Assessing Energy Efficiency In Your Home

Remember that the two great factors which you can change in order to enhance your quality of life are your lifestyle and your home. If you want to modernize your home, you have to make significant decisions regarding your household appliances. In today’s world, we are faced with a wide range of appliance styles, sizes, configurations and technologies.  Evaluating your household appliances can help a lot in your aim to save home energy.  The following are the factors that can help you compare and assess your home appliances:

Image via WikipediaEnergy Efficiency:  It is always good to carefully weigh the energy efficiency of the appliances in your home. With some household devices, you may have a choice between electricity and natural gas as the source of power. The energy efficiency can also be based on the materials the machine or appliance is made of. Various materials can be cooled and heated at different rates. Choose Energy Star appliances where possible, as these are made specifically to be energy-efficient.

Size:  Having an appliance with the right size for your home and the area where it will be used is significant. Speed can also be a factor. Generally, the faster an appliance finishes its task, the less energy it uses, compared to longer usage of a slower appliance.

Features:  Assess first the features of an appliance before purchasing it and think carefully how these features can improve your lifestyle, and whether you truly need the appliance at all. If you really don't need it, don't purchase it.

Another advisable tip is to come up with a home energy conservation plan.  There are various approaches which you can use in developing such plan and these include:

• Identification of the places where home energy is used inefficiently or lost
• Prioritizing said areas and finding out how much energy is being wasted
• Correcting said problems systematically depending on your home energy improvement budget

As you come up with your home energy conservation plan, you should first identify the problem areas. It is good to start in the area where the highest amount of energy is used because that area can also be the best place to gain potential savings. With the above mentioned home energy conservation tips, you can free up more bucks and also benefit the environment by conserving energy (aka fuel) use.

Examples of Energy Star Rated Appliances: