Learning to live in a more energy efficient fashion.

The most interesting is the temperature at which we set the thermostats. Humid summers in Indiana was accompanied by a cold and clammy 70-degrees indoors. The home felt more like a damp, cool basement – all over. Now, it’s a different story. Summers mean the home stays at 40-50% relative humidity, and thermostats are set at 75- and 77-degrees respectively, for the two zones in the house. And it is very comfortable.

Winter used to be 70-degrees and sweaters and wool socks. Not any more. Now thermostats are set to 70-degrees and 68-degrees respectively, and it’s comfortable enough to wear shorts. We keep experimenting with adjusting the temperatures for different times of the day, and see is we can find an optimal 67-68-degree setting that is comfortable when we are home.

Another change: we turn off lights more often when we leave a room, or don’t turn them on in the first place. On a sunny day the home gets plenty of natural light, so we’ve stopped turning on so many lights. I have no idea why we didn’t do this years ago.

We continue to NOT water the landscaping, and not only are we saving huge amounts of water, the landscaping seems to be doing just fine, in spite of almost three months of hot, rainless weather this past summer.

And speaking of water, we’ve directed virtually all of the water to be absorbed by the vegetation, which helps keep things green when we do get rain.

However, we have also identified some areas where we could definitely improve. One is in recycling. Oh, we recycle everything we possibly can, but the main culprit is corrugated packaging…and the cause is online shopping. It’s amazing how much solid waste is generated from “innocent online shopping.” It makes one wonder about just how green all this online shopping can be.

And we still haven’t found a solution for the small branches that break off during storms and windy days. They really add up, but we haven’t figured out a good way to deal with them. Don’t want to burn them, or leave them for the trash pick-up because they probably end up in a landfill, which is a big waste. I’ll keep searching for a solution.