by Sam E. Jones

Created on: September 10, 2010

One of the unpleasant surprises people may find when they figure out how to work from home, is that their energy bills suddenly start to spike as all that home office equipment is so often in use; this is when many home office workers start thinking about making their home office a little bit more energy efficient. Below are some ideas on how to help.

The first thing you can do in your home office, is replace your light bulb, and not with compact florescent bulbs either, now there are LED bulbs that uses as little as 7 watts to achieve what it used to take a traditional 60 watt bulb used to do. And while that might not seem like much, it can certainly make a difference as time goes on, because the lights in your home office are likely burning for a lot of hours.

Another immediate thing you can do is start using a laptop or notebook instead of a desktop. Portable computers consume far less electricity to get the same work done, so why waste all that electricity. And if you’re worried about comfort, you can also plug in an external mouse and keyboard, and monitor for that matter, though doing that will offset most of your energy savings.

Another energy drain at home is heating and cooling. It’s likely you would turn down the thermostat in the summer and lower the heat in winter if you were away at an office all day; but if your office is at home, you won’t be doing that, thus, your energy bills are likely higher than they would be otherwise. One way to offset this is to heat and cool your office separately, rather than doing so for the whole house when you’re only using one small part of it all day. This way you can go ahead and turn the house thermostat up or down to your heart’s content, as you can simply turn on a portable heater in your office, or window air conditioner. Doing this would allow you to adjust the house thermostat even more than you would if you were away working, because you being there during the day will mean you can rest that thermostat about an hour or so before your work day is through, which would save you even more.

And one final thing you can do is buy peripherals that turn themselves off when not in use for a set period of time; this will save you a lot on electricity costs, because it actually takes a lot of juice to keep printers and copiers warmed up and ready to go all the time.

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