Daily Home Renovation Tips

Earlier this month we completed our 3 week long home energy conservation tips contest.

It was the first contest we had ever run on our site.

For information on statistics such as number of entries received, number of new energy conservation tips for the home, and so on, you can read about the results of our contest here in the article we wrote a few days ago called Home Energy Conservation Tip Contest Results.

Now, about the winners and their energy conservation tip (or tips as the case may be).

If you recall we had three prizes.

The winner of the $100 Home Depot gift card was Shirley from Pennsylvania who submitted the following tip:

“Teach children and grandchildren the importance of turning off lights, unplugging the TV, closing outside doors et al, education is one of the best ways of converving (sic) energy”

As a professional educator myself, I have a strong belief that one energy conservation tip here or there in isolation is OK, in fact better than just ‘OK’.

However, to teach others of the many, many different possible energy conservation tips will have a greater short term and long term impact in reducing the consumption of non-renewable resources and in reducing resultant environmental damage. It’s what they call in the consulting or human resource professions ‘leverage’. And, if the others who you teach are in the same house as you are it, teaching others to conserve energy will also save the entire household money to spend on other ’stuff’ like, … oh … um … the mortgage.

The second place winner of a $25 Home Depot gift card was Tanya from Virginia who submitted the following energy conservation tip. Well, space does not allow me to tell you her tip submission? Why? Well, Tanya submitted not just one but a total of 85, yes eighty-five, separate valid energy conservation tips. Here tips ran the full gambit from unplugging, not just turning off, electric appliances when not in use to taking shorter showers to reduce the amount of energy needed to produce the hot water, to hanging your laundry not only on an outside line in the summer to an area inside the home in the winter, and more.

Tanya’s family should be very proud of her many, many efforts to reduce her home’s consumption of non-renewable resources, saving money by reducing her home’s electrical and heating utility bills and reducing polluting emissions.

Third place, the second $25 Home Depot gift card and bragging rights to her friends, neighbours, co-workers and family is Karyn also from Virginia who submitted the following energy conservation tip amongst her many, many different energy conservation tips:

“Keep track of the environmental voting records of candidates for office. Only vote for those who have your environment at heart.”

This submission resonated very strongly with me for two separate reasons. First, on a personal level I am sick and tired of politicians who will say anything to become elected to public office and then find any excuse to not meet their commitments. Take for example the current Federal government in Canada who two elections in the past said they would not change this thing called ‘income trusts’ which provided very high level of income distribution yet soon after they were elected retroactively created a new law which went against this campaign promise. Or in the election a mere several weeks ago the leader of this party said that he would not be willing to consider a budget deficit even when the leaders of the other political parties said that there was a work economic crisis, yet as soon as he won election said that budget deficits were now the order of the day.

So, holding elected officials to their campaign promises is important.

The other reason this tip resonated with me is that typically is costs more to acquire energy efficient appliances than energy efficient ones. My personal belief is that significant government assistance should be provided to encourage the populous to purchase energy efficient products.

Funding more wind or solar energy development is one thing to provide alternate energy sources but at what cost to the average home owner? If politicians would do more to help the average home owner purchase energy efficient / hybrid type of appliances, so they are at least financially equal to energy inefficient ones in terms of cash outlay, more consumers would be motivated to leave the energy inefficient appliances sitting on the retailer’s shelves. Somehow simply making such items free of sales tax is not really a sufficiently significant financial motivation to purchase a product that is already more expensive to buy than an energy inefficient model.

So, there are our winners. Congratulations to all!