Part 14 (1/2)

Little Things Mean a Lot, 1-2-3

1 Replace your five most-used bulbs with CFLs (coeable batteries

3 Don't buy bottled water

1 Replace Your Five Most-Used Bulbs with CFLs

I atching a TV rerun of the sitcom Friends when the inferiority of the traditional incandescent light bulbs struckthat as a child she cooked with an Easy-Bake Oven

The child's toy Easy-Bake Oven bakes cookies and cakes with a 100-watt incandescent light bulb Think about that The Easy-Bake Oven is possible because traditional light bulbs are actually sht They are wildly inefficient ways to illuy

Meanwhile, compact fluorescent lamps, CFLs, are so much better than they used to be They're definitely worth a try

Each CFL will save you 30 to 50 over its life, compared with an incandescent bulb That's because CFLs use one-quarter of the electricity The energy savings her purchase price And they last 10 tiht CFLs that say on the package they are guaranteed to last nine years-not nine ood, actually Probleht have all been reht turn on a little slowly and take several seconds to get to full brightness But I don't find that to be a big problehtness

The important point here is to at least try thehts The best deals are buying multipacks of CFLs at warehouse clubs and hohts with dihts, the bulbs lag behind in quality coe of die of full, half, and off, rather than all the brightness levels in between

A minor environmental drawback of CFLs is they contain a tiny amount of o online to Earth911org to find out where to drop the, a few national retailers, such as Home Depot and RadioShack, will take they, until we get LED (light-eer, give off better light, and don't have the mercury problereat way to go

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Another way to save electricity is to kill the vampires Va in a kind of undead state Examples of vaers, and cable and satellite TV boxes

They secretly suck electricity, day and night, even when powered off This ”standby loss” bleeds dollars from your wallet and wastes electricity Did you know that over its life, aits clock than it does cooking food? For electronics grouped together, use a power strip, which allows you to flip a switch on the strip to cut all power to the coeable Batteries

Like CFLs, rechargeable batteries have gotten a lot better recently They're worth trying because you can save ing ending up in landfills

Rechargeable batteries arerun, even factoring in the cost of the charger and er on a charge than a regular disposable alkaline

The big drawback had always been that traditional rechargeable batteries lose battery pohile idle So, if your digital ca in a drawer for a few eable batteries could be drained when you need it to capture an unexpected great eables, called hybrids or precharged batteries These nickel ed and lose power at a slow rate,idle for a year You can recharge batteries literally hundreds of tieable AA batteries could save you nearly 2,000

Four AA rechargeable batteries that yielded 500 charges each would cost 50, including the cost of the charger Electricity cost for charging is negligible, literally a few pennies

The equivalent would be buying 2,000 disposable batteries At 1 each, that's 2,000

Net savings is 1,950

I bought a brand that was one of the pioneers in the hybrid rechargeables, the Sanyo Eneloop They work quite well They're especially good for devices that eat through batteries, such as coaeables Fortunately, it's easy You can drop them off at such retailers as Sears, RadioShack, Ho for a list of battery recyclers near you

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Whether you use disposables or rechargeable batteries, it makes sense to invest in a battery tester Some are as cheap as 5 A voltroup of batteries is the dud, so you don't have to replace all batteries in a multibattery device

3 Don't Buy Bottled Water

There's only one beverage for humans that literally falls froe that's so common and inexpensive that you can drink as much as you want from a public fountain and nobody cares

Yet, soood money for a free product, all because they put it in a bottle for you Mind you, this is a product that requires you to go to the store, load heavy cases into your shopping cart, pay realit home