ecobee SmartThermostat with Voice Control

The Ecobee Smart Wi-Fi Thermostat is a great way to help take control over the heating and cooling of your home while saving an average of 20 to 25 percent on energy bills. This ENERGY STAR certified device works with several smart devices such as the Apple Home Kit, Amazon Alexa, and Google Assistant. In addition, with the Whole Home Voice technology, this product allows you to speak to one of the above-mentioned smart devices to control the thermostat in your home. For example, by simply saying to your smart home assistant, “I´m Away,” your Ecobee Smart Thermostat will automatically lower the temperature in your home to save on energy.  The ecobee SmartThermostat with Voice Control is currently selling for $199 and comes with built-in Amazon Alexa voice service as well as a room sensor, which pairs with your smart thermostat to help regulate the temperature in hot spots or cold spots in the corners of your home. 

FLIR Thermal Imaging Camera

Anyone who has seen an infrared thermal imaging camera knows how fun it can be. You can find your cats outside. You can see that people’s noses are colder than their cheeks and foreheads. That’s fun, but it can be useful too. For a home, you can easily see where any air and water leaks are a problem, so you can fix them properly. For example, since insulation is typically installed behind drywall, you don’t know if the installer missed an area—and often areas are missed: around outlet plugs, in corners, near crawl spaces, you name it. And the FLIR camera can find it. The older cameras are very expensive and bulky; the newer version is compatible with mobile phones (and is still pretty pricey, at $269.99 on Amazon, but it’s a lot less than older models). If you want to know where insulation is missing and are not a DIY-er, get your home an energy audit.

Sense Energy Monitor

If you take a look at your electric bill, the only thing it will tell you is how much electricity you consume and how much you owe over a one month period. It won’t tell you anything about how you use electricity. Sure, you know that lighting, appliances, and electronics take some electricity to run, but how much, and when? How do you know how to prioritize your efforts in being more energy efficient? The Sense Energy Monitor helps solve this problem by providing insight into how and where energy is being used in your home.  To get started, a licensed electrician will need to install this device onto your electrical panel. You then download the app for iOS or Android and connect the monitor to your home Wi-Fi signal. Over the coming days and weeks, the Sense Monitor will send updates to your phone, letting you know which devices are pulling power in your home as well as revealing trends in your home power use. Besides allowing you to have more control over how energy is being used in your home, this device will send you updates if your oven is still turned on or if the drain pump has been running for several hours. This Energy Tracker Monitor currently costs $299 and will quickly begin to deliver savings by helping you to cut back on your home energy use. 

Looking for something less expensive but along those same lines? The Kill-a-Watt electricity usage monitor, which sells for $15.99, will tell you how much wattage any one appliance uses simply by plugging the appliance into it (and plugging it into an outlet).

TomCare Outdoor Solar LED Torch Lights

For outdoor lighting, there really is no reason to use electricity. Unless you live in Alaska where the sun does not shine for very long during half the year, you can gather enough sunlight during the day to power a simple solar panel that will offer quality outdoor lighting during the evening. For a decorative look, the TomCare Torch Lights would look great on the edge of almost any patio or driveway. You never need to change a battery, and they will go on and off automatically from dusk until dawn.

Niagara Low flow Showerhead 

Nobody wants a weak shower that trickles a few small streams of water on your head, but showers typically are the third largest water user in the home, after toilets and clothes washers. Before the 1994 federal regulations requiring that showerheads have a maximum flow rate of 2.5 gallons per minute (gpm), most showerheads spewed out about 5 gallons per minute. So if you took a 10-minute shower, that would use 50 gallons of hot water—quite a bit of water and energy usage, and probably emptying your hot water tank! So, if you have an older home and have not replaced your showerhead since 1994, you can likely save quite a bit of water and energy by replacing it with a newer one that has WaterSense label—meaning it uses only 2.0 gpm. Better yet, try the Niagara Earth Massage showerhead, which has a flow rate of only 1.25 gpm, and still gets good reviews on Amazon and strong ratings from Consumer Reports.  If you are replacing an old showerhead, you will be saving many thousands of gallons of water by switching over. (Quick math: if your household takes a total of 15 minutes of shower-taking every workday, and you save 3.75 gpm, then you save 3.75 x 15 x 252 = 14,175 gallon per year. At a half-cent per gallon, that’s over $70 per year, not including the energy savings—easily paying for multiple showerhead replacements, and maybe even some faucet aerators!)

Compost Pail

To reduce the amount of waste that goes in the dumpster, recycling is becoming more and more common—but recycling only applies to paper, plastic, glass, and metal. What about all those food scraps and food waste? Compost it! If you don’t have an outdoor compost pile (or don’t want one), and your city picks up organics, you can start separating out your compost waste—but you’ll need some sort of container. Williams Sonoma’s Full Circle Fresh Air Compost Collector sells for $29.95 and has some nice features: it allows air to flow through, so it doesn’t start smelling within a day or two while sitting on your counter. The lid opens with the push of a button, so it’s easy to fill up, and it’s even made of recycled plastic. 

Organic Cotton Dish Towels

Using reusable dishtowels instead of paper towels dramatically cuts down on the waste of single-use disposable items. And as long as you are going for the fabric option, choose organic cotton towels. Why? Cotton is one of the most pesticide-heavy crops, which damages our ecosystem (you can read more about that here). Coyuchi waffle kitchen towels sell for $48 for a set of six beautiful towels—if your kitchen could smile, it would!

Glass Jars with Chalkboard Labels

How to reduce packaging waste? One of the first things to do to transform your kitchen into a more sustainable one is to start purchasing products in bulk—but you need to be able to store the products in their own containers. Start with these hermetically sealed glass jars from the Container Store, starting at $7.99 for a 25-ounce container. They have chalkboard labels, so you can easily write down the contents and erase it if you switch to another product. Get started with rice, flour, sugar, oats, lentils, and nuts—things you’d typically find in the bulk purchasing aisles. When lined up along a counter or in a pantry, they are much prettier than a row of packaged goods, and add a touch of color to your kitchen!