Power outages can affect any home at any time. With the right emergency backup power solution, life can continue without interruption. Here’s a look at how the latest emergency generators are keeping up with today’s high-tech and power-hungry homes.
LEDs are already the most cost-effective method of lighting your home. And now a new method of manufacturing them invented at Cambridge University may reduce those costs by 75 percent over the next five years. This next generation of LEDs cost one-tenth of what normal...
Backup generators bring peace of mind to homeowners who live in ice storm and hurricane-prone areas. Just ask anybody who lost power in the ice storm here last month how much they valued their backup generator. Briggs & Stratton is showing a new line of...
We've been singing the praises of LEDs here at BobVila.com for quite some time now. And for good reason; they are the most energy-efficient lighting product on the market. It's estimated that LEDs could reduce electrical consumption for lighting by 29 percent by the...
The EPA is calling upon Americans to change their conventional light bulbs to compact fluorescent lighting in celebration of the eighth annual Energy Star Change a Light Day today. We at BobVila.com have long been big fans of CFLs and are happy to see they have moved...
Summer is here with a vengeance in New England! And now with the air conditioning blasting on high, I'm thinking of ways to cut my energy bill. According to a recent study by an Australian consumer agency, video game consoles and plasma flat screen televisions are...
Let's kill this rumor before it even gets off the ground: Compact fluorescent lights, or CFLs, are no more a fire hazard than regular incandescent bulbs. One writer to the Green Guide expressed concern because his CFL burned out, leaving a charred base, some smoke and...
I may be the last to know, but I had never heard that rechargeable batteries needed loving care to stay in shape. It turns out that you can ruin a rechargeable battery by running it down to zero. The polarity of the battery cells can even become reversed, ruining the...
It's a good rule of thumb to be suspicious of anyone selling something door-to-door. And that goes double if the person is promising to save you big money if you sign a contract. Recently a company in New York named IDT Energy has been selling energy plans to area...
On February 17, 2009, analog television programming will no longer be available in the US. On that date, all full power TV stations must abandon their analog broadcasts (if they haven’t done so already), allowing the spectrum to be divvied up for other uses. From then...
