Improving Sustainability in Existing Homes

I really enjoy dreaming about renovating my existing home to make it much more efficient and also someday building my own sustainable home. For me (and most others) building a new home or completing a major renovation is way out of reach for financial or other reasons. While it may make me feel warm and fuzzy when I have these sustainable dreams, I want to be able to do something now to make my home more sustainable. I want to reduce my costs and also increase my comfort and enjoyment in my house as it is now….without incurring high costs.

Luckily, there are quite a few things that can be done in an existing home to make it more sustainable, many of which are relatively cheap or even free.  I want to focus on these over a couple of posts to give you solutions that you can use without blowing your budget.

First, I would like to address a couple of potential questions:

What Do I Mean By Cheap?

I haven’t set a hard line as to what I consider cheap.

Over these next posts about cheap things you can do in your existing home I am looking at things that can be done easily and quickly and are much more cost effective than paying thousands of dollars for a major renovation. Generally I am looking for solutions that are as cheap as possible but not more than a couple hundred dollars. The goal is to improve the sustainability of your existing home on a budget…. a very small budget.

What is So Great About Energy Efficiency?

Reducing your energy use will not only be more sustainable to the environment but will also reduce the operating costs of your home and, when it comes to heating and cooling, can also increase your comfort.

In this post I will be focusing on energy efficiency in existing homes and cheap (or free) things that you can do to reduce energy use in your home. (I will save water efficiency for my next post.)

3 Main Areas of Energy Efficiency

I am going to break these energy efficiency strategies into 3 main areas:

Saving Electricity

Reducing Heating and Cooling Requirements

Saving Hot Water

I am going to be covering a lot of solutions in these sections and am not going to go very deep into each of them. If you would like more information about specific solutions or have some that you would like to add (my list is not meant to be exhaustive by any means), leave a comment at the bottom of this post.

When I am talking about specific products, I have tried to include links to the products in the show notes so you can get more information about them or even buy them if you wish. Most of the items I have listed below are items that I have used myself. Some of these links (to Amazon or Homedepot.ca) are affiliate links which means if you choose to make a purchase through them I will earn a small commission, which helps me be able to produce more great content like this. Only buy items that you feel will help you on your journey to a more sustainable home.

I have prepared a PDF with a brief list of all of the items listed below.

Get the PDF of 16 Simple and Cheap Ways to Save Energy

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Are you ready to dive in?

1 - Saving Electricity

Become aware of the electricity that you are using in your home.