5 Home Improvements that Help You to Support Earth Day

April 22 is Earth Day, a day that is designated for making conscious efforts to reduce your carbon footprint and preserve the natural environment. Being that Earth Day is fast approaching, have you decided what you are going to do to support this important day?

If you haven’t, then you might want to consider making some improvements to your home. Believe it or not, your home could be producing a large amount of greenhouse gasses and negatively impacting the environment. However, this doesn’t have to be a permanent. There are improvements that you can make to your house that will make it more environmentally friendly and help support Earth Day – and the earth every day!

1. Buy an Energy Star Refrigerator. Swap out your current refrigerator for one that is Energy Star certified and you could make a huge impact on the environment. Energy Star refrigerators use 20% less energy than standard models. This energy savings not only equates to keeping more money in your pocket (you can save as much as $100 a year on your utility bills!), but because they use less energy, they use less coal or natural gas to operate; this means you’ll reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses you are putting into the atmosphere. Now that’s Earth Day friendly!

2. Install an Attic Fan. Installing an attic fan can greatly reduce the heat that gets stored in your attic. Between the hot air rising in your house and the heat from outside beating down on the roof, attics are hot spaces. If the attic isn’t properly cooled, your HVAC system works harder, which means more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

3. Put in a Tankless Water Heater. Tankless water heaters heat water on-demand and can cut the amount of energy that you use by as much as 30%. Less energy consumption means less of an impact on the atmosphere. Another benefit? You’ll never run out of hot water!

4. Invest in a Whole House Fan. A whole house fan can cool your entire home, which means that you won’t have to rely on an air conditioner to do the job. Air conditioners can put toxic chemicals into the atmosphere, which can have an adverse impact on the environment.

5. Get a High Efficiency Furnace. A high efficiency furnace, especially one with an AFUE rating of more than 90%, is considered a condensing furnace. In other words, these furnaces use a second heat exchanger to pull heat from the gasses that would otherwise be exhausted and put out into the atmosphere. Another benefit of this type of furnace is that it will greatly reduce your energy bill.

These five home improvements can have greatly reduce your carbon footprint and make your house earth friendly, not just on Earth Day, but every day!