Everybody should try to use a minimum amount of electricity, first to preserve the planet but also to save money when you pay your monthly bill. There are several energy efficient systems that can installed in your house to help you reduce your electric consumption.

Even if you have all these devices installed in your home, the most important part in saving energy is to get into some good habits.

• Turning the lights, fans and AC when you're not in a room.
• Unplug all electrical devices when they are not in use. Look in your house for electrical ghost leaks.
• You're also loosing electricity when using old appliances. Just like a leak in your water pipe, an old seal in your fridge will let the cold air escape and this will make your cooling system work twice as much to maintain the inside of the fridge fresh.

Computer and especially desktop consume a lot of energy so it’s good to turn them off at night.
But you should also turn the UPS off at the same time. UPS is the surge protector with battery backup device that in Nosara we almost all have connected between the computer and wall plug. This UPS keeps on charging the batteries even with the computer turned off.

Did you know that a cellular phone charger uses more electricity when nothing is connected to it than when it's charging the device?

Around the World

Liquid Desiccant Waterfall

The LEAF-House team from the University of Maryland is exploring a technology called a Liquid Desiccant System. The idea is to create a waterfall inside the house that instead of water use a material called a desiccant (in this case a type of salt called calcium chloride) to absorb water directly from the air without all the complicated machinery and energy requirements of conventional AC.  As the desiccant absorbs water, it becomes diluted and its ability to dry the air declines. The desiccant is regenerated by heating up the material in the Solar Hot Water collectors and letting the water evaporate to the outside air and that water can be used for the plants around the house. lar water heater is a very elegant and cost effective way of producing hot water for the house.
The device has a well insulated storage tanks which allows you to have hot water even in early in the morning after an entire night of darkness. And in case you didn’t have enough sun exposition during the day or you used more water than the tanks could store, the device has a temperature check that will trigger a built-in regular electric resistance to instantly heat the water so you always have hot water in the house.
Many individual homes and hotels in Nosara have these solar water heaters installed and they work very well.

Photo Voltaic panels are the application of solar cells in the conversion of solar energy directly into electricity. This system is still pretty new to Costa Rica and to make them more attractive to regular home owners, the government has take some decisions showing they are promoting it. The two key points that needs to be changed are first to oblige the power company to buy back the electricity produced by the Photovoltaic panels and second is for the government to lower or lift completely the import taxes on all solar components.

LED Lights

LED are little diodes that work by the effect of electroluminescence. LED arranged together as lights present many advantages over traditional light sources including lower energy consumption.
Even though they are relatively expensive, they consume 100 times less than regular lamps and they have more than 30 times the lifespan of the incandescent light bulbs. They also have improved robustness, smaller size and faster switching.