Ways to Save

1)    Turn off everything when you leave your room. Although you may not even think about it, leaving computers, speakers, lights and printers on when you leave your room is wasting a lot of energy.  You obviously don’t need any of these on when you’re not there, and doing so just wastes money that could be spent on Floralia.

2)    Don’t open your windows to cool down when the heater is on right below them. It makes sense, but people do it.  Most heaters in dorms can be turned off completely, by setting it to “0” or the snowflake.  If yours can’t, contact physical plant to have them come look at it.  The worst thing you could do is to let all the heat that’s raging out of your heater out into the environment.  Take off some layers, if it’s hot.  On a similar note, try and keep your room as cool as comfortable.  If everyone turned down their thermostat by one degree (I know we don’t actually have thermostats everywhere, so go as far as you can), the school could save nearly 20,000 gallons of fuel this winter!  When you’re gone or sleeping, turn it down by even more.

3)    Put computers in sleep mode after 15 minutes, and turn them off at night. Computers are nifty because they have a bunch of settings to help you out.  One that will really help you and the rest of the school is setting your computer to sleep after 15 minutes.  This easy switch will have your computer using only about three watts of power per hour instead of the 45-250 that it normally does. It is obviously still best to turn it off at night, and unplug laptops especially. Note: A screen saver doesn’t do anything to reduce electricity use.

4)    Unplug Chargers.  Most people don’t know that a charger still charges when it’s not plugged into your phone or iPod.  Unfortunately, about 75% of the electricity that chargers use is literally going into thin air while you are not charging your electronic.  This “phantom energy” is a huge problem.  If it’s hard to unplug your chargers every night, get a power strip and plug in your chargers, computer, T.V. and DVD player and flip the switch when you’re not using it.

5)    Use CFL’s instead of incandescent bulbs for extra lighting in your room. If every American household replaced one regular lightbulb with a C.F.L., the pollution reduction would be equivalent to removing one million cars from the road. A 30-watt C.F.L. produces about as much light as an ordinary 100-watt bulb, and they are available from the Renewable Energy Club for FREE.

6)    Do big loads of laundry.  Laundry is possibly your highest per-use contributor to electricity use.  Both the washer and the drier use huge amounts of energy, so if you can consolidate a couple loads every month you would be saving a bunch of money.

7)    Make sure that lights are not left on in empty spaces.  How often have you walked by an empty class or room in Cro, or even your bathroom and seen all the lights on?  They most likely don’t need to be.  Take initiative to turn lights like this off, and if your friends think you’re becoming too much of an environmentalist, just tell them that you’ll rock out harder at Floralia knowing that you helped to get the killer band there.

8)    Encourage your teachers to do reduce copying, and tell them that they don’t need to keep the lights on in class (unless they need to).

9)    Take shorter showers, and use cold water while brushing your teeth.  Heating water takes a huge amount of energy.  If you can cut a couple of minutes off your shower, and use cold water when brushing your teeth, you could save a lot of energy.

10)  Buy Energy Star Rated electronics. Energy Star is a government rating system that certifies electronics that use the most efficient technologies.  These products are usually similarly priced, but will save you money in the long run.

Every little bit helps.