The residential water-use calculator compares your water use to a similar average and efficient house in the San Diego region. The calculator estimates the energy savings and carbon footprint of your hot water usage, and helps identify specific areas for improving overall household water efficiency. Water conservation is easy and the water calculator gets you started right away.
Calculator: http://www.sdcwa.org/water-calculator
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After never seeing a power bill, San Diego families in military housing will start getting invoices for their electricity use later this year.
They won’t have to cover the entire cost. But military families who crank up the air conditioning or leave all the lights on — at least 10 percent more than the average user — will owe for the excess.
Contact the appraisers at www.scappraisals.com for a free handout on easy ways to save energy in your home. The appraisers at Southern California Appraisal Services are Certified Energy Analysts.
In Hawaii, the first Navy region to try the power-metering concept in 2011, about a third of military homes receive a monthly invoice averaging more than $60.
On the flip side, energy-saving households get cash back as an incentive. About a third of Hawaii families use less than the average amount and get monthly rebates averaging $57.
All told, the Navy has cut power use by 10.5 percent in Hawaii. About 15 million kilowatt-hours have been conserved, equaling $3.3 million.
The savings in San Diego are expected to be about the same, though electricity is less expensive here. It will cost $3 million to install power meters in older homes that lack them.
The change is driven by a 1998 Pentagon directive that ordered energy conservation at housing complexes managed by public-private joint ventures — in San Diego County, basically all military family housing constructed over the past decade.
Read more at: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/apr/08/tp-navy-begins-power-metering/
Disclaimer: for information and entertainment purposes only
If ever you should decide to redo your garden, sooner or later you’ll likely hear someone say, “Be sure to stay true to the surroundings.” It is one of those stock phrases that architects and decorators often use to suggest that the garden’s design shouldn’t veer far from the style of the home and interior, or that native plants and local aesthetics should be embraced. But for Lisa Gimmy, a landscape architect who has spent the last 20 years designing gardens around Southern California, the idea of staying true to your surroundings goes far deeper. For her, garden design is a matter of seamlessly integrating inside and out, lifestyle and landscape — and her solutions have yielded gardens that are livable above all else.
Does making your landscaping “green” add value to your home? Contact the appraisers at www.scappraisals.com for you value questions.
Many of the gardens she has designed, including the two featured here, belong to midcentury modern California homes. She’s a master at selecting plants and hardscape that not only work with the dry California climate but also with the horizontal lines and hard edges of modernist design. But Gimmy’s philosophy and approach to design is universal, and could just as easily apply to a farmhouse in the Midwest or New England.
More attuned to a home’s ethos and environment than her own personal vision, Gimmy does not have a signature style. It is possible to visit several of her gardens and not immediately realize they are by the same person. “There is not a look,” she says. “My gardens are more about the site, plants and views, and about finding a design that is in sync with the architecture and that allows the clients to live the life they imagine for themselves.”
Read more at: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/04/magazine/california-landscaping.html?ref=realestate
Posted in energy savings, Real Estate
Tagged eco-friendly, green, landscaping, lawn, water savings
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