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Where did the summer go? That’s the question on everyone’s mind as fall creeps up and winter is right around the corner. Will you be ready for the cold weather? There are many simple tips you can take towards winterizing your home that can save a lot on your heating bills. One of the easiest is to place a rolled up towel at the bottom of your front door. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, drafts like those under your door can waste up to 30% of your home heating energy. Now, you can get fancy with these draft stoppers by ordering up a “draft snake” or make your own using sand or kitty litter as a filler. The key is to make sure it covers the entire width of the door frame and is easy to push aside. Along with this door draft blocker, you should also make sure all your windows are properly insulated. Perhaps it’s time for some fresh caulking along the frame.
You should also be swapping out your furnace filters for better heating efficiency. These should be on the same replacement schedule as your smoke detector batteries which is every six months or whenever we change the clocks. If you have ceiling fans, you probably have been running them counterclockwise to catch the cool breeze. During the winter flip the fans to clockwise and you can circulate the warm air that collects at your ceiling. Remember hot air rises so let the fan push it back down! If you have an AC wall unit, you’ll want to make sure that you collect any pooled water that has accumulated in the unit or tubes. This will prevent freezing which could damage the unit.
Do you know what your water heater temperature is set at? The default for most of these units is 140 degrees but that’s too hot to use. If you dial it back to 120 degrees you’ll be adding up even more energy savings.
Not all of your winterizing should be relegated to the inside of your homes. Before the storms start rolling in you should cover up your patio furniture and grill. You’ll also want to make sure your rain gutters are cleared out from fallen leaves. This is one of those homeowner chores you simply can’t avoid! Fortunately, you have a willing partner standing by in the form of Junk King of Sacramento.
Junk King can be the perfect partner for leaf removal. Whether you want to rake the leaves into a pile or bag them up, you can rest assured that Junk King will pick them up and have them properly disposed off. It might seem like a never ending battle to get all the leaves but if you time it right Junk King can remove the bulk of them. They can also remove any other big item you want taken away. Start the winter right free of leaves and of junk!
According to a recent article in the Sacramento Bee, when Kyle Truitt was helping his friend, Josh Cox, move into a new home they became frustrated with all those cardboard boxes they needed to do the packing and moving. Because these friends were dedicated recyclers they wondered if there could be an alternative.
You might not think that being out in nature requires an eco-friendly recycling program but no area in Sacramento should be exempt from going green. As part of their successful “Plastics. Too Valuable to Waste. Recycle” campaign, the America’s plastic makers who make up the American Chemistry Council (ACC) recently announced a partnership with the American River Natural History Association. As part of this new eco-friendly team, visitors to the Effie Yeaw Nature Center with now have an abundance of recycling options in the form of six recycling bins now situated throughout the park. With this effort, the American River Parkway in Sacramento will be that much brighter and cleaner.
So how did you spend e-waste collection month? Surely, you knew that March was e-waste collection month in Sacramento. It seems as though the entire city banded together to clear up the clutter of e-waste. Home Depot stores took in your old batteries. Many Whole Foods markets scheduled e-waste drop off days. Certainly all of those special recycling centers run by the city were open for business (and they still are!). If you cleared out your home or apartment of all your e-waste clutter, then good on ya! If not, you don’t have to wait until next year to properly dispose of that e-waste or any other recyclable materials.
There is a reason why Sacramento has such a reputation as a beautiful city. It’s because the residents take pride in their surroundings. A function of that pride has been one of the most comprehensive recycling programs across the country. In fact, many other city managers from around the county come to Sacramento to see how they pull off these programs.
The PBS series “Antique Roadshow” has been a very popular hit among Sacramento antique collectors and curious minds of all kind. We’d all like to think we have a treasure hidden within our junk. Sometimes there actually is a genuine prize lurking in the closet or basement. Recent participants on “Antique Roadshow” have discovered paintings valued at over $500,000 and a jade collection worth over $1,000,000. Of course, those are the rarities. We all know that most of the junk we have sitting around our house is really, well, junk. As much as we’d like to discover a pot of gold, what we really should be doing is calling in a team of professional junk haulers to get rid of it all.
Los Angeles may give us our movies and television but Sacramento is where the laws are made. Of course Hollywood and Sacramento came together when the “Terminator” became the “Govern-ator.” Today, Sacramento is a model city boasting a wide variety of taste tempting restaurants, cultural happenings and diverse neighborhoods. Even though the residents take pride in how special their city is, there is one area where Sacramento is just like every other town across the country – the junk.
Everybody strives to remove the stress from their lives. We go on vacations. We take yoga classes. We try to find our “happy place.” Whatever the method is, getting rid of stress can be a huge benefit not only for our overall health but for all the people around us. No stress in our lives means good times. One major contributor to stress is clutter. Not just the kind of clutter you might find in your kid’s closet (although that’s an entire whole other level of stress!) but the big piles of junk that just have to go.