20 Ways to Reduce Residential Energy

Human carbon emissions is causing more wildfires and extreme weather events, and 15% of U.S. emissions is residential energy.

Julie Smith, 8/17/26

This is a summary of Chapter 19, Residential Energy, in the book, “2050: What’s it Gonna Be?”.  You can download the full chapter, as well as other chapters.  References are here.

Our planet is in trouble because of extreme levels of human carbon emissions. Our constantly increasing emissions are causing increased wildfires, which destroy homes and wildlife habitat, as well as the air we all breathe. Extreme storms are destroying property and killing people. In the past 50 years, we have decimated 70% of the wildlife on our planet. The underlying cause of all of this is carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels. How long are we going to let this continue In the U.S., before we take action to stop the destruction of our planet? 15% of our emissions are from residential energy, so there are a lot of practical actions that we can take at home to improve our environmental sustainability. We are responsible for the planet our children and grandchildren will inherit. We will leave them our legacy. So, what's it gonna be? A complete disaster on our planet and misery for all future life, or a beautiful planet that all can joyfully thrive on?

The simple truth is that we’re past peak oil with more people than ever on the planet, and we need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels sooner than later.  How dumb would it be to wait until the last minute, while ensuring planetary disaster at the same time?  If we begin changing now, it will be more gradual and less painful in the long run, and we’ll minimize additional global warming.  Solar energy is now less expensive than fossil fuel, so now is the time.  More people are employed in renewables these days than in fossil fuels, by a long shot.  Switching to fossil fuels reduces air pollution, in addition to the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and over time will reduce the smoke most of us experience these days from wildfires.

It’s already getting harder and more expensive to produce fossil fuels, as oil and natural gas wells get deeper, scarcer and more remote, costing more to extract and refine.  Obviously this increases the costs of the products, so if you choose the route of complacency and resistance to change, then there’s no sense whining about the higher costs at the pump or on your utility bill.  This is not going to improve on our planet for millions of years, so we’d better get over it.  The party’s over.  Time to wake up and get to work.

These days, with the climate emergency looming, more and more local and state governments are changing the rules in favor of the planet, and taking heed of our diminishing fossil fuels.  Crested Butte, Colorado, the state of New York, Seattle, Washington and at least 70 communities in California are examples of the many U.S. cities that have banned natural gas in favor of all-electric to take advantage of renewable electricity.¹⁴  They have fought, mostly successfully, against big utilities that want to continue selling us natural gas whether we want it or not, just so they can keep making money for heating our planet.  

Many cities are choosing not to make all-electric mandatory, but through education most citizens are finding that it’s a whole lot less expensive to go with all-electric, rather than install natural gas equipment that will be obsolete in just a few years.  The building code for the entire state of New Hampshire now requires that all building envelopes meet Passive House standards, which are 90% efficient for heating and cooling loss.  It almost feels as though common sense is beginning to wiggle its way in there through grass-roots educational efforts.  And it’s a relief to see, given that we’re unlikely to see any level of leadership from the federal government for years to come.

Below is a breakdown of U.S. residential electricity.

Here are 20 ways you can improve your environmental sustainability by reducing and ultimately eliminating your carbon emissions in your home. The first 13 tips are behavior changes that are simple to do and don't require new equipment, while saving money. The next three tips require relatively small capital costs to get off natural gas and go all-electric, and the final four things are the last step, installing solar panels and a battery to enable 100% renewable energy. At this point you will be completely free of fossil fuels and their associated horrors on our planet, along with the greedy ultra-wealthy CEO's whom you are currently paying to ruin our planet when you purchase energy produced with fossil fuels. Now, how cool is that?

1. The first and most obvious thing is to not leave things on that you’re not even using. This waste is known as "Phantom Energy", and makes up 8% of U.S. electricity.  Entertainment systems are the worst, followed closely by microwaves and computers and printers and such.  Basically, anything with a pilot light. 

2. Don’t leave lights on when nobody is in the room, or the house.  Like, Duh.

3. Your lights should all be LED’s at this point.

4. Outdoor lights should never be on all night. Put them on motion sensors.  If you have outdoor lights on all night, that could be your biggest electricity hog.  Night lights also mess with the wildlife that relies on cover of darkness for their natural activities.

5. Lose the clothes dryer and hang clothes to dry.  In winter, hang them inside.  The humidity added to the air from the drying will do you good.

6. Don’t run the dishwasher unless it’s completely full.  If you only have a few people in the house, hand wash the dishes with cold water and use the dishwasher as a drying rack. Only run the dishwasher if you have a lot of dishes to wash.

7. In summer, if you have AC, keep the temperature to 78 ºF.  Please don’t crank it to some low temperature where you need to wear a sweater in the house. That's just stupid.  In many parts of the U.S., a fan does just as well to cool, and uses about 15 times less electricity.

8. In summer, cover your windows with shades or curtains on south, east and west-facing windows to keep out the solar gain if your house is too hot. In winter, do the opposite; remove window covers on sunny days to allow solar gain in, and keep the windows covered at night or on cloudy days to keep cold out.

9. If your fridge isn’t completely packed with food, fill in the spaces in the fridge and freezer with bottles and jugs of water.  The fridge only comes on in response mainly to heat lost when the door is opened, and by replacing air inside with filled jugs, less air escapes.  Also, minimize the time the door is open.  Don’t just stand there and gape at the open fridge.  Know what you want and where it is when you open it.  Be organized. 

10. Don’t heat-load the fridge with hot food.  Leave it on the counter until it cools off, then put it in there.  In cold climates, you can set it outside the house and it will cool off in no time.  But don’t leave it out there, lest it be snatched by some enterprising racoon or other critter, depending on where you live.  We find that setting it under a chair with a weight on the lid works for the coons, and in winter the bears hibernate, so aren’t an issue.

11. Wash with cold water, including hands, dishes and general cleaning.  Using hot water for this stuff is a completely unnecessary waste.  Are you running the faucet full-blast until it gets hot, then washing your hands?  Do you know that 10% or less of water from a full-running faucet even contacts your skin?  And that your body heat is enough to keep a small flow of water warm enough to wash your hands, even in winter?  And that by running full-blast until you have the hot water you don’t even need wastes a gallon or more of water before it even reaches the tap?  Get over yourself.  Knock it off.

12. Never set your thermostat above 70 ºF in winter.  That’s just silly.  You don’t need to be running around the house in short sleeves at 78 ºF.  It’s winter.  Put on a sweater.  And a hat.  That will warm you up faster than wasting natural gas will anyway.  Challenge yourself to see how low you can go at night, when you’re sleeping under the covers.  We turn our thermostat down to 50 ºF at night, though the temperature rarely dips below 60 ºF.

13. Never run hoods or fans in the kitchen and bathroom unless it’s absolutely necessary when you are heating or cooling the air inside the house.  Doing that wastes all the energy you just put into that air faster than the draftiest house on the planet.  You can run the bathroom fan for just one minute and more than clear out the stench from Number 2 if it’s that big of a deal to you.  And the moisture from a shower will humidify your home nicely if you simply open the bathroom door after the shower.  How hard can it be?

14. Your first capital project should be insulation, if yours isn't adequate. Insulation is hugely important to reduce heating and cooling requirements, so make sure yours is good.  Buildings built in about the past 20 years should be decent, since building code requirements took hold, forcing builders to do the right thing, whether they wanted to or not.  R Factors of 10 to 15 mean that the heat flow through the outside walls and roof (building envelope) is reduced by 10 to 15 times what it would be if there were no insulation.  The current International Building Code⁴ requires new buildings to be at least R20 in the walls and R60 in ceilings in climate zone 5, where we live.  When we moved to Golden, we found that the walls in our 1948 home were pretty much devoid of insulation, so as soon as we could pull together the money, we had insulation blown into the walls.  Insulation projects pay out fairly quickly in heating costs, within a few years, typically.

15. The second capital project I recommend is the fenestrations, or openings in the building that can allow leakage of air. Windows and Doors should be properly sealed, and preferably double paned.  Again, double pane is a minimum requirement for new construction, but old homes may need an upgrade.  Also, in cold climates storm windows and doors should always be installed.  There will be costs to do this, but it will reduce heating requirements.  This is a potential DIY project in which you replace your windows gradually as you can afford it, starting with the worst ones.

16. We switched to an electric induction stove to reduce our natural gas before we did the bigger hot water and heat pump projects.  The cost was pretty cheap, we simply bought a single counter top plug-in unit to hold us over.  Induction stoves are really efficient, but also really picky as far as what you can use for cooking, so they might not work for everyone.  These stoves need the cooking pots to be iron or a steel with iron, so they don’t work for calphalon or other aluminum based cookware, like my canning kettle.  Also, if the bottom of the pot is dented from use, they don’t work, even if it’s stainless steel.  A plain old electric stove can be used to eliminate natural gas and be perfectly adequate.

17. At this point, it's time to think about solar panels. We installed about half of what we would ultimately need, but any number can be installed and even tied into the same circuit, as long as they are facing the same direction from the roof. This means that south-facing is wired together, and east-facing is wired together on a separate panel. You could just get a couple panels each year. The first time, the cost will be highest, because they'll have to install the inverter and other equipment, but it you plan your project, the installer can ensure that additional panels are simple to add later. When we installed the solar panels, we learned that they take in all the solar gain and convert it to electricity, but what we hadn’t thought of was that it also took a lot of heat out of our house, because the panels were actually shading the roof, reducing solar gain, so the house is cooler in summer.

18. A battery is a really good idea to leverage your panels as much as possible, because you'll produce excess power at times, and the battery will store it for you. Then, during times when the sun isn't shining, your home will first draw down the battery, and then draw from the grid. Also, if solar is installed without a battery, the customer still loses power if there’s a power outage on the grid, because the utility doesn’t want power returning to the grid from solar panels, which could electrocute the workers who are working to repair the system.  Who can argue with that?  However, when a battery is installed in addition to the panels, the customer continues to receive power off the battery until the grid is replaced, an added measure of energy security during outages.

19. Heat pumps can be installed either before or after solar panels as a next step to get off the grid. Heat pumps are electrically powered heat sources, that are far more efficient than electric radiant heaters, using about a fourth as much energy.  They also use about half as much energy as natural gas forced-air systems.  We installed a mini split heat pump in our house, and saw our electricity carbon footprint drop to less than half of what it was for the combined carbon footprint of electricity and natural gas prior to the heat pump. 

20. Our next project was installing an electric on-demand hot water heater, which allowed us to cut and cap our natural gas supply, eliminating the constant demand of the pilot light in the attic, which was about a therm per month, and the heat loss through air ducts in the attic. Because we lived in a house that was built in 1948, our wiring had to be upgraded to accommodate this. An alternative that may not require additional wiring is a tank electric hot water heater, but this requires a hot water tank in the house, which will by definition slowly release heat when not in use, which increases energy. The cost of the wiring was minimal, and the long-term energy and cost savings of going with on-demand were worth it for us.

    The one thing we still use hot water for is showers.  I have been known to take “sailor showers” when hot water isn’t available, but I really love a good hot shower.  Just saying.  We replaced our natural gas hot water heater with an on-demand electric hot water heater, and we put it in the bathroom, where the shower is, to eliminate any losses through pipes under the house.  The other hot water taps are tied to the same hot water pipe, and we do have to run the water longer at the more remote taps before it gets hot, which isn’t a problem because we don’t use hot water anywhere except the shower.  We keep our showers to 5 minutes or less, only shower a few times a week, although we may do a quick rinse in between, and we collect the water in buckets in the shower, then use that “greywater” for bucket flushing the toilet, to get two uses out of it.  In winter, this is also a way of keeping the heat used to heat the water in the house until it dissipates into the air.  After all, hot water contains about a thousand times the heat of an equivalent volume of air at the same temperature, so it seems silly to waste that heat it by letting it go down the drain.

Now that we've made all the above changes, our residential energy reductions have reduced our carbon footprint by about 14% out of the 15% of our total greenhouse gas emissions. This is definitely a nice gain towards the 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that we all need to achieve by 2050 to save our planet. Also, we're no longer subject to the inevitable increases in fossil fuel prices as we run out of these resources in the next few decades. The costs will increase significantly long before we're completely out, destroying yet more wildlife habitat and increasing global warming even more, leading to more storms and wildfires, which will increase in severity as we heat our planet. Think about that. Why would you wait?