have a better idea of what to look for. Notice, I said when you need a new one—not go out and buy one now to save some money. Honestly, our washer and dryer are about 15 years old at this point, and not really the most energy efficient—it’s absolutely crazy how fast technology advances. But they are super easy to repair and keeping them is waaaay better than buying a new set and trying to recycle our old set, or worse, it ending up in a landfill.
And our dishwasher is a portable dishwasher from like the 1970s or early 1980s, I’m not even shitting you..we’ve looked up the model number. I’m sure there are WAAY more efficient dishwashers on the market, but ours works (and works incredibly fucking well for what we put it through)…so we have no plans on replacing it.
Another thing to watch out for when buying a new energy efficient appliance is to size it appropriately for it’s intended use. If you buy a fridge or freezer that is too big, then you are actively cooling more space than you need. And if they are crammed completely full, there isn’t enough air flow for efficient cooling. Similar thought process for things like dehumidifiers or air conditioners.
We just water sealed and are in the process of adding a subfloor to our basement and it’s made a massive difference in how much our dehumidifier has to run, already—without the project being finished. And the paint for water sealing wasn’t that expensive. The flooring, however, is making this a larger project than I had anticipated.
Our solar installer just told us that by wrapping our older hot water tank with a blanket, we could help it retain the water heat longer, using less electricity. That might be something we have to consider in the future.
Opting to use cold water to wash, and clothesline to dry your laundry outside saves you a shit-ton of electricity from not having to heat the water to no having to use your dryer, which is probably on of your biggest energy consuming appliances. I love the smell of line dried clothes. Plus the sunshine has anti-microbial effects, so you get fresh smelling clothes that have been sanitized naturally for you! We save a ton of electricity this way, and it makes me soooo happy…win, win!
We don’t have a smart thermostat (our system is a little complicated), but if you have the ability to set your thermostat to a slightly colder or warmer temperature while you are gone, and then have it be your perfect temperature when you get home, that can save you some electricity and money.
One more thing we do during the summer is use our oven less. We cook more with our electric griddle, air fryer, or crockpot since these appliance don’t use as much energy or heat up the house as much. Inversely, we try to use the oven more during the winter. We’ll try to batch cook a lot of items while our oven is on, like granola on one sheet, root veggies on another, and maybe like a casserole on the second rack. This way we meal prep, save some oven time from having to cook each separately, and warm the house up for the day.
There are so many more little tips we could talk about, but that’s it for today. Thanks for listening. Feel free to reach out at nakedsustainability.com with your favorite energy saving tips. Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and join us next week as we explore more badass ways to care for the planet, while living this busy millennial life.
Until next time.
