Sure, it’s great to upgrade your heating and cooling systems at home to be kind to the environment and reduce your utility bills. But did you know those investments can actually improve the resale value of your home, too? According to the trade magazine Remodeling, every $1 in annual energy savings your improvements provide equals up to $20 in home value at the time of sale. For a typical-sized home of around 2,000 square feet, that can be more than $30,000 in added value. The lower the costs to operate a home, the more valuable the home becomes to potential buyers.

ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

While it’s greenest to stay hydrated with a reusable bottle, sometimes you either forget or you just don’t have a refill option handy. Instead of choosing a plastic bottled water, look for a greener alternative: boxed water. The same paperboard boxes used for milk and juice are now being used to hold water. These boxes are greener because they are 100 percent recyclable, plastic-free and are shipped flat to the facilities that fill them with filtered water, which means less fuel is used to ship more boxes. And many brands that sell boxed water also plant trees to replace the ones used to make the paperboard boxes.

ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

One-pot cooking is easy, money-saving and an eco-friendly way to prepare a home-cooked meal. If you have a rice cooker at home, you can do more than just cook rice in it. Many rice cookers have different settings for slow and even cooking, which is perfect for stews, oatmeal, soup and lots of other grains in addition to rice. Using a countertop kitchen appliance like a rice cooker, crockpot or pressure cooker can actually save about 70 percent in energy usage compared to conventional ways of cooking!

ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION