Saving money isn’t always fun. Being environmentally responsible can sometimes feel more like a chore than a privilege. Try walking around with a handful of messy food you are trying to eat while juggling a purse, shopping bags, and a plastic bottle of water. When it is time to throw some of that stuff away, you look around and see only one trash can that happens to be the wrong kind. Where is the one for plastic, glass, and paper? How long should you have to walk around with a sticky mess before giving up? Not fun.

At times, your home can feel the same way. Preaching about energy savings is easier than practicing it. Yelling at the kids for leaving the lights on when they leave the room is hardly fair when you continually fail to fix the doors and windows that leak the outside into your house, and your energy-guzzling climate control efforts to the outside. That is a lot more expensive than the lights. Again, not fun. Also, not cheap. Before you throw in the towel and decide that it will always be a losing battle, here are a few ideas that will help save a little money that are also fun and easy to do:

Make Your Own Entertainment

No matter how many gadgets you have and no matter how much energy they consume, one thing remains consistent: There are only 24hrs in a day. That is good news because it means that if you fill that time with things that don’t consume a lot of energy, you will save on your energy bill almost by accident. One of the ways to produce those savings is to create your own entertainment rather than turning on the entire home theater complex or the massive video game Power Station Super Mega XL Max. 

Forget about becoming a fake guitar hero. Grab one of your acoustic guitar picks, brush off your old skills, and be a real guitar hero to the ones you love. Give them the gift of music that didn’t come from a recording studio. You don’t need $1,000 headphones and a lossless format to appreciate the squeak of the steel strings. Everyone in the room will be able to hear every nuance just fine. What’s more, it doesn’t go against your energy budget when you play an acoustic instrument.

Let Technology Lend a Hand

You are doing it the hard way if you are still trying to do it all by yourself. The simple fact is that a computerized thermostat can do a much better job at regulating the temperature in your home than you can. Those devices have more than accomplished the goal of helping people save money and enabling people to waste a lot less energy in the process. 

There are a lot of energy-saving changes you can implement in your household on the cheap. Just by using low-flow faucets and LED light bulbs, you can save a lot of energy without making any changes to your habits whatsoever. It is very low-tech. There is nothing new to learn. If you make those changes when no one is home, they likely wouldn’t notice anything was different. The biggest difference you will see is in your energy bill. Oh, and you can easily add motion sensors that can automatically turn off the lights when people leave a room. Problem solved.

Get out of the House

We all learned a valuable lesson last year: When everyone is at home, the power bill goes up. There are many tips for saving money over the summer. But the most effective tip is to get out of the house. You don’t have to cool a house as much if no one is there during the day. Go borrow someone else’s air conditioning. If you are a remote worker, try working in a coffee shop. If you are just watching TV and killing time, go to the mall and watch the same show on your smartphone. The less you are home, the lower your energy bill will be.

The fact that you care about your energy impact is a plus. You can move past caring into action by making your own entertainment, letting technology lend you a hand, and getting out of the house as much as possible.