A lightbulb “suddenly burns out” and Rhett springs into green action, replacing the lightbulbs in our front room with CFLs. These things are great…they put out a beautiful white light and use 25-33% of the electricity of incandescent lights. Granted, they have mercury in them, but it’s not hard to work around that. They’re cheaper than LED lights and they really sip the electricity for what they do.

Some important links:

• Did you know consumers prefer CFL light? Really. Check out this Popular Mechanics study.
• What about the mercury content? Again, Popular Mechanics is there.
• Energy Star on CFLs, including proper disposal.
• Find a CFL recycling facility.
• CC Crane is pretty famous for LED lights, for the mercury-phobic.
• Check out the CFL Epidsode of Real World Green, our “distant cousin” green vlog.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

Tags: cfl, reduce, electricity, green lifestyle, green, environmentalism

We’d like to welcome everyone who’s coming to see us for the first time thanks to our redistribution at greenerMIAMI. We’re so proud to see our first site affiliation.

Hungry to shrink our electricity bills this summer, we go after our monster appliance sucking 1800-5000W of power. That’s right…the clothes dryer. We look into the inexpensive and surprisingly not-inconvenient option of letting the miserable heat of Florida’s summers do the work for us by drying on racks. See how this is going for us and check out some information on how you can get involved.

Links:

• Project Laundry List - A group promoting information and advocacy of a clothes dryer-free lifestyle and a return to the clothes line. They’re a great place to start if you need information on fighting deed restrictions. We live in a “right to dry” state. Do you? Find out.
• Treehugger.com - A discussion about deed restricted communities, difficulties in putting up clothes lines and drying racks, and property values.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

Tags: green, green lifestyle, environmentalism, reduce, electricity, appliances, clothes, clothes line, hang out