Name: Michele Chalice, Healthy Home Habitats What motivated you to install solar?: My commitment to collectively healing our planet with less destructive energy choices. The energy from our panels lessens my guilt from the multitude of other environmental...
Home Resource Efficiencies
Favorite Environmental Actions at Home
Purple kale alongside the porch, Red Runner Beans and cucumbers hanging on the fence, pumpkins up a trellis and peach trees at the sidewalk, . I love that at least this food will not burn fossil fuel being shipped cross country to our table. I love that we grow them...
Healthy Home Habitats & Revision Energy Join Forces!
https://www.revisionenergy.com/blogs/healthy-home-habitats/ Go Solar when the numbers work! My payback period for both the solar and the heat pumps is 15 years. Love that $14/mo. electric bill and the ½ tank of oil each winter. Efficiency is Key! And don't forget...
Less Consumption, Less Damage, More Life!
I couldn’t agree more Lloyd Alter, in your recent Treehugger article “Why are there so many fist pumps for heat pumps these days?” Reducing demand is the challenge, the goal and so very achievable with daily decisions and choices that value the health of our planet...
A Summer Window Dance for Staying Cool
It's summer. Yay! And daytime temperatures are now exceeding 85 degrees. 🙁 So now we start the summer, energy-efficiency, window dance to begin at the Healthy Home Habitats house. Yes, the solar panels & heat pumps here provided 90% of our heat this past winter...
Catching the Flash Rain Water for Later
Oh boy, no rain again today... “Wait Mommy, I’ll turn on the rain for you!” my young daughter said as she ran to one of the rain-barrels along the dripline of our roof years ago. “In 2012, the top 1 percent of rainfall events in the northeast carried 71 percent more...
Reducing Your Lawn Load
Dear Healthy Home Habitats, Our water bills are rising and droughts are back again this year. I think I’m finally through with the “best lawn in the neighborhood" competition. But I’m not ready for the cost, expense and effort of creating a meadow. I need my yard to...
5 Steps to Drought-Proof Your Landscape
No, you are not imagining it. Not only are the droughts back again this spring in the Northeast US. But they are projected to continue through the growing season. Drought and erratic, intense rainstorms are predicted. Communities are implementing outdoor, landscape...
Anguished Animal Lover
Dear Healthy Home Habitats, I love my affectionate cat and I like to feed wild birds in the backyard too. But for the third time this week I’ve come home to beautiful, little feathers strewn throughout the house 🙁 I know I should keep Clara the Cat inside but she...
“Rag Revolution!?”
HEALING THE EARTH FROM HOME Many years ago and much to my chagrin, my Mother was horrified to find cloth rags in our kitchen instead of paper towels when she came to visit my newborn daughter. She stated that we were bound to poison our child! Well, my teenage...