We finally found our dream house! It has 100 square meters living area plus 50 square meter basement. We bought it in a “Belagsfertig” state. That means, the inside finishing still needs to be done. Before we moved in two weeks ago, only the basics (heating, electrical wiring, floors, painting, doors, toilets, and water pipes) were done.

we're done with the kitchen

I am glad that this week, we can count the kitchen and the bathroom as done as well. We have a lot of plans for the house and we are planning everything carefully. Sure, we want a lot of fancy things for the house but the most important consideration we have is; the house’s energy consumption should be as low as possible.

Before buying a house, we read as much as we can about home energy and how we can save money. One very helpful site is Microsoft-HOHM.com. This website offers a lot of information about home energy consumption. If you register and put in a few information about your house, like when was it built, what type of heating system does it have, and a few other details, this site can calculate your energy usage and calculate how much you can save. This website also gives you very good recommendations on how you can reduce your energy usage. We really got a lot of helpful information from this site and we are trying to follow their recommendations as we put our house together. Registration is completely free so you can check their free services anytime.

We believe in living green and saving energy is one way to show that. When we decided to buy a house, we made sure that the one we are getting is a “low energy house”. That means, the windows and the walls are built so that we don’t need to use excessive heating during the cold season. It is costing us a lot of money now but we believe that in the long run, we will save more than what we spent.

We also see to it that the home appliances we are buying are energy saving appliances. The washing machine and the dishwasher for example, have the “eco” feature. You just have to load them, put in some details, and they will calculate the weight of the load, the washing soap, the water, and the running time. This is much better than the traditional electrical appliances which only run in uniform programs—it doesn’t matter if you are washing 7 kilos load or or just 2 kilos load because they will always use the same amount of water and the same amount of energy.

For lighting, we use LED lights and bulbs that last longer and use lesser electrical energy.

There are still so many ways we can save energy and we try to follow these strictly because energy saved is money saved.

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