Today is my final post about “The Hunt: 11 Days Of Doing” from DoSomething.org, the nation’s largest organization for teens and social change, in partnership with Lenovo, the world’s second largest PC maker who helped found the campaign last year, and Bing, the search engine from Microsoft. You can check in each day here for the list of challenges, which are released at 11:11 AM EST on the web, through email, and text until the close of the campaign on July 20. Each challenge takes less than an hour to complete. Feel free to join in. It’s not too late!
DAY 10: ENERGY CONSERVATION
CHALLENGES:
Challenge 1: Brainstorm 5 ways to conserve water in your house. Share them with your social networks.
Challenge 2: Turn your air conditioner settings to no lower than 78 degrees.
ULTRAbonus: Did you know that plugged-in appliances use power even when they’re not on? Unplug at least 5 that aren’t being used.
Water is one of our most precious natural resources. It keeps our environment sustainable and offers so many benefits that we use on a daily basis. I don’t know about you, but I appreciate clean tap water, clean water for bathing, and clean water for doing dishes and laundry.
For today’s challenge, I brainstormed 5 ways our own family could start conserving water in our home. It wasn’t difficult to see where we were being wasteful and make some needed changes.
1. Showers for me. I am guilty of enjoying a long bath just about every evening, and that’s after my morning shower. I know if I cut that long bath back to just once or twice a week, we’d definitely conserve more water in our home.
2. Make sure our water faucets aren’t left in “drip mode”. Often times when we are in a hurry, I notice we sometimes leave our bathtub faucet dripping.
3. Waiting until we have a full load of laundry to wash. I’m a cleaning freak, and a half empty laundry basket drives me nuts. Normally, I’d just toss a small load in and start the machine. That’s definitely a water waster.
4. Don’t let the sink run while we brush our teeth. Letting the faucet run while we brush our teeth is just water down the drain, literally.
5. Waiting until we have a full load of dishes to wash. I also often run our dishwasher even when we don’t have a full load of dishes. I need to wait until we have a full load for this as well.
So, can you think of any areas in your own home where you and your family can help conserve water?
I am participating in a paid campaign through Mom Bloggers For Social Good. All opinions are my own.
These are all great ideas. We couldn’t do 78 it gets way too hot in Las Vegas, and we tried. But we do set and leave it so as not to fluctuate the energy. I also taught my son the water rule, and he yells at his Daddy for breaking it! Win Win (No more wife nagging, less water wasted!)
Those are all great ideas that we try to enforce as best as we can with 4 kids! We have a programmable thermostat and during the day it’s set to near 85 and then an hour or so before we get home it changes.
We have to kick the habit of letting the shower run. It’s easy to get busy doing other things and before you know it an empty shower has been going for five minutes.
We need to figure out ways to conserve water. We are supposed to be doing that in this drought.