Greening your own home

When older adults are considering selling their homes and downsizing it is always important to get the most value out of the real estate. Even folks who are not in the mood to move can consider making some small changes that will reduce the cost of running a house. Greening up your home is full of benefits no matter what the future holds.

These changes (ranging from $0.00 to $1000.00) will add value to your home and do a little something for the environment, too.

Energy Saving Kit Union Gas Customers in Ontario can go to their closest authorized dealer and pick up a free wordEnergy Saving Kit ($100 value). Included are: shower head, kitchen sink aerator, bathroom sink aerator, roll of Teflon tape, 2m of foam pipe insulation.

PeakSaver Thermostat Last fall we had our free wordPeakSaver Thermostat installed at home. This remote controlled thermostat will allow us to control the temperature of our house (times to increase and times to decrease) via a website. This is a benefit to us because we can turn off the air conditioning in the house when we are at work and set it to come back on one hour before we get home - saving us money. It is also easy for us to turn off the air when we are away for a few days and use our mobile phone to turn it back on before we get home.

The PeakSaver program also allows Ontario Hydro to increase the temperature in our house by a maximum of 2 degrees on days when there are risks of brown-outs.

Two Button Toilet It's quite common these days to see a two button toilet in hardware stores. Button one is for your most common toilet visits (a small amount of water) and button two (larger amount of water), well, I'm sure you get the picture. The thing is that it is pretty wasteful to rip out a working toilet to install a low-flow one. Instead you can put in a $80 wordPerfect Flush system in your existing toilet.

The Shower Manager Maybe this would have come in handy when I was running a summer camp full of teenagers but I can see the value at home as well. The $115 wordShower Manager will help you know when you've had enough. With an adjustable timer you can set a limit on showers. When the timer runs out the water slows to just a large enough trickle to rinse yourself off.

Attic Fan Many people associate attic fans with warmer climates but they also make sense in the great white north. With a quiet system like the Airscape ($1100) you can turn on the fan in the evening and vent out all of the hot air that has accumulated over the day. That means that you won't have to keep the air conditioning running in to the evening - you can let physics do the work for you!

Tankless Hot Water Heater Keeping water hot takes a lot of energy. A tankless hot water heater will use up to 75% less energy and give you a nice long hot shower when you need. A tankless, or on-demand, heater, will only heat water when you turn on the "H" tap. The water is drawn through a coil where it is heated as hot you would like. Not keeping 50 gallons warm means your $1000 investment will be paid off in less than 2 years.