Day 37 of our Green Year: Unplugging The Power

Today, we decided to do an easy one and it is one that every one of us can do in our own green years. When you turn off something like your television, Wii, DVD player, stereo and more, you do not necessarily keep it from using power. Many devices these days will have lights that will show they are still plugged in and to show that light, you need power.

Unplugging things when you go to bed, or leave the house is not only safe as it can prevent fires from shorts, but it can save you money. By unplugging everything in your house, you can actually save up to $20 to $30 on your energy bill, depending on how much you pay each month. This means that not only are you saving power, but you are also saving money. It is just one of the many ways that you can go green, and save green.

Unplug your electronics, your coffee makers and your microwave. None of these things need to be plugged in when you are not using them, so you can save some money by just taking the time to unplug them

As well, Layla and I decided to do a demonstration of the baking soda and vinegar drain cleaner, which works great, so we did a video. Enjoy!

Day 31 of our Green Year: Lovin' Lemons

We now enter our second month of Our Green Year and things are going strong. We have had some wonderful feedback from our readers, who have suggested some great ideas that we will be incorporating into our future blogs. As well, today we were interviewed by our local paper, The Trail Daily Times, who are doing a story on Our Green Year.

For today, we have decided to show the great environmental side of lemons, much like we did with vinegar, to show some of the great things it can do and to help prevent chemicals and other harmful substances from getting into our air, water and earth. It is important to note that when you use chemical cleaners, you are breathing the fumes into your body and it can stay there. Going natural is the best way. Here are some great tips:

• Take equal parts lemon and water and you have a great air freshener.
• Pour lemon juice on places where you have ants and they will stay away.
• Forget about cleaners with harmful chemicals in them, just mix equal parts lemon juice and water and you have an all-purpose cleaner. You can also mix it with vinegar and the lemon juice will mask the smell of the vinegar.
• If you need to clean chrome or copper, just mix lemon juice with baking soda and wipe away the blemishes on the copper or chrome with a towel.
• Use hot lemon juice with baking soda to clean drains.
• If you want to kill the germs on your chopping board, sprinkle lemon juice on it and wash it off.
• Lemon juice works great for cleaning glass and mirrors, as well as serving as a great furniture polish.
• On top of this, if you mix it with equal parts water, then you have a natural mouth wash, and it can also be used to disinfect wounds.

There are many uses for lemon juice in your home, and we are only scratching the surface. However, it is important to use natural products like this instead of chemicals because then you are not contributing to waste or putting chemicals into the environment.

As well, if you implement any of the solutions we have offered in Our Green Year, from the solar cooking to this, send us some photos. We will put them up on our website. Remember, this is not just our green year, it is everyone's green year and we are all in this together. E-mail pictures to crwbaird@gmail.com

Also, today I baked some dandelion leaves in the solar cooker and made some coffee out of it and I gotta say...mmmmm it is surprisingly good, and healthy. See how we made it in our tutorial section later this week.

Day 27 of our Green Year: Drinking Coffee The Green Way

With coffee, I am an addict. I will drink one to two pots per day and I simply love everything about coffee. However, despite this I am going green with it, as Layla is with her tea. How do you go green with coffee? Well, it is actually quite easy.

First of all, you want to buy local brews. These are brews that are roasted and made in your area. Talk to your local coffee shop to find out if they brew it locally and roast it locally. If they don't, try and find one that does.
Second, instead of going into Starbucks, with their oddly named cup sizes, to get a coffee, why don't you go in with a reusable mug. When you think about the waste that is generated by those mugs, it is quite amazing. You have the lid, container and safety wrap (keeps your hands from burning), which all contribute to waste.
Third, try and get organically grown and fair-trade grown coffee. We have decided to do that here by buying coffee from Kicking Horse Coffee Company, which is located in B.C., so we can kill three birds with one stone on that one.
Lastly, you want to compost your coffee grounds, as well as get a reusable coffee filter. There is no need to constantly buy coffee filters when you do not need to, and coffee grounds make a great compost material for the garden.

Also, in terms of coffee grounds, here are some great uses for it:

1. You can use it as plant food for rosebushes, azaleas, rhododendrons, evergreens and camellias that like acidic soil.
   
2. If you are having a problem with ants in the yard or house, then sprinkle some of the grounds in the areas you do not want them and they will not go anywhere near the grounds.
3. If you would like to make your own paper (an upcoming blog ;) ), then you can use coffee grounds as brown dye for paper, as well as fabric and Easter eggs.
4. Cats hate coffee grounds, so mix it with some orange peels and put it around your plants.
5. Mix some of the coffee grounds with some shampoo when you are giving your dog a bath, it will not only get rid of fleas, but it will make the dog's hair feel softer.

I would also like to give a shout out to a new affiliate of our blog, Eco-Libris. The people here are an environmental leader in that they will plant a tree for every book that you buy through them. As a book lover and a writer, this provides a wonderful solution to me as the books I buy end up costing a tree its life. Check out their website at: http://www.ecolibris.net/

Here is a list of coffee companies that practice the principles of fair trade and organically grown, courtesy of Treehugger.com:

Birds and Beans
Blue Smoke Coffee
Bodum
Cafe Bis
Cameron's Coffee
Global Exchange Fair Trade Online Store
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters
The Groovy Mind
Grounds For Change
Kicking Horse Coffee
Merchants of Green Coffee
Newman's Own Organics
Simple Coffee
Solar Roast Coffee
Sweetwater Organic Coffee Roasters
Today Was Fun
Oso Negro

Day 25 of our Green Year: Building A Solar Cooker

Hey everyone,

Day 25 has come and it was a big one. To start, we took to task to build a solar cooker that would allow us to barbecue outside during the summer by using free and renewable energy; the sun. The solar cooker was built mostly by Layla who has a knack for these kinds of things. She was able to put it together using just reflective material, electrical tape and cardboard.
We tested it outside and within about 20 min it was over 200 degrees so we hope it works all right.
We will be posting up the steps to build the cooker soon and they will be displayed on a link to the side. Then you will be able to make the cooker yourself.
To build the whole thing, we did not spend over $20 so it is very affordable. We will post pics soon of how well it worked cooking. It may need fine tuning but overall it looks like it will work pretty well.

Also, thank you to Kate Webb from The Province newspaper here in B.C. This is a big paper and they were nice enough to do a story on us, which will appear on Tuesday. Kate also provided me with some links to other individuals who are living the green life:
No Impact Man - http://noimpactman.typepad.com/
Green As A Thistle - http://greenasathistle.com/

We should be using some ideas from those sites as well for our green initiative.

Stay tuned everyone as we begin to go more and more in-depth with the things you can build and use to help you go greener. We are hoping to make this an all encompassing year and want to cover everything, so thank you all for visiting.

Day 22 of our Green Year: Cooling Down In A Green Way

Where we live, southern British Columbia, we deal with a lot of heat. While we are on top of a mountain, we enjoy not having hot nights but the days can get pretty hot and that presents a problem when you want to fight the heat. Down the road from us, there is a town where it gets to 40 degrees and where people leave the AC cranked all day long.

Nonetheless, where we are there are some air conditioners but not many, and for this day of our Green Year, we have decided to offer some tips we will be using to help beat the heat without the air conditioner.

Air conditions are horrible for the environment, and they cost you a lot of money on your energy bill. Instead, there are a few things you can do to beat the heat:

1. Insulate Your Home: Insulating your home helps keep it warm, but it can also keep it cool. Put in the right caulking and weather stripping and you will be able to keep the heat out during the summer time. You can also put trees up to shade your home, which can lower the temperature in your home by as much as 40 percent.
2. Open the windows on the ground floor of you house on one side only, then go to the top floor and open the windows on the opposite side. This will bring cool air into the bottom of your house and push the warm air out the top (hot air rises remember). Put some fans pointing inward on the window sill downstairs and outward upstairs to help make things work a bit better. (See diagram above)
   
3. Close blinds on your large picture windows. This will prevent a lot of heat from coming into your home, it will get dark but it is not the end of the world.
4. Keep anything that generates heat off, throughout your home. This is everything from lights, clothes dryer and more. These things will actually increase the heat in your home and make things a lot hotter.
5. Drinking water will cool you down because your body will feel cooler and refreshed. Having hot clam chowder and hot tea is only going to make you feel, well, hot.
6. Heat is a state of mind. If you simply try and ignore it, you will but if you focus on it and whine about it, the heat will bother you all that much more.
7. It is going to get cold in the winter and you will wish it was hot, so just enjoy the heat while it is there. It is going to be hot, that is what summer is.

You can be assured Layla and I will be implementing all these measures in our house and in no way will there be a air conditioner running inside of it.

Day 19 of our Green Year: Vinegar For The House

We are nearly to our twentieth day of our Green Year, and for this day we are going to talk about vinegar and how it really is one of the best environmental things you can buy for your house. The number of uses it has is really amazing when you think about all that it can do, and by using vinegar you can actually stop using many of the other cleaning products that carry harmful chemicals.

Now, when you buy vinegar, be sure to find out what brand you are buying because some come from fossil fuel products, which negates using it as an environmentally friendly solution in the house. To find out how to make your own vinegar, visit this site: http://www.vinegarman.com/VinegarMaking.shtml

So, what are the uses of vinegar around the house?

• Instead of using paint thiner, use vinegar as it is much better than turpentine and is safer for both your hands and the environment.
• Mix it with water as we did earlier this week and you have a product that is much better than most cleaning products bought at the store.
• If you burn yourself, or have a bit of pain, you can use vinegar by soaking it on a cotton ball and putting that on the bruise or burn to quicken the healing.
• Fido pee on the carpet? Use vinegar to deal with it.
• If you have a stain, you can put vinegar on the stain before washing it, which is better than using the expensive and environmentally-harmful stain removal products on the market.
• It serves as a better fabric softener and uses about half the amount needed.
• In the kitchen and bathroom, you can use vinegar to deal with mold, stains and soap scum.
• If you have clogs in the drain, boil white vinegar and pour it down the drain to remove clogs without the need for Drain-O.
• If you want to cleanse your face or deal with dandruff, you can use vinegar instead of other expensive products.
• One of the most toxic items you will use is oven cleaner, but vinegar can actually work better in the stove simply by soaking stains in vinegar and then scrubbing them off.
• If you have a stinky room, put a bowl of vinegar in there to deodorize it. Both the vinegar smell and the bad odor will disappear in no time.

There are so many uses for vinegar, that many people really do not realize it. Give a try to some of these uses for vinegar and let us know how they work for you.

Thanks to AboutMyPlanet.Com for all these helpful tips!

Day 11 of our Green Year: Tin Can Uses

Everyone know that you should recycle your tin, aluminum and glass containers, but surprisingly very few people do it.
As part of our Green Year, Layla and I are making the effort to recycle everything that we can, including tin cans, aluminum cans and glass jars. However, the whole point of this blog is to show ways that things can be done that help the environment, and there is nothing better for the environment that recycling items into new items for your home.

So, Layla is making pen jars that can be sold through request to us through the blog (quite cheaply) and through a local farmer's market. By taking the cans we have and converting them into something else, that is a little bit less energy used to create containers for pens, knick-knacks, junk and more. The one on the left is made from a tin can, the one on the right, a Pen Monster, is made from a glass jar.

Recycling your tin cans, either through a recycling program or by turning them into things you can use in your home, is incredibly important. Each year, 15 billion cans are simply thrown away. This is very unfortunate because recycling one tin can can save enough energy to power a TV for three hours, while the average American throws away six pounds worth of tin cans every single month!
Make sure to recycle the tin, aluminum and glass in your home and try to be creative to create things out of those cans that can be of use to you in your house. The Earth will thank you.

Here are just a few of the uses you can get out of cans and jars:

1. Plant Pot
2. Candle Holder
3. Pencil Holder
4. Portable Compost Container
5. Edge your garden with tin cans to create a unique marker
6. Gift Box
7. Soap Container

Here are a few uses for cans and jars from the Home and Garden Network:

1. Tomato juice cans covered in pretty fabric or ribbon make great wine holders for gifts.
2. Make a picnic holder from two coffee cans and four soup cans. Spray paint them in fun colors and hot glue them together. Place paper plates and napkins in the large cans and flatware in the small ones. The wind won't blow them away.
3. Make a decorative umbrella holder from four coffee cans. Open both ends, hot glue them together end-to-end, and cover them with adhesive-backed paper. Leave the end on the bottom can for a base.
4. Use a large coffee can to make "round" bread. Remove both ends and lay on the side while baking.

As well, here is a great sight for creating tin can lanterns, great for Halloween or other holidays:
http://www.crafty-moms.com/tin-can-luminary.shtml

Day 8 of our Green Year: Lighting Up The House Efficiently

Yay, one week ago today this blog was created and already we are getting a lot of feedback on it and a lot of visits. Both Layla and I are excited about where this blog will go in the coming weeks, and months.

For Day 8, we decided that the time was right to switch our house over to Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs) from the standard incandescent lights. We are doing this to not only save energy, which means less fossil fuels, but also to save money on our electric bill. These lights will replace the rest of the old fashioned lights in our house, and while they cost more, they are better in the long run.

A full 25 percent of the energy bill in a typical home is from the lighting and the price to light an incandescent bulb over its life is as much as 10 times what the bulb cost originally. The CFLs we are purchasing will last 10 times as long as the old bulbs, use 50 to 80 percent less energy and are four times more efficient.

Surprisingly, one of the easiest and best things you can do for the environment is to install these bulbs, which is why our house is now a Compact Fluorescent Light house. If everyone in the U.S.A used these bulbs, it would mean 90 power plants could shut down; reducing CO2 pollutants and nuclear waste.

CO2 Removed from atmosphere after replacing incandescent bulbs with CFL bulbs (five rooms) over life of bulbs: 2.5 tons.

Day 6 of our Green Year: Improving the Air with Saplings

For Day 6 of our Green Year, we decided to make things a bit greener in our area. As a result, we have acquired seven saplings that we are going to be planting later this week to help improve the air, take some CO2 out of the atmosphere and make things a bit easier on the planet.
These trees will be planted later this week near some of the trails that hikers use around our town. However, we may put one or two in our yard.

You may be asking the question of how planting trees can help the environment, so here are some bits of information about trees and all they do for the environment, and us.

1. Trees absorb carbon dioxide, remove the carbon and release oxygen back into the air. This means, no trees, no oxygen, we all die. In fact, one acre of mature trees absorb the same amount of CO2 in one year, that a car being driven for 26,000 miles produces.
2. Trees placed around a home in a strategic manner keep it cool and cut summer air conditioning needs by up to 50 percent.
3. Trees reduce runoff by breaking rainfall, which allows the water to flow down the trunk and into the earth below the tree. This prevents stormwater from carrying pollutants into the ocean.
4. Trees shield people from UV rays. The most common form of cancer in North America is skin cancer, and trees reduce UV-B exposure by 50 percent.
5. Studies have found that patients in hospitals with views of trees at their window heal faster. Children with ADHD have fewer symptoms when able to see trees, and mental fatigue is reduced on individuals who have trees outside their windows.
6. Homes and neighborhoods with trees in front of them have been shown to lower the violence of an area near the home.
7. Trees increase property values by up to 15 percent when planted in strategic locations around the yard.

Carbon Removed Each Year By Seven Full-Grown Trees: 182 Pounds
Amount of Oxygen Provided by Seven Full-Grown Trees: Enough for 21 People

Day 4 of our Green Year: Storing Snow

We are just about one week into our Green Year, and today we took the advice of someone who has read the blog and began storing snow.
Yes, it may seem odd that we are storing snow, but the truth is that it is an excellent way to save water for the summer.
When people water their lawns, they can waste between 50 and 500 gallons of water. Some water in the afternoons, when most of the water evaporates, while others water their lawn too much. Typically, your lawn needs only one inch of water per week. This means that if you have a rectangle lawn (for simplicity's sake) that is 15 by 35 feet, you will need 271 gallons of water per week to water it. However, your lawn can survive on less, so watering your lawn as little as 100 gallons of water per week should be fine.
To that end, we have begun gathering up snow, which we will store in a 71 gallon rain barrel that can be bought from Canadian Tire for about $70 to $90. While we fill the barrel with snow, rain will also keep it full. This means that if we can maintain the barrel with enough rain water so that it is full twice a month, that is 142 less gallons of water we will be using on the lawn each month.
We have not bought the barrel yet, and are just using some containers we have around the house instead. They may be small, but every single drop of water helps and it is another drop less that we use from the watersheds in the area.

It should be noted that when we store our water, we will be purchasing a mosquito net so that no mosquito can get to the water to lay its larvae. You should never let still water exist in your yard, unless it is covered or protected from mosquitoes, who will use it as a breeding ground.

A Shout Out!
Thank you to everyone who has read the blog and sent us e-mails. In particular, Min, Jay and Sue have all told us they will be implementing some of the ten things you can do to save the environment. Every big change starts small, but overtime it grows larger and larger until it cannot be denied. We look forward to receiving more comments and feedback in the future.

Water Saved With Two Small Containers: 5.3 Gallons (small but a start)

Ten Ways To Save The World

The world is in trouble and it is up to all of us to work hard to reduce our carbon footprint and take the strain off the environment. Thankfully, many of the things we can do will not only help the environment, they will save us money as well.

1. Turn down the thermostat: This is easy to do and it saves energy and time. When you are sleeping or out, you can turn down the thermostat by 10 degrees and use 25 percent less energy. Even when you have people over, reduce the thermostat because the amount of body heat in the room will keep the temperature of the house high.
2. Wash clothes in cold water and dry outside: A total of 90 percent of the energy used by the washer is actually used just to heat the water up. By washing with cold water and using cold water detergent, you can use a lot less energy. Dry your clothes outside on the line if you can, that will eliminate the need for the dryer in the Spring and Summer.
3. Wash your dishes by hand, not in the dishwasher: Like the washer, 80 percent of the power used by the dishwasher is just to heat the water. Fill up a sink, fill up a rinse sink as well, and wash dishes that way.
4. Turn off faucet while brushing teeth: This is easy to do but few do it. When you turn off the water while you brush your teeth you save eight gallons of water per day, that is 3,000 gallons A YEAR!
5. Turn off the lights: Turning off the lights in the house when you are not using them saves a lot of energy. Turning one light off, for one hour a day saves 20,000 Watts per year, and that is only one light for one hour! Also, use high-efficiency light bulbs if you can, because they last longer and use less energy.
6. When you are not using something, unplug it: You may think that when you turn something off, then it is not running anymore and no more power is used. The truth is power is still being used and by unplugging the microwave, television, coffee maker and more, will save you $10 to $20 on your power bill each month.
7. Use cloth bags: Canadians use 55 million plastic bags per week, we use them for five minutes and they last 1,000 years, so using cloth bags will help the environment immensely!
   
8. Use Energy Efficient batteries: There are 15 billion batteries put in the landfills each year. Rather than throw out batteries, use rechargeable batteries that can be used 500 times before they are useless.
9. Close doors when you leave a room: Your house has to heat up the entire space indoors, so close doors to trap heat in and use less energy to heat up your home.
10. Limit showering time: Baths take 200 liters of water, and 15 minute showers use 300 liters, so have five minute showers and you will only use 75 liters of water per day on showering.

Saving the environment isn't hard, it is very easy and all it takes is a bit of change.