After looking at my carbon footprint data I realized how much my family keeping the porch and oven light on 24/7 truly impacts my carbon footprint. All of the other categories of my family footprint data are either below or slightly above the average carbon emission; however my home average is way above average, and that's largely from our use of light bulbs outside 24/7. If we start turning off our porch lights during the day, then my home carbon average would decrease thus making my carbon footprint much smaller.

This is very true, I have also noticed around my house we will leave things on while at school or out somewhere. And this has to change because while we are out doing something than are earth is using electricity and we are not even in the room. Our carbon footprint is increasing and in this case we can do something about it, in changing the little things to make our world a better place.

I noticed that many of the points you are bringing up are true for my family's light usage also. As I was walking around my house collecting data about our light usage to calculate my carbon footprint, many of the lights were already turned on - even in rooms that were not occupied. This greatly increased the percentage of my carbon footprint in the "home" category. We could probably do a better job remembering to turn the lights off when leaving a room in order to save energy.
   We could also use a more environment-friendly type of light bulb, rather than the incandescent bulbs. I noticed that almost half of the total number of light bulbs in my house are incandescent.  As well as negatively affecting our environment, incandescent bulbs are not as efficient as lights such as compact fluorescent lights. Using efficient, environment-friendly light bulbs is another example of ways we can change our household lighting habits to improve our carbon footprint and affect our environment positively.

I have very similar problems with my family’s light bulb usage as well. I try my best to turn off lights when I leave the room, but since I have six people in my family, it is hard to keep track of all of the people leaving rooms and turning off lights. Also, we could really use more CFL and LED lights in our house, for the majority of our light bulbs are incandescent which are much less energy efficient. A study by the ECA says that even replacing three 60-watt incandescent light bulbs with 13-watt CFLs can decrease your carbon footprint by 183 pounds.

Another problem I face in my household is the amount of paper we use. Things we can do to fix that paper usage is buying fewer paper bags at grocery stores and printing fewer unnecessary documents. Also, something I do a lot is not turning my computer all the way off and leaving it plugged in after it is fully charged. Sometimes I will leave the computer plugged in for 24 hours straight. This is very wasteful and I need to remember to unplug once I leave the house. So, there are many simple ways that I can reduce my fam ily footprint. All I need is for every member to do their part!
Source:
Osmun, Rosie. “How to Reduce Your Family's Carbon Footprint.” The Huffington Post,
    TheHuffingtonPost.com, 11 Jan. 2016,
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rosie-osm … 40860.html.

I used to have similar problems with turning off lights as well. Many times when I would leave my house I forgot to turn off the lights. Recently though, my mom has been making sure at least one person from my family goes around and turns off all of the lights before we leave to go somewhere. I think this significantly impacted my carbon footprint for the better. Because lighting comes from electricity which comes from burning fossil fuels, the less the lights are on the less carbon emissions are released into the air. I think one way to improve my carbon footprint is to install more compact fluorescent bulbs instead of incandescent bulbs in my house. Over the period of time a compact fluorescent works can prevent "1,000 to 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from heating the atmosphere" (Tufts Climate Initiative Lighting Brochure).

Souce:
Randolph, Paul H. "Turn Off the Lights." Interfaces 19.4 (1989): 89-91. Web. http://sustainability.tufts.edu/wp-cont … ochure.pdf