By Vanessa S. Holt, Managing Editor
We all mean well when we make New Year’s resolutions. It seems like a good idea, in the haze of the holiday, to start fresh when you break open that new calendar to January.
Traditionally, resolutions seem to center around health, with vows to lose weight, start exercising more, or stop smoking. In addition to those, here are a few suggestions for little things we can do that don’t take a lot of effort, could ultimately save us some money, and which might even make us feel a little bit better in the process.
It’s amazing what can happen when everyone makes a small adjustment, as change ripples outward from each household, for better or worse. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money or take a lot of time to make a very small change or two this year, which en masse could make an enormous difference. Just look at the way that consumer habits have brought about changes in the marketplace, from the increasing demand for organic goods, to the popularity of recycled and recyclable packaging.
But let’s say that you’re not looking to change the world, just to change yourself. One idea for reducing energy usage and costs is to replace regular light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs.
Those are the funny bulbs that look kind of like a spiral or a corkscrew. Although they are a little more expensive, they last for so long and use so little energy that each one represents a savings of $30 in electricity over the life of the bulb. I find that many stores have regular sales that make them about the same price as a regular bulb, and each one can be expected to last for about seven years of regular use.
According to the Web site www.energystar.gov, a joint program of the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, if every American house replaced one regular light bulb with an Energy Star-qualified CFL bulb, the amount of energy saved would light more than 3 million houses for a year, would save more than $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars. And that’s just for one light bulb.
Buy energy-efficient new appliances (the Energy Star rating means that it meets efficiency guidelines set by the EPA and Department of Energy) to save money in the long run, but if you’re looking for something you can do for a couple of bucks the next time you go to the grocery store, a CFL bulb is a good place to start.
Here’s another idea that takes almost no effort and very little cost. Visit www.njcleanenergy.com and sign up for a program that will allow your house to tap into renewable energy. You don’t have to do anything much more complicated than click on the “residential” option for CleanPower Choice and select the plan that’s right for you. A couple more clicks, a little bit of typing, and you’re signed up.
You still receive your electric bill from the same company you always have, but a small additional cost of as little as 1.3 cents per kWh per month ensures a clean power source such as wind or hydro power will be delivered onto the power grid. While it won’t hook your house directly up to the windmill, it will create a demand for such power and reduce the demand for fossil fuels by that amount.
The impact on your monthly bill will probably only be a few dollars, depending on how much you currently use. The average for a New Jersey house is 700 kWh per month, which would incur less than $10 a month in additional costs, for clean energy.
This is also an attractive option for those who live in apartments or those who are not immediately able to convert a house to solar or wind power, but still want to cut dependency on fossil fuels. Signing up for this program and, at the same time, reducing your own energy use by gradually shifting to CFL light bulbs, turning off appliances when they are not in use, and following other energy-saving tips, will probably recover those extra few dollars each month.
Those are my top two picks for earth-friendly New Year’s resolutions. Of course, bringing reusable bags to the grocery store instead of using plastic bags is another resolution that I’ve tried to adopt, as I recently covered in this column. So far I’ve remembered to start bringing them with me, so I can already vouch for how easy of a resolution that should be to keep.
Vanessa Holt is managing editor of the Register-News. She can be reached at [email protected].

