green home

LED holiday lights are sweeping the nation. There's a good reason why they are showing up on Christmas trees and houses faster than you can say light-emitting diode. They pay for themselves.

A typical string of lights may cost around 30 percent more at the store, but take them home and plug them in. Your power bill for the LED lights will be up to 98 percent less. Not only will they immediately save electricity, LEDs are unbreakable and can last up to 20 years.

The ecobee Smart Thermostat is a programmable thermostat that will help you not only reduce your footprint and conserve energy, but save money as well. Using it is simple.

The unit is equipped with a touch screen display that makes programming quick and easy. You can change the temperature simply by touching and dragging the temperature reading along a thermostat diagram. You can also program the ecobee to have different settings for each day of the week and even each hour of

Although it may save energy, most of the time a compact florescent lamp (CFL) doesn't win awards for aesthetics. They last for years, but breakage and disposal are usually problematic due to the presence of mercury and lead, both dangerous substances. Enter the Marexim Safety Bulb.

Not only do these bulbs look like regular light bulbs, they are enclosed to prevent breakage. Not only are they enclosed to prevent breakage, they stay cool to the touch when on, the glass and solder inside is lead-free, and the bulb contains no liquid mercury. An RoHS compliant, energy efficient CFL for the masses? Wait, this gets even better.

This may sound impossible at first, but Sweden based Home Energy has developed a way to burn wood in a carbon neutral fashion. The process takes place in their Wood Pellet Boiler.

Fallen wood left on the forest floor naturally decays and, while it does so, releases energy as well as carbon dioxide. The Wood Pellet Boiler, while burning the wood manages to harness the

Fresh from Sweden comes a new idea in home energy generation. A unique-looking, quiet windmill called the Energy Ball. The company HomeEnergy has developed the aerodynamics of the Energy Ball to accelerate wind through the rotor and achieve high efficiency renewable power generation.

The device will install with limited space and operate silently at wind speeds as low as 4.5 miles per hour. Perfect for the roof of a private home, the Energy Ball plugs directly into an electrical outlet to contribute power to the household.

Motion-activated lamps have become the norm on many exteriors of energy-saving suburban homes. Whether on the driveway, side yard, or on the back deck, these lamps provide security from strangers lurking in the dark. In addition, they save energy since they are only used when a person is in the vicinity.

Improvements on this design have included solar lamps that require no external power and charge during the day. Now a further improvement has been made. The solar wedge lamp combines sleek industrial design with ultra-efficient LED lamps and requires no wiring to install.

Countless gallons are wasted every day in homes around the world simply by leaving the sink running while washing dishes or brushing your teeth. In fact, about 95 percent of all water entering a house ends up going down the drain. Eulo has come up with an ingenious solution for conserving water in the kitchen with its Grey Water Recycling Sink.

Developed by Australian Ainslie Asher, the Eulo Grey Water Recycling Sink takes the used water going down the drain and sends it through a series of filtering steps before sending it out for other uses. First the water passes through a strainer to get rid of large particles such as food etc. After passing through the

If you have been consuming too much toilet water lately, Brondell may have found a solution. The company has devised a new product called EcoFlow that will allow toilets to save a considerable amount of water. The product basically allows your toilet to flush with two different amounts of water, depending upon your needs. According to Brondell, EcoFlow takes just 30 minutes to install. The resulting half/full flush option will, they claim, reduce water consumption by up to 50 percent. Personally I think it would reduce it by more than that (think off all the flushes per day for #1 compared to #2, in fact Brondell says 9 out of 10). According to Brondell 40 percent of indoor water usage in a typical household is from the toilet and about 55 billion gallons of water are flushed each day.

This is actually not a new product or concept at all. Having just returned from a nine country trip in Europe, I think every single hotel/hostel I was in had the half/full flush option and probably 90

Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) seem destined to be a clean, eco-friendly solution to lighting in the very near future. OLEDs are basically LEDs whose electroluminescent surface layer is composed of organic compounds. The compounds can easily be laid down in rows and columns on a polymer substance that holds them in place. OLEDs can be used for television and computer screens as well as lighting. The OLEDs' advantage over LCDs lies in the fact that they require no backlight, allowing them to operate on far less power, and thus far longer on a single charge. They can also be made much thinner than LCDs and manufactured more effectively than both LCDs and plasmas.

That being said, GE has been working on some innovative lighting designs that use OLEDs. Due to their paper thin design

The latest and greatest light bulbs from Nexxus Lighting are here. The Array PAR30 is an LED bulb using only 7.7 watts of power with a brightness equivalent to a 75W standard bulb. They are the first LED bulbs to achieve 95 lumens per watt. These warm or cool white additions to the Array series of bulbs are rated for

a whopping 50,000 hours, over 25 times longer than incandescents. Unlike florescent lamps they power up immediately and can be used with standard dimmers. When the time finally comes to dispose of or recycle expired bulbs, rest assured the PAR30 is RoHS compliant, containing no mercury or lead.