Outdoor Home Cooling Tips

Outdoor Home Cooling Tips:

The way we landscape or decorate the exterior of our home can decrease our indoor cooling energy consumption and save us money. Looking to nature for ideas will take you far in your home cooling efforts.

• Plant wisely.
  Planting crawling vines along the south and west sides of your home or on trellises in front of windows can help insulate the house as well. You can do this with edible vines such as grapevines, for added utility.

• Plant native, deciduous trees.
  They will also help shade your home from the hot summer sun. And when they drop their leaves in the winter, they will assist in passive solar heating.
• Consider awnings.
  Used on the south or west facing windows, they will block the angle of the sun coming through the window during he summer while allowing the lower angled winter sun to come in and warm the home.
• Invest in solar screens
  Solar screens on the outside of windows make a huge difference and are worth the investment. They can be removed during the winter.
• Need to paint?
  If your house is in need of a paint job, consider lighter colors which deflect rather than absorb the light.
• Redoing the roof?
  Light-colored roof shingles also help decrease any heat absorption by deflecting sunlight.
• Paint your roof!
  You don't need to redo your roof to benefit from lighter colors. Collecting used paint from around town or cast-off paint from a local hardware store in light shades will give you the same effect for much less.

For more information on this topic, visit the source of the article at http://www.sustainablebabysteps.com/home-cooling.html

An Environmentally Friendly Way to Clean Your Deck

If you have a retractable awning installed on your deck, we bet you have spent a lot of time out there this summer. Spilled food and drinks, muddy footprints, squashed insects, and even bird droppings may have left your deck a little worse for wear, and in need of a mid-season cleaning. What is the best way to clean a deck? A pressure washer? A chemical cleaner? Or a scrub brush with a green-cleaner, such as oxygen bleach? There are pros and cons to each of the methods.

Cleaning Your Deck with Pressure Washer

Pressure washers are extremely popular – and like shoes – they come in all different sizes and the end of the spray wand can be equipped with different tips that concentrate the high-pressure stream of water. A pressure washer can clean a wood deck faster than you can do it by scrubbing by hand. But a pressure washer has drawbacks. It’s noisy, it uses gasoline or electricity and lots and lots of water – and used improperly can deteriorate the wood surface – leaving it rough after it dries.

Cleaning Your Deck with Non-Toxic Cleaners

There is a more environmentally friendly way to clean a deck. Tim Carter, who writes the popular Ask the Builder website, is a big proponent of using non-toxic cleaners and scrubbing by hand. He recommends using oxygen bleach- not chlorine – that is not toxic to you or the plants around your house.

According to Carter, the oxygen bubbles in the oxygen bleach solution does most of the work done by the pressure washer – but without the noise pollution and without using gasoline OR electricity. The solution soaks into the dry wood and the oxygen ions deep clean the wood by breaking apart dirt, algae and mildew molecules. The solution is not toxic to you or any of the plants, bushes or trees around your deck. “You can’t say that about chlorine bleach,” he adds.

But the con about using a green cleaner is time and elbow grease. You will have to do some additional mechanical agitation by using a scrub brush on a pole to get your deck squeaky clean. However, you will be pleased to discover that the wood will not be fuzzy, and there will be hardly any erosion of the soft wood.

There are many different oxygen-bleach products on the market, including Natural Choices, Exterior PROx Deck & Patio Cleaner, and Stain Solver.

For more information on this topic, visit the source of this article at http://www.aristocratawnings.com/blog/