One Geek, One Earth

…or offers you 20 ways that your home can save the earth, anyway. Sunday night they had an hour long show illustrating 20 ways to green your home. To be fair, it was about 50% product placement but a lot of the products were actually interesting, if somewhat expensive at times. The neat stuff:

(1) Plug into the hottest appliances

A dishwasher that automatically senses what dishes you have in the washer and uses just enough water and heat to clean. Also highlighted a monthly energy dashboard for your house that is accessible from the internet, so you can see what your energy usage patterns are, even while you’re not in the house. And the one I’d really like - a built in, hermetically sealed food composter.

(5) Recycle with style

A reminder of the reuse portion of the reduce, reuse, recycle portion. Reupholstering old pieces of furniture can be incredibly stylish and keeps furniture from hitting the landfill.

(6) Planet friendly floors

They mentioned cork floors, which appeal to me as I don’t walk well in bare feet on regular hardwood floors, but cork has give to it for a softer experience and cork is environmentally great because it is harvested from the tree every 9 years rather cutting the tree down. Marmoleum, which is a brand name linoleum was shown. Linoleum is made from all natural products and the design possibilities are much better than what you may remember from your childhood. And finally, they mentioned carpet tiles (available from lots of different eco-friendly materials) - since tiles are placed in a pattern, if something happens to one, you can just remove the tile to clean it, rather than having to remove the whole carpet, which is definitely more earth friendly.

(13) Go with the low flow

Besides the standard low flow showerheads and faucets, they showed off a toilet that has two separate buttons - 1 for #1, 1 for #2 - that way, the toilet uses only as much water as is needed.

(17) Be green when you clean

Lots of expensive washer and dryers that I can’t afford, but they did mention dryer balls that are supposed to help your wet clothes separate, allowing your dryer to be more efficient and use less heat. Should also allow you to stop using dryer sheets and fabric softener. For $20, that seems like it would pay for itself before long.

(20) Keep nature natural

Planters made of corn husks that are naturally biodegrable - you plant them with your plant, and they become part of the soil. Neat. They also had a stylish rug made from recycled plastic bottles and furniture made from “polywood“, a substance made from recycled milk jugs. Definitely neat stuff and something to consider when we move and need deck furniture.

If you can catch the show on repeat on HGTV, I think it is worth a look see - at 45 mins if you can Tivo it, I think it is worth the time.

Every Tuesday on the way to pick up my daughter from her mémère’s house, I pass by this odd shaped, basically round house that has an open house sign on it. I wasn’t even positive it was a house at first. Now that our house is on the market, I thought it might be a good opportunity to go take a look at the house and see what was up. Turns out that it is a house designed on green principles.

The Ark

A house that the creator refers to as The Ark because “you’ll never have to leave home again”. It has living quarters on the upper two floors and a separate private office on the bottom floor with its own entrance and driveway. The windows are facing the sun to create passive solar heating and they have active solar heating that heats hot water, which then runs between floors keeping the house warmer. The foundation is built for easy extensibility without spreading out and the builder buys lots where the view is fantastic and unlikely to change.

I don’t think I’d be able to live in this particular house - while I like a lot of the design of the house, the stairs tended to be at odd angles and with my various diseases, in the future I might have a lot of trouble climbing stairs. As it turns out, at $345K, the house is definitely out of our price range, but it was nice to look at and gives me some ideas for features that I might want to add or look for in a house.

For those interested, the house has its own website: http://www.1309martinlutherkingparkway.com/