Green in multifamily

I'll make no bones about saying I'm not in the green movement to save the environment or reduce my carbon footprint (which by the way is ridiculous, North America absorbs as much carbon as it emits). There are a lot of money saving techniques to being green, however, and I'm a fan of saving money. I suppose I'm what you'd call hard green.

If you're not at least considering 'greening' up your property, you're already way behind the curve. More and more people are demanding greener, more sustainable apartment communities. There's the usual recycling program, using low VOC paints, using sustainable landscape, etc. You can do all the 'greening' to your property that you want but in the end being green comes down to the user. Carbon reduction gets only so many people pumped, but being able to save on your electric bill every month really gets people interested. Here are two tools we've focused on in my Architecture class that reveal energy use in a quick and easy way.

Black & Decker's Power Monitor

Fork over $100, mount this puppy onto your compatible meter (no wiring required) and watch it instantly transmit how much nergy you're using, what it's costing you per minute and an average monthly price if you use that much continuously. When you're running from room to room in the morning leaving lights on, the dishwasher going, TV on, you take a quick look at how much you're using, your monthly average and quickly go around turning things off.

Watts Up? plug load meter

Plug in different appliances and see how much energy they use. It reads it right on the meter or you can plug it into your computer and track it (as well as do some other spiffy stuff I won't get into). It's about $240 but the price keeps falling. We used this in our class to test different light bulbs and lamps. It was intersting to see the differences in energy use. You can program the regional price per kWh wherever you go.

Black & Decker's LightsOut Auto Switch

For about $30 you can screw this over your light switch and it will turn the lights on/off when you enter/leave the room. We've all done it- you go to grab something in the other room, get sidetracked and leave the light on. It drives me nuts when the girls in my sororty house do that- I have notes posted by the lights to turn them off when you leave. With this, you don't even have to worry about it!

These could be used as incentives, resident gifts or just around your office. Whichever you use, your energy bills are bound to go down.