American television personality and former model Carter Oosterhouse explains why he’s living an eco-friendlier lifestyle and how you can follow his lead.
How can enhancing your surroundings and living an eco-friendlier lifestyle improve your overall quality of life?
Being eco-friendlier and lowering our carbon footprint on a daily basis has easily improved my family’s quality of life.
Today’s world is full of fast-paced, consumerism like we’ve never had before. A lot of that can be great for innovation and technology, but that’s not always the best for our personal lives.
For example, we can order a meal online, and have it shipped to our house in 20 minutes (we do this sometimes). Or, we can grow a garden, pick the veggies, make dinner at home with healthier ingredients, and compost when we are finished.
Though a 20-minute meal is hard to beat, I guarantee the home-grown and home-cooked food will produce bountiful results.
We spend time with our family cooking and gardening, teaching our kids valuable life lessons. We have fun together and the ingredients are undoubtedly healthier. On top of all that, we won’t be adding wasteful plastic containers to the already overtaxed landfills.
How can homeowners use smart technology to make their homes more energy efficient?
We have so many products that are in the marketplace that can help us and our homes on many levels. Appliances are the biggest energy consumer in our house. We use EnergyStar-rated equipment to improve our own energy efficiency and cut down on our monthly bill.
Let the appliance do the thinking for you. Smart dishwashers and laundry machines can tell you how long to run each cycle by internally figuring out how heavy the load is. These machines recognize small loads and give you a quick clean with less wasted water and energy.
Which smart technologies have you seen be the most effective in helping to boost energy efficiency?
I use a lot of these technologies in my own home but the one that I think has been most effective is the Wiser Energy System. This system was connected to my electric panel by a licensed electrician. All I had to do was download the Sense App (Square D edition) and it tells me exactly how much energy is being used in our home and where it’s coming from.
Also, the Wiser Energy System starts to know how your home works overtime. If you add new appliances, it will find them and adds them to the app. The app will send you an alert if you leave an appliance on.
The app will also let you know if you’ve started to consume more energy one week from the last. The basic idea is that each homeowner should know exactly how their home consumes resources and how we all can lessen that energy consumption.