Practical tips for trimming your electricity bill without renovations: insulation, lighting, appliances and daily habit shifts.
Last August, my sister in Charleston texted me a photo of her thermostat set to 68 degrees with a caption that read, "why does this still feel like a swamp?" Her AC…
The first estimate on my kitchen table read $14,200 for a new central air system tied into my 1920s craftsman's patched ductwork. The second quote, for four ductless heads and one outdoor…
Last February I crawled into a 1926 attic in Southeast Portland with a flashlight and a tape measure and found about four inches of shredded newspaper insulation, matted flat, with visible joist…
Your thermostat quietly controls one of the biggest slices of your energy bill, and most of us never really tune it. In this tutorial I walk through the exact steps I use…
Your fridge runs 24 hours a day, every day, with no off switch and no user prompt to remind you it might be sick. That makes it the easiest appliance in the…
Heat pumps and furnaces both keep a house warm, but they do it in very different ways, and the right pick depends on your climate, your fuel prices, and how long you…
Renters often feel stuck. You cannot change the windows, the appliances, or the insulation, so the usual advice about home energy savings reads like it was written for someone else. This article…
People often ask me what an "energy upgrade" really costs, and the honest answer is that it depends on how much you want to do this year versus over the next five.…
Most household appliances are more honest about their energy use than we are about how we treat them. The fridge in the garage, the dishwasher run half-full, the dryer with a clogged…
