How to Make Electronics Eco-Friendly | Green Living

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Learn how to make your lighting, electronics and appliances eco-friendly in this Howcast video featuring Alegre of Green and Greener.

Hi. Allegra from Amber Living here today to talk about the exciting topic of greening your lighting and appliances and electronics.

My first tip is to invest in something called a smart strip. Smart strips are fantastic because they’re kind of surge protectors except that they have 3 different types of outlets. They have one that’s called the Master outlet and then they have a number of outlets that are called the Controlled outlets and then they have Always on outlets. So, for instance, say for your television. You plug your television into the Master outlet and then you plug all the other peripherals, so your cable box, your DVD, your DVR, your Blue Ray, whatever it is so you plug those into the Controlled outlets. And then say you need something to always be on, maybe your cable box should always be on. So what that does is when you turn on your TV, it turns everything else on for you which really just sounds like a lazy man’s dream but the reason why it’s more eco-friendly is it saves you a ton of energy because when you turn off the TV, it also turns everything off for you. So you don’t have to go around turning everything off because some people can be lazy and then they leave things on and that’s just drawing a lot of electricity.

But the other thing is even if you’re turning your appliances off, they are still going to be drawing a little bit of energy from the grid, it’s called a phantom load. And the reason it does that is so that it starts up really quickly. Well, phantom loads can add up to be 13% of your household energy bill. So if you get something like a smartstrip, you can save yourself 13% of your energy bill because it will control things like phantom load.

They’re also a great thing to have if you have like an office because your computer can go into the Master strip and say your fax machine and your printer and your modem and all that other stuff can go into the Controlled ones and again, it’ll cut down on all those phantom loads. So those are fantastic.

Another great thing that you can do is to get on/off sensors for your lighting. So this is specially practical in an office environment. So say, when someone goes into the bathroom it senses that someone’s in there, turns the light on, turns the light off. You don’t have to have the light on for all those hours when no one’s actually in the bathroom. You’ll save a ton of energy that way.

And another thing is to use energy efficient lighting and lightbulbs. So that means, get rid of the incandescents and switch to either CFL or LED’s. I’m going to talk about the differences between these different types of lightbulbs in a different video so tune into that one for more details about that.