As the temperatures outside drop this winter, keep your home’s interior warm and comfortable with these effective heat-saving strategies. These tips will also help your household conserve energy and reduce utility costs throughout this season.
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Electric Living
How many of us give our washing machines a second thought? And why should we? They’re reliable, automatic, hidden away, and quietly serve us when needed, with little fuss or mess. It was not always so.
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10 Ways to Keep Your Heat Indoors this Winter
Despite your efforts to shut out the cold weather, sometimes warm air escapes through windows, doors and other openings, thereby causing temperatures to drop inside.
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5 Eco-Friendly Ways Startups Can Help the Environment
Making your office environmentally friendly might seem like a luxury, but give it some thought and don’t push it to the background.
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The Impact of Recycling
Americans spend and average of $51,000 on household expenditures per year. Most are for items which end up as trash and goes to the landfill.
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8 Ways to Reduce Your Water Waste
Water is wasted waiting for the shower or sink to warm up, on the slow leak you have in the toilet bowl that you never knew about and from sprinkling your lawn every day.
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Radon, an Invisible, Odorless Northwest Issue
Portland and Vancouver have a radon issue– one that has been here for thousands of years–and it is not going to go away. The soil in the Willamette Valley, much of Clark County, and the Columbia River Gorge has a granite component, Ice Age material brought down the Columbia River from Montana repeatedly between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, during the Missoula Floods. It is found as sand, gravel, cobblestones, even boulders. This granite, mixed into the upper layers of our soil, contains uranium, which breaks down naturally over time and produces radon gas. Invisible and with no smell, radon is drawn upward into our homes (regardless of architectural style,…
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How to Stop Energy from Leaking out your Windows & Doors
In an economy struggling to recover, businesses and individuals alike are trimming costs wherever possible. Many homeowners are choosing to put their budgets on a diet — and a good place to start eliminating unnecessary costs is with energy use. Most homeowners pay dearly for the convenience of appliances, climate control, and electric lighting. Among the top home energy expenses are heating and cooling. There are ways, however, to reduce the cost of these conveniences with little effort. Climate Control By far, the largest energy expense in the home is space heating, which accounts for 45% of home energy usage. Cooling accounts for another large chunk. Together, these two forms…
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Dealing With Computer Scrap
Waste prevention is the ideal situation and it is the most preferable solution to manage waste, recycling included. Used and functional electronic items can be donated to extend the functionality of products and keeps them out of the waste management system for an elongated period of time. Donating used electronics allows educational institutes and not for profit organizations to take advantage of an additional source of infrastructure and there are plenty of electronics recycling opportunities in Portland: You can recycle your e-waste for free through Oregon E-Cycles, or donate to Free Geek, which will put your used equipment to work as a community educational tool. A working computer with a current operating…
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Five Reasons Why an Environmental Site Assessment is Important
(If You Are Looking to Buy a Commercial Property) Investing in commercial real estate can be risky. Returns on the investment are dependent upon the constantly changing real estate market, natural hazards, loan terms, and/or the success of tenants, to name a few. One of the biggest risks can be related to the potential for environmental liabilities related to a property. Environmental liability can have enormous financial ramifications for an owner, and can feasibly affect the ability to lease or utilize a property. Therefore, environmental due diligence, specifically a Phase I Environmental Site Assessment (ESA), is a critical step in choosing the right property. Investors and users alike may focus…
