Daily Home Renovation Tips

First, we would like to thank everyone who entered our first ever Home Energy Conservation Tip contest.  We really didn’t know what quite to expect, never having run a blog contest before. Your contributions overwhelmed us.

We thought we already had a lot of energy conservation tips that could be used in the home on our Energy Conservation page.  I mean, we already had 101 tips.

However, based on all of the entrants we have more than doubled the number of home energy conservation ideas that most everyone can do in their home to reduce the amount of non-renewable resources which they consume.

As well, the vast majority of the suggestions you provided are cheap and simple to do.

And that’s the idea, right? Everyone has their own value system. Some insist they will only conserve energy if it saves them money and refuse to understand why anyone would pay money simply to reduce consumption of non-renewable resources. Others will reduce the amount of non-renewable resources they consume even if it is costs more to do so and forces them to go bankrupt. While still others are in between.

Additionally, the vast majority of the suggested provided by our contest entrants would be done by anyone. Again, that’s the idea, right? If something can be done by oneself, then usually it is cheaper than if one has to rely on a ‘professional’ to implement. And, if we have to rely on someone else to do something for us, even if we had the money to pay for it, we would have to wait until it was convenient for them to show up at our home.To us the most effective energy conservation tips are the ones which are cheap or even cost nothing to do, and which are simple to perform.  This is because frequently it costs more money to purchase an environmentally friendly device.

Take for example a tankless water heater. These things cost, installed, anywhere from $2,500 and up. Or what about solar PV panels which use the sun to generate electricity. Typically, solar PV panels can cost $40,000 and up. And it both cases the installation is so complex that you need professionals to do the installation … at least most people do … which would include us.

And with either of these, the financial investment is massive … at least it is to us … which will significantly reduce the number of people who could afford them. As well, the financial payback, that is the number of years it would take to recoup the money paid for these devices from the savings that they realize, can be staggering.

Now, this is not always the case. Take the solar shades we installed this spring on the outside of our south facing windows. These cost less than $3 per square foot yet were much less expensive than traditional awnings which for windows of our size would have cost at least $1,500 or more and would have needed a professional to install (we were able to easily install our exterior solar blinds ourselves). Here is the link to the first article in the series on our experiences with our exterior solar shades: Part 1 - The Need.

We would also like to thank The Home Depot for supplying us with the gift cards and the idea to hold our contest in the first place.

We cannot announce the winners or the winning entries just yet because we have to ensure that the winners of our prizes meet the qualifications of the contest. As soon as we have verified the winners we will post them up on our site.

What we can do at this time, however, is to provide you with some of the early statistics. I say ‘early’ because we are still compiling the results.

In total we received 935 entries. Of this total number at least 62 were rejected because:

• they were either clearly SPAM,
• they included more than one energy conservation tip in a single entry (our rules clearly states one energy conservation tip per entry),
• they were duplicate entries (our rules states that you could enter as often as you wished but each entry had to contain a unique energy conservation tip, i.e. you could not make repeat entries with an energy conservation tip for the home you had used on a prior entry)
• they included environmentally friendly tips, which while great, would not result in reducing a non-renewable resource used to produce energy in the home, or
• they included an conservation tip which would not be performed in the home

Of the 873 acceptable entries we received:

• 191 different energy conservation tip for the home were submitted 
• 142 were suggestions that we did not yet have on our home energy conservation listing, of which:
  • 45 related to Electricity
  • 40 related to Space Heating
  •   5 related to Space Cooling
  • 16 related to both Space Heating and Cooling 
  •   9 related to Water Heating
  •   5 related to All forms of energy consumption

The three most common home energy conservation submission were: 

• 83 times (10.0% of the entries) - Use energy saving light bulbs
• 57 times (   6.5% of the entries) - Turn the lights off when you leave the room
• 53 times (   5.3% of the entries) - Unplug electrical appliances to eliminate phantom electricity usage.

Over the next several weeks we will be adding all of the new energy conserving suggestions for the home to our existing list as time permits. You can find this list on the Energy Conservation page of our site. You will be able to identify which idea came from this contest because it will be displayed in, well, green.

Lastly, the response to our first contest was so overwhelming with so many suggestions and ideas that people are using right now which was not on our list has given us an idea.

We have decided to devote the entire month of January 2009 as our Energy Conservation month here at DailyHomeRenoTips.com. This means that the vast majority of our articles will be on different aspects of energy conservation in the home. Some days we will focus on cooking ideas, other days on how to reduce the amount of energy consumed doing the laundry, while other days we will focus on different aspects to reducing our heating bills.

There is so much to write about with the input we received from the contest we are confident we will have no challenge focusing on the different ways of reducing non-renewable resources consumed to generate energy in the home. In fact, we also plan to implement some of these ideas for our selves and we will of course show you what and how we do them.

So, once again, thank you so much for your participation in our first ever Home Energy Conservation Tips contest.