Do one thing and make a difference on Earth Day

Today is Earth Day and we at AlertMe would like to suggest that to mark the 40th anniversary of Earth Day we all ‘Do one small thing’ to make our homes a little greener and save money on electricity bills.

You might be surprised as to how significant your contribution would be. Imagine a family home where regularly the family leaves for school and work every day, but in the house they have left: Two TVs, two set top boxes and a HiFi on standby, two PCs, a games console, a colour laser printer and two lights with 60 watt light bulbs switched on.

This amounts to around 375 watts of electricity being wasted and with every watt costing £1 a year, this means that 375 watts of power left on consistently will cost this family home £375 over a year. What a waste of energy and money!

Not only that, over the year this totals 3,276 KWh of energy consumed and in carbon terms that is a massive 1.4 tonnes of CO2. So this home is wasting 3,276KWh of electricity, throwing away £375 and it is generating 1.4 tonnes more CO2 than it needs to. Even if you can just switch off your PC and printer or two 60 watt light bulbs, when you are not using them, this could save in the region of £100. If every home in the UK does this, we could reduce the UK’s carbon output across the year by 12 million tonnes and collectively save in the region of £2.6 billion.