How do we save energy?

For lighting; CFLs in every room, one bulb per fixture, one fixture per room unless needed for accent lighting, CFL grow lights for my plants in the living room, and a modified LED bulb in the refrigerator.

For basic electric appliances; we have everything plugged into power strips and shut them off at the end of the day to prevent phantom drain, this saving us some money. Most people don't realize that a computer can draw 40% of it's running power when it is completely powered down! We even have the kitchen hooked up like this.

We don't have any appliances that plug in and have clocks on them. Even our alarm clocks are on our mobile phones so we don't need extra power draw within the home.

When we moved in, we turned off the gas to the furnace and blew out the pilot light. Since gas costs so much more than electric, and there is so much heat lost in the vents when moving under and throughout the house, we have found that using a single space heater in the center of our house warms it all up nicely to where we are comfortable in sweaters and jeans indoors in the winter.

If it gets really cold and we are up late at night, we don't turn on the lights. Instead, we use oil lanterns and candles. They light up the room enough to see, and have the added bonus of heat. My kids love to get old candles and make them into new ones, so this is a freebie for us as well.

We have all of the potential air leaks blocked with foam tape, door sweeps, socket sealers, insulated vent-covers, and so on.

We wash all of our clothes in cold, have our water heater turned down low, and even wash dished in warm, not hot, water. Our clothes are all line-dried, even in the winter, and we live in a rental apartment in the middle of the city.

We grow food plants in containers, and in the winter we bring them inside for a two-fold effect. Not only does it ensure a longer harvest, and an earlier start on the next season's growth, but the large containers of dirt act as a sort of thermal mass heat-storage tool tat prevents excessive heat loss wen entering and leaving the house.

We have water bottles that we freeze when our chest freezer isn't quite full, to, again provide that thermal mass so that all the cold doesn't leave when we open the door and cause the freezer to work harder.

We're not quite there yet, but we hope to soon have everyone in the house equipped with a notebook computer so we can get rid of the power-hogging desktops once and for all to save even more energy.

I guess you could say we're pretty serious about saving energy around here. *smile*