Photo: Barley & Pfeiffer Architects

Traditional fluorescents have improved and are fantastically efficient.

Traditional fluorescents have changed radically over the past few years. With the new types of light bulbs and ballast, they’re fantastically efficient, generate much less heat and last seven times longer. They make really skinny tubes that light up immediately, put out flicker-free light and give you great color rendition. In my own kitchen, every light except two is fluorescent. The entire kitchen is lit up with about 350 watts of energy, while a typical custom home kitchen might use 2,000 watts.

I’ll give you an example. Let’s say there are 10 bulbs in a room using 75 watts of energy. Switch to fluorescent bulbs at 18 watts and you save 570 watts of energy. If each puts out 3.4 BTUs of heat, that’s 1,938 BTUs of heat released into the room. Well, there’s 12,000 BTUs in a ton of air conditioning. So you’re basically saving about one-sixth ton of air conditioning in the room just by doing a lighting retrofit.

• Select energy-efficient appliances

A refrigerator runs all the time, making it the second largest consumer of energy in your home after the air conditioner. Be sure to get an energy efficient model, one that’s earned the Energy Star®. The ones with ice maker dispensers on the door aren’t as efficient, because they have less insulation and use more energy.

Also consider an induction cook-top. They put to use 85% of the energy that goes into them, whereas a normal gas cooktop uses only 15%-25% of energy in the cooking process. Microwave ovens are much more efficient than electrical and gas ovens.

• Conserve water

Water conservation is much more effective than trying to be your own rainwater collector or gray water re-user. Come up with ways to use less water before investigating the cost of putting in a rainwater collection system. Low-flow showerheads, front-loading washing machines, ultra-low-flow toilets, drought-tolerant landscaping — those things alone can save you 5,000-10,000 gallons a month. You won’t be able to collect that much water with a rainwater system, which might cost $5,000-$10,000. And making those changes are cheaper and will save water the rest of your life; a rainwater system saves only when it rains. My $7,500 system has been empty for two months.

Typically, outdoor plantings use the most water in a home. That’s why it’s so important to go with truly drought-tolerant plants, to really understand what’s native. I’m not a landscape architect, so I went with what my landscape designer told me on my own home. He planted zoysia grass, but it died because it doesn’t work in the shade. It cost me $6,000 to redo the sod with a shade- and drought-tolerant St. Augustine and to replace other plants that died.

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