Many students using our footprint calculator said that they could not pledge to reduce their home footprints because they were not making the decisions for the household. Here is your chance to design your own sustainable virtual household!
If you had your own home, what would you do to make it more energy efficient? Where would you get your electricity from? Where would your house be? Would you live near to your school or work or local transit options? Where would you get your food from?
MY Family Footprint >
MY Family Footprint
My home is accountable for 69% of my carbon footprint. This is primarily due to the fact that my house is about 5,900 square feet, and tat we use many lamps and overhead lights. While about half of the lights are CFLs, the other half are all incandescent, and the the ones we happen to use more often are the incandescent lights. I originally had no idea how much energy we were using. I thought we were saving energy because we had many lamps on timers, however it never occurred to me that the timers were on for about 12 hours, and about six of the hours were when we were asleep. In addition, only some of the lamps on timers had CFL light bulbs in them. I have addressed this issue with my parents, and I convinced them to change all of our light bulbs to CFLs, and to set the timers for 6 o'clock pm to 10 o'clock pm, and from 5 o'clock am and 8 o'clock am, which are the only hours of the day where we really need them. I hope that this has helped reduce our carbon footp rint slightly. I know we could make bigger changes to help, but doing little, simple, and easy things are a good way to start.