There’s nothing better than saving money on your annual household or office budget, helping the environment and doing both at the same time in really easy to adapt ways. And how do you go about taking care of all three in one go? Read on and catch up on five excellent tech gadget solutions that are sure to leave your schedule, your conscience and your bank account better off.
1. Solar Powered Chargers
Cell phones, music players, tablets and just about anything that can be recharged with a battery through USB connections or electrical cables, all are fair game for the cash saving power and convenience of the solar powered charger. These neat little devices come in many shapes, sizes and specifications but they all share a couple of awesome things in common: they can be used anywhere and anytime there’s sunlight available, they’re light and easy to lug around and they’re great not only for saving money on the electrical bill but also for keeping you mobile electronics active even when you’re far from civilization.
With solar chargers, you can now not only be more green when enjoying high digital tech, you can also do it in places that put you far more in touch with nature without hauling in the chains of civilization.
2. Wireless Enabled Digital Thermostats
Now here is a technology that takes some very old technologies and updates them with a green twist. Digital thermostats are essentially installable HVAC control systems that can be easily and fairly cheaply added to most modern homes with electronically controlled heating, cooling and lighting systems. Once in place, they let you Moneymanage a wide variety of different settings for your home’s comfort providing systems either from a digital wall panel or through a user interface that downloads to your mobile device and lets you run your house temperature and lights while you’re far from home.
The energy and money savings come in the form of highly specific controls that regulate how much energy your house uses far more finely than a conventional thermostat system could. Companies such as the Nest home thermostat claim to enable savings of over $200 per year on typical residential electrical bills!
3. Awesome Space Heaters
Heating bills in the home or office can easily skyrocket during the colder months, especially if you and your family or coworkers need to spend a lot of time in these places working or sitting in one place for some reason. The reason why: to keep yourself warm, you need to keep the entire space you’re in warm, such as a whole living room or office area. This takes a lot more heat –and thus energy—than you actually need per person since this is how most internal heating systems are designed.
The solution: space heaters! These cash saving little machines are basically portable heating units that you can move around anywhere in your home or office and set up right next to yourself and others, giving heat directly to you and using less energy in the process. Different designs allow for keeping warm in all sorts of different ways, but all have the ability to save you money on electricity in common. According to this convenient chart by Cozy Products, one manufacturer of space heaters, annual cash savings can go into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars, depending on your typical heating needs and bill sizes.
4. Eco Friendly TV Screens
You may not have thought of it this way, but TV screens are steadily becoming bigger and bigger leeches of household electrical use. With larger screen sizes and more sophisticated HD formats, many screens can sap quite a large load of electricity from your daily flow. Just how much? In some cases, with particularly large screens, as many as 600 watts might be getting sucked into the screen.
This is where green friendly HD flat screens for home entertainment come into play. Offered by companies such as Panasonic, Aquos and Vizio, these newly developed green friendly screens are able to reduce upper level use on larger models from the more usual 5 to 600 watts down to a cool 230 watts, saving you yet another sliver of cash per year.
5. Low Energy Light Bulbs
While many of us are going to miss the incandescent bulb when it finally goes away (and especially the quality of its light), anyone who’s even half serious about saving money on electrical bills and being more strict about their carbon footprint would do best to replace them quickly.
The best solution out there comes in the form of low energy lights. These can either be fluorescent light bulbs or even powered by internal LEDs; whichever is the case, while your per bulb costs will skyrocket, each bulb will last much, much longer than a typical incandescent and use much less energy while it’s shining. In the case of LED lights, the energy used to illuminate will be only one 6th of a classical light bulbs needs, and with some brands of fluorescent lighting, electrical savings per bulb can be as large as 80%. This means that over the long haul, you will come out on top cashwise.
About the author: Stephan Jukic is a freelance writer who generally covers a variety of subjects relating to the latest changes in white hat SEO, mobile technology, marketing tech and digital security. He also loves to read and write about location-free business, portable business management and finance. When not busy writing or consulting on technology and digital security, he spends his days enjoying life’s adventures either in Canada or Mexico, where he spends part of the year. Connect with Stephan on LinkedIn.