Be A Smarter Driver
Take the Drive $marter Challenge and learn how you can save money on fuel in your vehicle. The Drive Smarter Challenge is a fuel-efficiency campaign aimed at keeping more money in drivers’ pockets by reducing the number of costly trips to the pump. It offers effective money and gas saving tips in English and Spanish and extensive additional resources.

To calculate annual gas savings with the Drive $marter Challenge. The website also features links to extensive resources ranging from where to find the cheapest local gas to information on public transportation, biking, car sharing and carpooling.

Save Money Around the House
A whopping 46 percent of home energy use is energy loss! In other words, no productive energy use at all! Here are simple ways of reversing this, mostly by changes of habit.

• Each degree you raise the temperature of your air conditioner saves 3-4 percent of cooling costs.
  • By changing the temperature by two degrees all year, you can save about 2,000 pounds of C02 a year.
• Cook with a slow cooker or a toaster oven to reduce electrical use from kitchen appliances.
  • For a meal that requires one hour to cook in an electric oven, and which uses 2.7 pounds of C02, a crockpot uses 0.9 pounds of C02 for seven hours, a toaster oven takes 1.3 pounds of C02 for 50 minutes and a microwave only 0.5 pounds of C02 for 15 minutes of cooking.
• Switch to a laptop instead of using a desktop computer and cut three-quarters off your electrical use.
  • Turn off the laptop at the end of the day.
• Switch to cold water washing and save 80 percent on energy used for laundry and save an estimated $60 a year. (see laundry tips)
  • Hang dry your clothes instead of using the dryer and save 700 pounds of C02 a year.
• Plug anything that can be powered by a remote control or that has a power cube transformer (little black box) into a power strip and turn it off, and/or unplug, when not in use.
• Turn off the lights when you aren’t using them and reduce your direct lighting energy use by 45 percent.
  • Stop using heat-producing halogen lamps (they can also be fire hazards).
  • Install occupancy or motion sensors on outdoor lights.
• Switch to compact fluorescent from regular incandescent bulbs and use 60 percent less energy per bulb and save 300 pounds of C02 a year.
• Wrap your water heater in an insulation blanket and save 1,000 pounds of C02 a year.
  • Insulate your hot water pipes.

Laundry
Laundry takes up a lot of energy, nearly 7 percent of a household’s electricity use (most of that for the dryer), according to 2001 Energy Information Agency figures, the most recent available.

There are some easy ways to save money, and energy by laundering more efficiently.

Washing

• Rinse in cold water.
• Set your water heater to 120 degrees, not 140 degrees.
• Always wash a full load - or at least adjust the settings to match the size of your load, so the machine knows the right amount of water.
• In general, washing machines that load in front are more energy-efficient than machines that load on top, though there are some exceptions.

Drying

• Dry multiple loads in succession.
  • This ensures that the heat the dryers produce does not go to waste.
• Clean the lint trap after every load.
  • As lint fills up, it blocks air flow, making the dryer work harder.
• Use the sensor-dry settings to dry your clothes, rather than timed drying. The latter will keep clothes tumbling even if they are already dry.
• Dry similar kinds fabrics together. Ever noticed that towels dry more slowly than T-shirts?