Rather take a shower. You will save up to 40% in water and use 5 times less electricity than heating a bath water.
Install an energy-efficient showerhead. It’s designed to use up to 40% less hot water and saves you R480 or more on your electricity bill every year..
Insulate your geyser with a geyser blanket. This prevents heat loss, reducing the cost of electricity needed to keep water hot by R500 or more a year.
Insulate your ceiling. It affects heat loss in winter and heat gain in summer, saving up to 16% of the electricity you need annually to heat or cool your home.
Insulate your hot water pipes. It prevents heat loss, reducing the cost of electricity needed to keep water hot.
Remember load-shedding? Remember actually speaking to your kids again? Catching up with your spouse? Playing a board game together for the first time in a decade?
Committng to a once-a-week ‘power-off evening’ should decrease your electricity bill in the region of 5% and is goingto make everyone appreciate and understand the value of electricity that much more.
I can just about excuse the odd piece of littering. But the cynicism required to take a load of rubbish out into the veld and dump it there is mindblowing. Each decent-sized municipality has an illegal dumping report line but they vary from town to town. Give your council a call now and find out how to report it and then put the number on your fridge.
South Africa’s political system is not very well structured to allow easy access for citizens to the halls of power, but we all vastly underestimate the power we have as consumers. If a company does anything you’re uncomfortable with, you need to do two things. First, STOP buying from them!
It’s the best-kept secret in the car business. No matter how swish your new car is, no matter how long you’ve wanted that particular brand, model, engine note, after a couple of weeks the novelty wears off and you’re left with … just another car.
Even when your computer is switched off, it is often drawing power for the monitor, printer and other extremities. It’s worth unplugging the machines completely as this also protects you against power surges and saves a noticeable amount of power over time. Machines left in stand-by mode still draw nearly 20% of the power they do when fully operational.
Go and have a look through your kids’ bedroom cupboard (or all over their floor if cleaning their room is their responsibility). How many of the electronic toys still work? 10%?
And yet they still play with the things, unless they’ve been so badly designed that all their functionality is lost once the batteries are out. I remember very clearly realising at the age of about 5 that battery-powered toys just limited the scope of play that your imagination allowed.
Okay, this can be a tricky one. Labels like ‘not tested on animals’ are pretty much standard on personal care products these days. And just about every soap and shampoo is marketed with images of forests and mountain streams. The rules governing the right to use the word ‘organic’ on a label differs from country to country and product to product.
Put on warm clothes instead of switching on a heater. If you still need warmth, use a gas, small-bar heater or 2-kW fan heater to heat more efficiently.
Use a hot plate that’s most similar to the size of your pot. An electric stove loses up to 40% of its heat when he pot is too small, which means you waste electricity.
Take the train or a bus to work. You can use the travel time to read, work or catch up on emails!
Using high efficiency shower heads in the bathroom can save much household energy and water to the advantage of the householder, the environment and, under energy and water shortage circumstances.
...Submitted by GreenerZA
The efficiency of the newer LED light bulbs is more than five times higher than comparable incandescent bulbs. In other words, led light bulbs use only about 20% as much electricity to produce the same amount of light. However, because led bulbs direct a larger percentage of light where it is needed, in many applications they are as much as ten times as effective as incandescent bulbs, reducing energy use by 90%.
Don’t limit your carpool options to people you work with. At times that can be great but there are many instances that the 8 hours you spend in the office together is just about the limit of everyone’s endurance. Be open to the idea of carpooling with friends who work in different offices.
Recycle your food-waste into super-food for your garden.
Make your own garden compost.
Simply place waste fruit and veggie peels , small bones , waste cooked and raw food etc into bucket.
Use Recycled/ Remanufactured Printer Ink and Toner Cartridges or Simply Refill your empties.
It costs much less than buying NEW and keeps the empty ones out of the landfill sites, printer cartridges are completely made of non-biodegradable products and contaminate the ground around it.
Aquatrip - Permanently Installed Water Leak Detection Systems
Switch off appliances at the wall and pull out chargers. Leaving them in standby mode could cost you up to 6% more electricity.
The HOTBOX uses the principle of insulated cooking.
