And it’s not just in our backyard in Virginia - USA Today reports today that across America “electricity bills are heading up. Way up. Utilities across the USA are raising power prices up to 29%,” predicting a similarly scary scenario on a national scale: “Even more dramatic rate increases are ahead. The mounting electric bills will further squeeze households struggling with spiraling gasoline prices.”

Yikes. So what can you, Mr. or Ms. Modern American who hopes to continue using electricity, do about it? Plenty!

There’s no need to cower before utility price increases - or to wait for Congress to solve the problem for us (though you might want to remind them to take action, too). Yes, you can take steps to cut your power bills by as much as a third (maybe even more!) today!

Here are our top 10 suggestions, in order of effectiveness, for simple tweaks to your home to help you keep your bills under control:

1. Install a Programmable Thermostat

Just program a thermostat to adjust temperatures based on your daily routines and you could lower your energy bill by up to 33%. Most programmable thermostats allow you to set at least four separate time periods for your heating and cooling - that means that you can tell your thermostat what time you want it to be when you wake up and when you get home in the evening, and instruct it to save energy by powering your heating or cooling down when you’re not home.

2. Use an Appliance Timer on Your A/C

If you have a window unit air conditioner, you can also set it to run only when you need it by using a heavy-duty appliance timer. It doesn’t make sense to have your A/C running all day when you’re at work if your only interest is making sure it’s nice and cool when you arrive back home - just set your timer to turn your A/C off a half hour after you’ve left and turn on a half hour before you get back home. Think about it: does it make sense to pay for electricity for eight hours to cool an empty house or apartment?

3. Install an Oxygenating Showerhead

Especially if your hot water is heated using an electric water heater, then your morning shower is about to get much more expensive as rate hikes start up. If you have an older showerhead, it may use as much as 3 or 5 gallons per minute that you’re standing under it. Heating that many gallons of water each minute can really rack up quite the bill. An easy and painless way to cut back is to switch to an oxygenating showerhead: they add oxygen to the shower flow to keep your water pressure nice and high (often increasing it!) but to cut your hot water consumption to a comfortable 1.75 gallons per minute. Saving 3 gallons of water and all the energy needed to heat that water will make a big difference on all your utility bills.

4. Change Your Bulbs to CFLs

Light at night isn’t free - but it certainly can get a whole bunch cheaper. You’ll save 75% on energy for every older, incandescent bulb that you replace with a CFL. The latest CFLs are technological marvels - especially compared to the earliest incarnations of compact fluorescent lighting. Now you can’t tell the difference between the light cast by CFLs and that of traditional incandescent bulbs - and CFLs are available in nearly all the same shapes and features regular incandescent bulbs. The only difference is that you’ll save $8 to $10 per bulb per year with CFLs - and CFLs last about 5 to 7 years each!

5. Improve Your Clothes Drying Efficiency

The best way to dry clothes is with a solar-powered clothes dryer - which is to say, of course, a clothes line. Clothes lines don’t use any energy, so they’re entirely free. Sometimes and for many people clothes line drying may be impractical - that’s OK, there are still steps you can take to improve your drying efficiency. Cleaning all the lint out of your dryer vents is a great start - and one that can save several dozen dollars in energy costs each year. Dryer balls are another great little aid. Tossing a few in with your load will lift and separate clothes, exposing your garments to hot air pockets with greater efficiency.

6. Make Your Power Strip Think

Did you know that all the peripheral devices (monitors, printers, DVD players, VCRs, speakers, etc.) connected to your computer or TV may be costing you $10 to $30 per year per TV or computer while they’re off! It’s strange but true: unless you’re physically unplugging all of your equipment, it’s probably resting in stand-by mode - drawing power twenty-four hours a day. Sure, it’s not a great deal of power at any given moment - but this subtle suck accumulates a great deal each hour, day, week, and year. You can prevent it by switching your old power strip for a Smart Power Strip. A Smart Strip senses when your TV or Computer turns on or off - and cuts (or resumes) all power to your peripherals automatically.

7. Aerate Your Faucets!

You use hot water in your sinks too, right? If your faucet is not aerated, you may be sending several gallons of water down the drain every minute it’s open - and you’re paying for the energy to heat all that wasted water. Aerating your faucets can cut that flow down to a gallon per minute - or 2.2 gallons if you’re not yet ready to try one gallon (or less!) per minute flow rates.

8. Sweat the Small Stuff: Change Your Night Lights

Your night lights don’t use that much energy each night, but that little bit does add up week after week and year after year. You can shave a little bit more off of your electric bill by upgrading to especially efficient LED Night Lights. They have the added bonus of lasting about 100,000 hours each - that’s several tens of thousands more than your old-school incandescent bulb night lights.

9. Keep an Eye on Your Electricity!

What’s that toaster really costing you? And is that gadget really off when you switch it off? Knowledge is power - and that’s why a Kill-a-Watt meter or other sensor can help you make informed decision to adjust your use of the products and appliances around your home.

10. Inflate Your Tires

Just like the solar-powered clothes dryer, your feet are far more economical and earth-friendly than any car. So is public transportation, when that’s a possibility. But, for those who must drive and must pay $4 per gallon, there’s still a bit that you can do: keep your tires fully inflated! Fully inflated tires roll most efficiently, whereas a slightly sagging tire can cost you by increasing resistance between your car and the road. Check your tire pressure regularly by using an easy-to-read digital tire pressure gauge.

Take the Earth Aid Challenge!

You can purchase most of the products we’ve described in some hardware stores - but you can also purchase them here at Earth Aid! We’ve created the Earth Aid Challenge to help you take all of these ten steps together - or any combination of four or more of them. You can build an Earth Aid Kit on our website to get live calculations of how much energy you could save in your house by making any of our ten switches. If you take the challenge and purchase at least four distinct products from us, we’ll ship your Earth Aid Kit via FedEx for only $5 anywhere in the continental U.S. - we’ll also cut your prices to our Kit level as an extra reward for your efforts to fight back against utility price increase! Give us a shot!

We’ve just launched our latest assault on the conventional wisdom that green has got to be expensive: Earth Aid Group Buys.

We’re helping folks band together to force prices on helpful green products down to unprecedented lows. We’re calling this new weapon a Group Buy. Here’s how it works:

A series of exclusive offers for select green products are made available for a period ranging from two to three weeks. (Our initial round is open until June 25th!) We start the product out a great price - but that’s just the beginning. The price decreases over the course of the offer period as the number of folks opting-in to the Group Buy increases. Nobody is charged for their purchase (though we do verify your credit card in advance) until the group buy period closes - and then everybody receives the low group price! Your purchase ships to you shortly thereafter.

This process allows all of us to band our purchasing power together into a formidable force - which we use to drive prices down. And it works because of a very simple proposition - manufacturers can cut prices progressively for larger and larger bulk orders. What our Group Buy process does is automatically pass the savings along to everybody who purchases. Cool, huh? It gets even better:

Introducing the Conditional Order

What if you want the green product on offer only if the price drops lower than it already is? That’s a fairly common aspiration - and that’s why we developed the conditional order. You can make your purchase contingent on the price dropping.

For example, referring to the price table above: the price is currently at $79, or a 20% savings. If you put in a confirmed order, you’re committed to purchase even if the price doesn’t drop any further. 20% is a great deal - but what if it’s only worth it to you at the 31% discount? You can put in a conditional order! We’ll add you to our group, but you won’t be committed to purchase until/unless the group reaches 51+ orders and the price for everybody then drops to the 31% discount.

Your conditional order counts because it adds to the number of people in the Group Buy. It’s the combination of confirmed and conditional orders that counts towards bumping the price into the next lowest price tier.

The only risk you run with a conditional order is that you could miss out if the offer price doesn’t drop to your targeted level - so, place a confirmed order right away if you want to be sure to get in on the deal. Everybody who’s confirmed gets the low price reached at the end of the Group Buy period.

What We’ve Got: Introducing the Inaugural Round of Group Buys!

There are five separate offers combining for a total of fourteen possible purchases. Here are the deals you can get in on between now in June 25th:

Neuton Battery-Powered Lawn Mowers (greatest possible discount: $100 off)

The Neuton CE 5.2 Battery-Powered Mower is welcome relief from the arm-yanking pull-starts, the fumes, noise, and vibration of a gas lawn mower. Start it with the push of a button and mow for up to 1 hour on a single charge. It’s akin to trading in for an electric car for your lawn.

Since it doesn’t use gas or oil, it never needs a tune-up, and it runs clean. It produces no direct pollution or carbon emissions. Enjoy the ease and convenience of battery-powered mowing!

Malibu Outdoor Solar-Charged Lighting (greatest possible discount: 31%)

If you’re paying anything for outdoor lighting, switching to our solar-charged outdoor lighting products can cut your expenditures - and your carbon footprint - on this lighting to zero. We have four sets of lights available - all are entirely solar-charged during the day; they run off their potent batteries and LEDs all night long!

Honeywell 7-Day Universal Programmable Thermostat (greatest possible discount: 32%)

These Honeywell thermostats are Honeywell’s top of the line Do-It-Yourself model. They’re user-friendly - featuring a large, bright screens for ease in setting up to four distinct temperature periods for each day of the week. You can set these thermostats to adjust your home’s indoor temperature to maximize energy efficiency and save hundreds of dollars on energy costs every year!

SunLINQ Portable Solar Chargers (greatest possible discount: 35%)

The SUNLINQ 6.5 Watt Portable Solar Panel, featuring PowerFLEX technology, is a flexible, foldable and durable solar panel that produces enough power to charge rechargeable, flash lights, lanterns, cell phones, GPS units, satellite phones, MP3 players and portable games - just about anything that is capable of being charged through a standard cigarette lighter adapter / car charger. It’s a great, small start towards bringing solar power into your life.

Earth Aid Kits (greatest possible discount: $168 off)

We’ve put together special configurations - and special discount levels - for Earth Aid Kits for this inaugural round of Group Buys. Every single Earth Aid Kit on offer will save you several times its cost on your energy bills each and every year. Joining our Group Buy is a great way to get an added discount on your initial investment in Earth Aid Kit energy efficiency.

We’re People-Powered - Tell Your Friends!

Earth Aid Group Buys only work if we all work together - and the more of us who work together, the lower our prices get together. So, perhaps join us today and start to spread the world?

In contrast, fossil fuel and even nuclear-powered plants will be faced with an increasingly intractable dilemma: they require fuel, and their fuel is available only in finite quantities. This doesn’t mean that we’ll soon - or ever - run out of oil, gas, or uranium; but, they are ultimately finite resources that become increasingly scarce each day. As scarcity increases, so do prices. Even in the medium term, it’s a difficult proposition for folks depending on finite fuels to compete with those of us leading the march towards employing infinite fuels such as sun and wind.

Once you’ve made the initial (albeit often hefty) investment in installing a renewable power generator unit of any sort, you’ve done the heavy lifting - you’re making money (and energy) whenever the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, only shelling out a modest amount for regular maintenance, etc. Not a bad deal.

Nonetheless, while renewables will someday soon be the ’steak’ of our energy and our economy, they’re currently still the ’sizzle’. Today, energy efficiency is the steak. Why? Well, it’s cheaper and - for the moment, at least - more effective.

The monumental scale of the opportunities for energy efficiency is an accidental outcome of the heretofore unsustainable evolution of the electrification of our economy. This first time around, we didn’t design our fixtures and our gadgets with a significant degree of foresight. That’s why we’re getting stung particularly harshly as energy prices push our utility bills skyward.

What’s the good news? Where pessimists and skeptics see lemons, we see particularly lucrative lemonade. There’s now a whole nation of inefficient items and appliances that can be easily replaced to achieve both better performance and an impressive, quantifiable improvement in energy expenses. (not to mention associated greenhouse gas emissions!)

An investment of as little as $50 in Earth Aid Kit energy efficiency upgrades, for example, can net an average household $300 in utility bill savings each year. Unless your home is already operating at peak efficiency, these simple energy efficiency upgrades are painless changes that anybody anywhere can make - including urban dwellers who don’t have access to a roof or yard in which to install renewable generation assets.

Act II - Steak & Sizzle Together: Why Efficiency is the Important Step Before Renewable Energy

Installing any sort of renewable energy asset today is a great idea, as we’ve discussed above. We don’t encourage waiting before taking the renewable leap, but we do encourage energy efficiency before jumping right in; it’s easy to see why this is a good idea, too:

It’s silly to spend $6000 on installing a backyard wind turbine to generate 1.2kWh of electricity when still can spend just $47 to save that much electricity.

How’s that? 1.2kWh of electricity is a significant amount. It’s more than enough to power an efficient home, but it doesn’t make a worthwhile dent if you’re not already efficient. For example, 1.2kWh is only enough to power 12 - that’s right, twelve - 100W incandescent light bulbs.

Twelve 100W incandescent bulbs use 1.2kWh (1,200 watts) each hour

Twelve 23W CFLs use only 0.27kWh (276 watts) each hour to do the same job

So, what’s the lesson? The short version is that you should spend $47 to significantly improve your efficiency before you spend several thousand to start generating your own power. Once you’re your own power company, you’ll appreciate that your primary customer runs a tight ship - especially because you’ll likely be able to sell to the big power companies any extra electricity that you generate and don’t use in your own home.

The Windspire Turbine on exhibit at the U.S. Botanic Garden generates 1.2kWh under normal conditions

The resurrection of the blog is part of a massive expansion of Earth Aid’s interactivity. Not only can you follow us here, but you can also befriend us on a variety of social networking platforms (including Facebook and MySpace), follow us on Twitter, see and contribute photos on Flickr, view our movies on YouTube, and join our customer support and knowledge sharing community at Get Satisfaction.

You can click on any of the links in the preceding paragraph to jump straight to our profile on those platforms. We’re building these platforms to participate more actively with you, and to empower you to participate more actively with us. Earth Aid exists so that we can make a difference together. Won’t you join us?

The Washington Post today revisits the Green the Capitol project today, this time taking a more critical look at the initiative’s carbon offset purchases.

Several months ago, we wrote:

Insofar as these funds and credits eventually find their way to supporting somebody’s new energy efficiency or renewable energy projects, all this is a good thing. We are all in this together, so it doesn’t matter who does the emissions reducing - just so long as the emissions are reduced somewhere on the planet.

Of course, paying somebody else to reduce their emissions does still tend to ring a little hollow if you haven’t taken at least the simple steps to reduce your emissions too.

The Green the Capitol certainly has embarked on many innovative and impressive initiatives to quickly make some long overdue upgrades to the Capitol complex - so the offsets they’ve purchased don’t ring hollow in this singular respect.

As the Post notes, however, that doesn’t get you off the hook. David Farenthold quotes consultant Mark Trexler to highlight an important element for credible offsets: “additionality.” In other words, “buying an offset must cause some new reduction in emissions that wouldn’t have happened if the money hadn’t been paid.”

In several distinct cases detailed by the article, it appears that the $89,000 worth of offsets purchased by the Capitol may not have had much “additionality” after all - instead allegedly going towards financing projects that had happened or were going to happen already. Joseph Romm of the Center for American Progress succinctly takes the Capitol’s offsets to task: “This is waste of taxpayer money.”

We remain of the opinion that the best path forward is making creative changes in Federal policy coupled with taking creative action to identify opportunities for more environmentally and economically sensible upgrades at home and at work.

We believe that the most overlooked aspect of any institutional effort to address a collective carbon footprint is the people who make up that institution. A very large share of electricity used in this country is used at home - piling on top of that used in the office, or in industry. So, the largest share of any community’s carbon footprint may yet be the energy use at home of the individuals who make up that community.

Any institution’s effort to address its carbon footprint is certainly incomplete unless that effort specifically helps the individuals who make up that community address their carbon footprint at home. With specific regard to the Capitol, we wrote in November:

We also suggest that perhaps the Congressional staff and interns are left out of the equation. Some of the country’s most talented public-minded young people take some of the country’s most underpaid positions as Congressional staffers. The Green the Capitol Office and individual House and Senate Offices could take some initiative to help these thousands of staffers upgrade their energy efficiency at home (i.e. when they’re not in the House - get it?) As you can see on our site, taking simple steps at home can really add up - both in cash in your pocket from energy bill savings, and greenhouse gas emissions out of our atmosphere. It’s at least as good a way - if not a better one - to achieve a carbon offset as purchasing offsets in Chicago.

What do you think? Let us know - and, if you agree, call your congressmen!

In the photo at the top: the Capitol building to the left and its own coal fired power plant to the right

Parting ways with Kermit to assert that “it’s easy being green”, Oprah advocates using a Smart Strip Power Strip to automatically eliminate “phantom loads” associated with your computer or home entertainment center.

What’s a phantom load? Well, every device that you’ve got plugged in is always drawing electricity - whether it’s a lot or a little, this continuous, low-level energy use adds up over 24 hours of each day. The Department of Energy estimates that as much as 43 billion kWh each year is wasted by phantom loads throughout the United States. According to DoE, 75% of the electricity used to power home electronics is consumed while the products are turned off!

The Smart Strip can help you eliminate the phantom loads of your peripheral devices - most commonly those associated with your computers or home entertainment centers. How? Simple.

Choose a “control device” - such as your TV or computer - that’s at the center of a system. You plug it into the blue control outlet.

Your peripheral devices are the ones that the Smart Strip aims to address - the DVD player, the VCR, the speakers, the computer monitor, the printer, so on and so forth. These are the items that don’t need to be on when the “control device” isn’t on - they’re the “switched” devices. Plug them into the white outlets. When’s the last time you used your DVD player while your TV was off? Your Smart Strip will automatically switch off everything in the white, “switched outlets” whenever what’s in the “control outlet” turns off. It cuts all power, so you’re not wasting money and energy to supply “stand-by” power unnecessarily.

The red outlets are the “constant hot” outlets. What’s in there always has power. You might use these red outlets for your wireless router or TiVo - something you don’t want to turn off just because the control device turns off.

We’ve made a helpful Smart Strips video that’s available on our site (including in high definition video), and on both YouTube and Brightcove. It’s a great way to learn how to eliminate your phantom loads with a Smart Strip - watch how we set-up a Smart Strip with our TV.

Using a Smart Strip is not just smart for your world - it’s smart for your wallet, too. You could pay as little as $5 to $7 for a standard surge protector, but it’ll end up costing you. You probably pay a couple dozen dollars a year (or more!) to keep your peripheral devices on stand-by unnecessarily.

We calculate that using a Smart Strip will probably save you $25 or more each year on your energy bills.

We carry at least two models (one big, one small) of Smart Strips at all time - they’ll save you a bundle by themselves, and even more if you use them to start building your own Earth Aid Kit!

	Smart Strip SCG4 Power Strip	$32.95 MSRP $29.95 Our Price $26.95 Our Kit Price
	Smart Strip LCG3 Power Strip	$39.95 MSRP $35.95 Our Price $29.99 Our Kit Price

Happy New Year, Canadians!

We wanted to make sure that our friendly neighbors to the north could also kick-off 2008 by making the green resolution that keeps itself - outfitting your house with the easy energy efficiency upgrades of the Earth Aid Kit.

What better purpose to put your impressively appreciated currency towards than helping out Mother Earth while lowering your utility bills and improving your quality of life? That’s what the Earth Aid Kit is designed to do - you’re welcome to customize the Earth Aid Kit that suits you best by picking and choosing what you need from our select array of premium home energy efficiency products. If you select products from four or more categories of energy efficiency, we’ll drop your prices to our ultra-low Earth Aid Kit levels. There’s not a better deal anywhere else in our hemisphere!

We’ve built a customized jumping-off point for you right here: canada.earthaidkit.com. You’ll see Canada-centric content, tips, and resources up here soon. If you have any suggestions or other ideas, we’d love to hear them; please e-mail us at canada [at] earthaidkit [dot] com.

All prices on our site are still denominated in USD, however. We’re happy to ship to anywhere in Canada from our warehouse in upstate New York - but we’ll ask for you to kindly cover to cost of shipping; it will be calculated dynamically for you when you’re at checkout. We’ll ship your package via either UPS or FedEx.

So, Canada, thanks for stopping by and have a happy, green new year!

When it comes to cutting carbon emissions, a lot of things — global trade agreements, international climate treaties — are out of our individual control. One area where each of us can make a difference, though, is in our own homes. Houses and other buildings are responsible for nearly half of all greenhouse gas emissions, but they don’t have to be.

Not sure how to start? Earth Aid Enterprises, a new venture in Washington, D.C., is offering Earth Aid Kits to get you started. ( read the full post here! )

Other prominent blogs picked up the story, Crave - cnet’s hip gadget blog - called the Earth Aid Kit the “Gift for Mother Earth.” Elsa Wenzel wrote,

What do energy hogs deserve for the holidays? Earth Aid Kits are a not-so-subtle hint to those who leave the lights on when they leave the room and the faucet on while they brush their teeth. ( read the full post here! )

Both Gregory and Wenzel took note of Earth Aid Enterprises‘ energy savings and emissions reduction calculations - emphasizing that folks who build their own Earth Aid Kit finish off each year with more money in their pocket and a much cleaner conscience. If enough folks install Earth Aid Kits, we’ll all be breathing much cleaner air too.

Thanks to Gregory and Wenzel, several other blogs around the web have also discovered the Earth Aid Kit - including Apple Review and ecoyear. We’re always happy to hear that people are writing about us. Let us know if you see anything, and let us know if you’d like to write about us too!

That’s right: chances are that your power company will pay you to pay them less. Why? As Thomas Friedman and others have noted, it costs your utility a bundle to build extra power plants to handle growing electricity demand. So, they’d much rather pay you use their existing electric capacity more efficiently.

Obviously, that’s good for you: you pay less on your energy bill because you are using less electricity - and you get paid a bonus rebate as a reward for saving money. Very cool - which is a very helpful transition to the topic of global warming: producing less wasted electricity and building fewer unnecessary new power plants reduces greenhouse gas emissions - a LOT. So, you, me, your local utility, and the polar bears are all winners here.

We want to be sure to do our part to help highlight wherever you can get started right away, right from your keyboard. Many utilities around the country will pay you to purchase and install a programmable thermostat or compact fluorescent light bulbs. Want to see if and how yours might help you? Check our maps!

That’s right: for your convenience and for our country, we’ve started to map all utility energy efficiency rebate programs. And you can help - please do use this form to let us know of a program near you, and we’ll add it to our maps!

Now you can specify how many people will be using your Earth Aid Kit and how many cars you have in your household. Our site integrates these considerations into its dynamic calculations of the impact of your Earth Aid Kit.

As always, you can continue to shop using individual product pages by browsing our categories or product list - the calibration feature adjusts site-wide, though as of yet you can only actually adjust your calibration on this page. You’ll reach this page every time you add a product to your cart and press the continue shopping button.

Hope you enjoy saving money, saving energy, and doing your part to save the planet! Please let us know what you think about the site and its new features!