Top 5 Tips on How to Make Your Home More Sustainable

Top 5 Tips on How to Make Your Home More Sustainable

With how global warming is becoming a major concern for the entire planet, it's time to start looking at ways to make your life more green. You've started carpooling, recycling your cans and bottles, and even started volunteering your time to helping your local community clean up the road.

Top 5 Tips on How to Make Your Home More Sustainable

[ photo: survival-mastery.com ]

However, did you know that you can start with your own home? By making it more sustainable, you're taking a big step in reducing your carbon footprint every year. But there are some people who aren't sure how to go about making their home more green. Instead of flubbing around like a chicken without a head, here are five great tips you can introduce into your every day life to make your home more sustainable.

Tip 1: Taking Care of your Garden

Every spring, it comes time to start pulling up the weeds, tilling the soil, and getting it ready for your homegrown vegetables or flower garden. Going to the store to buy bag after bag of mulch is not only expensive, they're heavy and difficult to carry home. Which, in turn, eats up more of the gas in your tank.

However, you can save yourself the hassle by learning how to make mulch. It's actually pretty easy, and mulch is great at minimizing weeds taking over your garden, as well as retaining rain water so that your plants can grow more healthy.

Mulch can be made of anything organic, so it is absorbent and decomposes to add more minerals to the soil. You can use cut grass, shredded leaves, sticks, and wood chips to make a rich mulch that your plants will love. Simply pick a spot in your yard, somewhere that doesn't interfere with where you want your garden to grow, mow over your leaves and rake on your piles of mowed grass.

If you have a wood chipper on hand, you can reduce any branches or twigs in your yard, and add that to your mulch pile. Then just leave everything to sit and decompose until it's ready to use in early spring.

Tip 2: Making your own Charcoal

Fueling your home with gas feels like a necessity, but learning to live off the grid can save you more money in your pocket. You can save a pretty penny by learning to make your own charcoal to use for cooking and heating your fireplace during the early fall months. Having this on hand can also help you to survive during a blackout, when there's on electricity to heat your home. Charcoal has also been known to help with digestive issues, especially when it comes to toxins, so it never hurts to have some in your home.

The first step in making your own charcoal is to have a great survival axe on hand. To make charcoal for heating purposes, you're going to need to use hardwoods, such as hickory, oak, and walnut. Split your pieces of wood as many times as you can until they're the size of twigs. Place all of your pieces into a metal container with a hole poked into the top for the methane gas to escape.

Put on the lid and place the container into a fire. If you see a white smoke coming out of the hole, then you know the charcoal process is starting. Ensure that your container remains in the fire at all times.

Be careful, as this smoke is the escaping methane, meaning it's highly flammable. Keep cooking until the smoke is no longer flammable and remove your container from the fire. Allow it to cool completely before removing the lid, and you should have charcoal that's ready to use.

Tip 3: Collecting Rainwater

Keeping your plants watered during the hottest months of the year can cost you a large water bill. Which is ridiculous, given how much rain falls every year. Instead of letting it get to waste, start keeping a rain barrel. You can keep it under the gutter spout that runs down the side of your house. Then you can use Gilmour hose connectors so that you can attach a hose to the bottom of the barrel, or just use your watering can to remove water when your plants are looking a little thirsty. It's a great way to put to use all that rain that ends up in the water table anyway, and you won't have to turn on your outside faucet as often to get your plants the hydration they need.

Tip 4: Turn on a Light

The incandescent bulbs of yesteryear don't last very long, and having to purchase them when they burn out means an extra trip to the store. They're also not very efficient when it comes to lighting your home. Instead, LED and CFL bulbs use 75% less energy and last much longer before needing replacement.

You also won't burn your hands when changing these bulbs like you do with incandescents. They don't emit any heat at all while they're lit, so there's no wasted time waiting for the bulbs to cool. Thanks to how popular LED and CFL bulbs are becoming, they're also dropping in price to make them more affordable for anyone to use.

Tip #5: Leaving your Shoes by the Door

This may seem like a strange tip, but here us out. Being outside, at the mall, walking down the street, or going to work, you're going to step in a lot of things, and a lot of that stuff is toxic. Pollutants stick to the bottoms of your shoes and are still there when you get home. Adding these toxins to the air circulating throughout your house, you're creating an atmosphere that's not safe to breathe.

However, by leaving your shoes by the door, you keep all of that yucky gunk by the door and away from your family. A simple shoe rack will get the job done. An added bonus is that without you tracking all that dirt through your house, you'll reduce your need to vacuum every other day. And that means less electricity used to keep your house clean.