Solar Power and 3 Other Ways to Make A Home Environmentally Friendly

A green planet-friendly home is created by thinking about using renewable energy sources such as solar power, smart meters, recycling, and adopting self-sufficiency. When it comes to solar panels, Minnesota Solar can supply these locally.

Solar Energy

Householders can invest in renewable energies by installing solar panels on the roofs of their homes. It is a way of investing in your property and the environment. Over time, you will notice a saving as your household bills reduce and you pay for the initial investment you made in the solar panels. Excess electricity can be sold back to the grid, too, so that no unnecessary electricity has to be generated. Collectively, the surplus from many households can be considerable. With thought and investment, your carbon footprint can disappear almost like a footprint in a dune.

Solar panels are a feature we all want to see now when we look to buy a house. Those houses that have them we know are already environmentally friendly. It will in the future become a necessity that every home is that way. We can be one of the early pioneers.

Smart Meters

To know and control how much electricity we are using, the only true way is to invest in a smart meter. This will show us on its display exactly how much energy we are using, and just how much it is costing. This then allows householders, and indeed businesses, to assess if there are areas where savings can be made. Like a water meter, it invariably means that we will end up using less, which has to be a good thing for our budget and the environment.

Recycling

Where it is not possible to produce biodegradable products, we should look at ones that can be recycled. Single-use plastics are thankfully becoming a thing of the past and we now look to recycling plastic like we once only did paper, glass bottles, tin cans, their ring pulls. From these tins, we recycle aluminum, steel, and tin. Recycling glass is nothing new because the Victorians would recycle Crown beer bottles, known in the antique trade as dumps, which they used as paperweights and doorstops. The bubbles and effects created inside them make for a very attractive addition to a desk of any period.

The idea of recycling is to reduce pollutions levels when the whole product does not need to be manufactured from scratch. This will collectively help slow global warming.

Self-sufficiency

A form of self-sufficiency might be growing vegetables in your garden at home or on an allotment. Not only do they taste nicer and have more nutrients than the processed ones that you buy, but they can also save you money and help the environment by not involving any kind of packaging. This reduces plastic waste. Also, helping the environment, when you grow your vegetables there tends to be less food wastage. You are hardly likely to throw away vegetables that you have grown and waste them. If you have excess, you will sell them, or proudly offer them to a friend or relative for free. Even those next door, if they have kept down their noise levels.

The easiest to grow vegetables for beginners include beetroot, broad beans, garlic, onions, peas, potatoes, runner beans, and spring onions. Tomatoes can be added to the list, although a fruit by classification. The hard part of growing tomatoes is to get them to turn red. Left green, though, they still make a very nice chutney. Plenty of sunshine, however, should turn them red so that they look delicious enough to eat. To add to the fruits we could grow, strawberries are nice to have in the summer. If we have room for part of an orchard, apple trees, damson trees, and plum trees can be planted. Your gardening efforts will be well worth it when you find out what you can save and how nicer everything tastes when fresh. Better for having grown it yourself, even if you are slightly biased.

If we have a flat roof to our property, we can create a garden on the top of our roof space. It would be a waste not to do something like that with it.

So, there are several ways that we can make our home more environmentally friendly for our family and future generations. The one major change we can make is to install solar panels on our roof and have the sun power our home in terms of our heating, appliances, and gadgets. Also, we can have smart meters so that we closely monitor how much electricity we are using. That will have us save electricity so that we have more to sell back to the grid if we have solar panels fitted. We can adopt an attitude that includes recycling more. We can only buy products that are either biodegradable or recyclable. Finally, we can become more self-sufficient and grow our vegetables and fruit rather than buy them in packets.