Thursday, April 08, 2010

Money Saving Tips

For the past two weeks, I’ve been watching our local utility company put solar panels on street poles. I think they will be using them to power street lamps as they put up new lights, too. I’ve always wanted solar panels on my house and this got me thinking about saving energy at home. And as things usually go, just this week I received this offer to write a sponsored post for the web site Microsoft ® Holm™. Energy saving hints and suggestions are a big thing right now and this website says it gives you help to cut your energy costs. It is brought to us by the Microsoft ® you are used to for your computer programming needs.

The first thing I noticed to cut home energy costs were the little hints flashing in the bottom right corner. A couple they mentioned were saving up to 10% on your water bills just by sealing up water drips or save up to $75.00 a year on energy costs by using your computer’s hibernate setting while you sleep. There are tips for your home appliances like turning the temperature of your water heater from 140 degrees to 120 degrees to save 10% a year or save $100 a year by hanging clothes on the line instead of using your drier.

This is a BETA program which means it is being tested and it is free. I signed in using my Windows Live account. There’s a tab that lists energy saving tips and as you follow the suggestions you check them off and see how much money and CO2 you save annually.

My local energy provider is not currently partnered with Holm so they can’t evaluate my gas and electric bill directly with the company. I did find lots of articles and links that tell how to do various energy saving things so for a free website it’s worth a visit.

5 comments:

  1. great stuff. cutting energy costs is definitely a hot button...

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  2. We've been watching our lights and keeping the heat a two degrees cooler this winter and it's made a big difference in our utility bill...my new motto I can do less and we all benefit.

    Great post.

    Dorothy from grammology
    grammology.com

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  3. I bet I save more by powering down completely. Now if I could just spend more time on my bicycle than in my car, I'd be fine. What I need is a passenger compartment on my bicycle.

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  4. with the number of sun hours we've been getting the investment would never pay off

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