There are a lot of simple things you can do to save energy in your home to slash your electric and gas bills while reducing your carbon footprint. My wife and I had already done the easy things like installing compact fluorescents, choosing Energy Star appliances, unplugging chargers and switching off the power bar for our computer to eliminate standby power loads, and being diligent about turning things off when not in use. But we wanted to do more (and save more money). So when we moved in 2006 we hired a “whole house performance” contractor to evaluate the house we wanted to buy, then implemented the recommendations and financed the cost into our new mortgage. The result was over 60% energy savings! Check out my blog in this group to find out how we did it and how a whole house performance retrofit works. I’ve also posted a few pictures.

Here is something that could help to calculate how much you could save on lighting. It is a calculator that shows how much energy you could save by replacing incandescent lamps with compact fluorescent bulbs. I found it on the SMUD website at http://smud.apogee.net/homesuite/calcs/specialty/cflcalc12.aspx. The link does not seem to work from here, but you can probably copy and paste it into your browser.