Start Today, Stop Saying Tomorrow: Five Easy Steps to Conserve

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Seeing your power and energy bills can be intimidating, even scary—but we have good news for all homeowners. If you’re looking to save more of your paycheck rather than spend it all on your energy bill, we have five more saving tips for you. These are steps that you can take to significantly reduce the cost of home upkeep and save energy while doing so.

We suggest choosing one of these tips to focus on each week as you first start out. The more you practice each tip, the easier it will get and soon you’ll be in the habit of constantly saving. If the tip is more of a process, use your week of focus to plan how you will go about achieving the energy-conserving goal.

  1. Weatherization: The most cost effective
  2. Weatherization is a term used to describe sealing your home off from the outdoor weather, whether it’s 95 degrees or -10. This is proven to be the best way to save energy and money in your home, and it only requires one short period of installation.

    Air Sealing fills the cracks and leaks in your home, which create a draft when left untouched. These small, invisible leakage sites carry air in and out of your home and stop you from being able to control your home’s temperature.

    Insulating your home’s building shell adds a barrier that blocks heat from traveling through your roof, walls, ceilings, and floors.

  3. Upgrade your way of living
  4. It seems like some new kind of technology comes out every day. Our country now relies on energy to charge our life of electronics. We need to adjust our old habits to this new world of constant energy-use. The first step is to be ready and open to new ideas about how to control your every day actions to save energy. To get started, try an easy task such as lowering your thermostat at night or when you leave for work in the morning.

  5. Set your temperature limits: 68 to 78
  6. In the winter, set your thermostat to 68 degrees or lower. In the summer keep it 78 degrees or higher. For each degree that you adjust, you will save about 3-5% more energy because your furnace and air conditioner will do less work.

  7. Put a rug on it
  8. If your feet feel cold against your wood or tile floors in the winter months, there’s no need to turn up the heat. Find a rug to throw down and cover up the toe-chilling floor. Of course, the problem could be that your home needs to be sealed and insulated – but a rug is a great temporary fix.

  9. File your Bills
  10. Keeping a file of all of your utilities bills helps you save more and more every month. By keeping track of how much you spend each year, you can set goals to reduce for every bill.

To make it easier, an initiative called the Green Button program works with power companies to allow you to access your records online. Ask your company if they are participating in this online movement. If not, start filing!

If you follow these five simple steps, we guarantee that you will save a large amount of energy in your home, and with energy saving comes money saving. So stop telling yourself that tomorrow you’ll get around to taking steps towards conservation—start now by contacting Dolphin to seal your home and learn more helpful tips.