With the growing number of green issues in our world we all try to pay more attention to living environment-consciously. This affects both our daily lives and our choices of products for long term use too.

If we are past recycling whatever use in the household, and we would like to make some savings with going green, there is a wide range of gadgets, like LEDs, we can choose from saving us energy and eventually money. The most radical way of saving energy is to switch for local sources of renewable energy, like solar panels or windmills, however these usually require refurbishing parts of our homes, and at first we might not want to go into that straight away. Also, since establishing renewable sources in our home is neither cheap nor easy, we might want to reduce our energy consumption to the minimum first, i.e. using LEDs, and find a solar panel for this reduced need of energy only.

The first step we could take is examine our existing electronic devices and switch for energy-saving ones as soon as possible. It is not difficult these days to get rid of our energy-hungry appliances, since shops offering electronic gadgets all offer the correct disposal services too when we buy a replacement from them. New appliances are all categorized into energy classes, and currently the most energy saving one is the A+++ class. If you want save as much energy as possible, do not chose anything below class A, whether it is your heater, fridge, lighting or coffee machine. A simple advice with appliances is to switch them off as often as you can. With the high number of appliances in our homes standby operations can also add up to a substantial amount of used energy.

Besides the appliances used in our homes, another major field of energy use is our lighting. This part of energy saving is really easy due to the wide range of energy-saving light bulbs available on the market, but if we want to go green besides saving energy, the best solution is definitely LEDs. This relatively young technology is fast developing both in its brightness and efficiency, and prices for new applications become more affordable with these developments. If so far we only had incandescent light bulb, we will be amazed to see the difference with LEDs, which consume only 90% of this energy. But LEDs are also much better than compact lights too, saving energy roughly 40% more without any flicker or delayed switch on. LEDs have the amazing characteristics of reaching full brightness instantly, and have the longest lifespan a light bulb can have ranging from 25 000 hours up to 100 000, depending on the device.

Heating is another main consumer of energy. If we do not want to go into refurbishing of our homes, there are still a couple of tricks we can use for getting the most out of our heating. A room with good ventilation and proper humidity feels less cold. This is partly because warm air floats upwards, so if it is circulated, we will feel less cold. Proper insulation for the house also helps, and there are several smaller steps you can do before adding a whole layer of insulation to your house. The cheapest is to use thick curtains during the night which will keep a lot of warm inside if your windows do not have the best insulation. Shutters added to them give even better results. However, if you decide to refurbish your place, insulating the floor as well as the walls will reduce your heating costs during the winter and air conditioning in the summer.

Saving water can be tough for fans of bathing, but if you take energy-saving seriously, you should switch for short showers. Other opportunities for saving water arise during washing the dishes and washing our clothes. Both done by energy saving and economic appliances give us the best results. In addition, you can also collect rainwater for watering your plants. This will not only save you water, but is also better for the plants.  </span></div>