Off Grid and Eco Friendly

• The Spruce Green Home Improvements
• An entire greenhouse At Burpee. Wildly expensive but if you can make sure it's climate controlled year round, you can then grow vegetables for a family, flowers, or whatever, organic as you like.
• ASES guide to claiming a 30% tax credit on new solar panel installation from their web page ASES
• EnergySage Industry-tied website for finding solar panel installers in your area
• 12/30/22 Some insulation help: Pink foam board insulation This is R5. It's cheaper than R10. All foam board, and most foam insulation, is extremely flammable, so should be covered with drywall, as per this article from Attainable Sustainable
• 1/2/23 More insulation help: Atticat Pink Expanding Fiberglass Insulation Seems to be one of the least expensive and most attainable solutions for many homes. Look into it. Air sealing the attic and preparing all the "stuff" up there first is important; learn how to do this right then go do it.
• Solar Powered Attic Fan If you can mount it, then you can reduce the costs of AC in summer by a lot.
• R-Tech Insulfoam is the company. My favorite insulation panels, ever, hands down. Cram these in any window or place where you need more insulation, such as in an attic or below floor joists in the basement, or in exposed wall joists in a garage, or in a garage door. Cut these to size precisely and they'll stay in there with friction. They work. They just work.
• Switch to renewable electricity grid provider This is a handy guide provided by Electricity Rates. Really important for people living in Texas. Note that you can and should definitely check out your electricity provider's website to see if they have any sort of renewable options or related programs. Also note that in many cases you can switch providers without having any work done on your home's wiring, or even the exterior wiring. It's pretty cool.
• Green-E Another search tool for finding potential eco-friendly renewable electricity providers. This is not available in all locations but check your zip code on each website, you might be one of the lucky ones.
• Dandelion Energy Geothermal In the Northeast, this company can install a geothermal heating and cooling system for you, which according to them is typically about $18,000-25,000. They claim this can, however, help you save up to 50% on heating and cooling bills.
• Geocomfort by Enertech This appears to have a larger service area, namely, possibly the entire continental U.S. A geothermal heating and cooling installer. Hmm. They also seem to be linked up with Dandelion, as explained here
• Geosmart Energy A Canada version of geothermal installation, apparently
• ClimateMaster Another geothermal company
• ECS Geothermal In the Kansas City general area
• Compost bin from Bed Bath and Beyond. No hassle setting this thing up. You might need to put some non-chemically-treated plywood or some chicken wire over it to keep out possums and raccoons. A fitted sheet that has seen better days and a couple cords to tie it down with would also work. Or, just grab a couple bags of leaves and clippings and a couple untreated strawbales, and toss that in there after every visit to the pile.
• Bamboo fencing At Walmart. So much better for the environment than wood, and can be fastened to existing chain-link fence to improve privacy by a large amount. Here's another like it and another
• Reed window screens at Walmart. A reviewer commented that they put these up on the outside of their windows in Cali to reduce the glare and heat from the sun.
• Rubbermaid recycling bins At Walmart. Also sold on Amazon and Home Depot's sites. Get a bunch so you can group like by like; recycling plants sometimes require you to sort by group. Also get one for hazardous waste such as lightbulbs, batteries, and chemicals (btw car repair shops such as Jiffy Lube might offer help with disposing of vehicular fluids; ask your local repair shop about this also). And another for e-waste (usually Best Buy will take this). Important, because if you don't live anywhere near a recycling plant and/or hazardous waste disposal and travel to a big town only like 1-4x a year, you can drop it off at a recycling plant there, and then you won't have recycling piling up in your house and multiplying like tribbles and getting all over your car when you do schlep it. Speaking from experience.
• Jackery Solar power products for camping with an emphasis on safety. Not large-scale for grid-tie or off-grid home solar... yet.
• Bluonics For clean water and water quality issues. Underrated as a service.
• Aquasana A competing company. Family and I installed a water filter for the whole house from this company, after spending a year looking for a technician who even knew how to do it. Long story. Anyway, it works, and it's expensive af. Yes, we needed it.
• Aquasana countertop water filter Do you buy filter pitchers? Might wanna try this instead as it's more likely to actually work. And no, I don't think Berkeys work.
• GoalZero I was graciously directed to GoalZero, a company producing affordable solar panels-based electricity solutions for emergency and off-grid use, by correspondence with GroupHug Solar, which was seriously nice of them. Both worth checking out.
• Yeti Home Integration Kit Yeti Power Kit This is a sold-in-tandem kit of solar panel integration and lithium-ion battery that requires installation by a licensed, professional electrician. However, it would take a lot of scrutiny into the credentials of the engineering team to be certain that the lithium-ion batteries and the whole thing is set up well and in a way that reduces or eliminates risk of the lithium batteries catching on fire or exploding. I wish I was kidding.
• It's worth mentioning that I used to compost in a five-gallon bucket, stirring the stuff with a stick and chucking in a handful of dirt from time to time. I'd cover it with a spare nylon pantyhose now if I tried it again, to prevent hungry varmints from digging through it. Another way of making that happen is to drill some holes in a big plastic trash can, set it on a couple two-by-fours for drainage, and hold the lid down with bungee cords. In either case it's good to get a bunch of "browns" aka non-nitrogenous wastes such as sawdust, a straw bale, grass clippings, leaves, or whatever, cause it helps more common composts like kitchen waste compost faster.
• Blackout curtains At Ikea
• Blackout roller blinds At Ikea
• Insulfoam Foam hard insulation panels that provide both R-value and air barrier. These are great for cramming in windows that you don't use in order to reduce heat transfer, and also great for insulating garage doors. They sell a handy kit for garage door insulation also.
• Sunpower Solar energy installation, maintenance, and upkeep, including Tesla Powerwalls. They can also install electric car charge ports for you. Extremely expensive.
• LG Solar Apparently LG is now getting into home solar panel installation. Gonna talk to them about it.
• Sunrun solar This is through Costco. Sunrun is a more shady company but it might also be cheaper. No guarantees of not being made with slave labor in China.
• Ikea Home Solar Not offered in the USA. Might be worth looking into for people overseas.
• LG inverter AC wall unit Just one example of a family of dual inverter AC window units. They don't eat up a ton of electricity because unlike the usual wall units that go "on" and "off" and have nothing in between, these cool the space just as much as it needs, when it needs it. Energy efficient and effective. I use one of these and recommend it. Home Depot, Lowes, and Amazon should all have it; be sure you get only what is needed for your space and what your electricity supply can handle, the right unit in the right place for the right size of room.
• Lehmans Most of the stuff on this site is expensive but it is likely to save you money in the long run. They have a lot of stuff, and I mean a lot.
• Bluonics Reverse Osmosis Undersink System Relatively cheap reverse osmosis system for drinking water. No idea if it works that well or not.
• Aquasana Water filters. In theory, better than PUR and Brita. Of particular interest to people living in places like Flint, Michigan is this unit OptimH20 which costs like $2000 plus plumber fees to install and $560 something per year for replacement filters. No, I don't know if it's worth it. 4/17/22 It's worth it
• Berkey Light Water Filter 5/26/22 Now that Aquasana has created a countertop water filter that operates on electricity, I don't recommend this one anymore because it's just activated carbon. Anyway, this is an activated carbon water filter. It reduces contaminants better than Brita and PUR but never use it instead of a reverse osmosis system. If you take collected rainwater and boil it then cool it, then in theory you could run it through this filter and it should be drinkable. Try it at your own risk.
• One strange option for purifying rainwater: devise a system where the rainwater goes into a large food-grade bucket with a hole at the bottom on the side, backed up by mesh, with large clean rocks topped with gravel topped with a mixture of pea gravel and sand. Essentially, a DIY aquifer. Then the outflow could get boiled and cooled, and then ran through a Berkey.
• Solar oven Expensive, but hey, a fancy grill costs roughly as much
• Best Drying Rack Laundry drying setups for outdoors. Which is important if you like your clothes to stay wearable after three or four years instead of falling apart due to dryer.

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