Living Like Ed - (Page 49) Also, the air inside your house might not get circulated all that Air out Your Home well or that often. You can do COST: free wonders simply by airing out your home once in a while. Open the windows and get some cross-ventilation. Of course, nontoxic cleaning products and nontoxic paints can reduce the number of chemicals you release into the air in your home, and you’ll want to avoid things like hair spray and air fresheners. Once you’ve stopped introducing toxins into the air, you’re ready to take the next step and purify the air in your home. The purification process helps to eliminate both germs and toxic odors, improving the environment inside. I started using an electronic air purifier—a relatively small device from Advanced Pure Air that doesn’t require much energy—in both my home and Rachelle’s Pilates studio, which is over the garage. The air purifier has been great for improving our health and alleviating our allergies. I’ll let Richard Mayer from Real Spirit USA, the company behind Advanced Pure Air, explain how the device works: 49 1: home Turn Off Electronic Devices Looking for more low-hanging fruit? You can save energy just by flipping a switch and changing some bad habits. For instance, Rachelle doesn’t understand there’s this wonderful valve at the entrance to each room. It’s called a light switch. Every time you flip off that switch, you save a little energy. Rachelle will turn on a television in the living room and then she’ll come into the kitchen, make dinner, and eat dinner with the television still on in the other room. You can’t even hear the TV from the kitchen. So you can save a little more energy by turning off the TV when you leave the room. Rachelle also regularly turns on her curling iron, then gets on the computer, then forgets about the curling iron. It turns off automatically after about 20 minutes. So then she’ll turn it on again . . . and go back to the computer. She’ll do two 20-minute cycles before she finally gets around to doing her hair. If I turn it off, she gets outraged—even though it gets up to full heat Long showers really do use a lot of water—between 5 and 10 gallons every minute.
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