apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Winter will soon be upon us and temperatures are starting to plunge for most of us. Unless you're living in California or Florida, you'll soon be getting ready to see some snow, if you haven't already. With everyone trying to save money, there are a couple of cheap ways to keep your place warm...

In a perfect world, we would slowly wean ourselves off fossil fuels and embrace green technology. The thing is that it's hard to let go of them when we can't find green alternatives that provide as much power. Dye-sensitized solar cells promise to bring solar cells to everyone cheaply...

One of the most annoying tasks in gardening is raking the leaves. We can't count the number of hours that we've spent raking up leaves. What's even more annoying is that when there are more leaves that fall to the ground, you have to do it all over again. Enter the PowerRake...

There are a bunch of ways of getting the skinny on what your energy consumption is. The trouble is that most of the time, these figures are displayed in numbers, or if you're lucky graphs. We think that if this information were displayed in a more visual fashion, it would actually help you keep your energy usage down...

Running out of juice is always a problem if you move around a lot. Sure, you can take your charger with you, but what if you can't plug in? Well, there are always other ways of powering up your gadgets. Admittedly, some of the solar panels and power packs are somewhat inefficient, but they would still help you out in a bind. But what if there was a better way?

Anyone with a pool knows the drill. Right after a dip in the pool, you need to take a quick shower. While there are other systems out there, this is the first that we've seen that will heat the water with solar energy so that you won't have to rush your shower. Also, this is something handy to have on camping trips...

In order to save some money and to just save the environment, what if you could just extract the water that you need to drink from the air? This isn't a new idea. For anyone who's had a moist smelling basement, dehumidifiers have been necessary to keep things from getting moldy. The water generated this way isn't safe to drink, but a San Louis Obispo company has come up with an innovative solution...

If you have a lot of humidity in your place, you know that there can be lots of water extracted from thin air thanks to dehumidifiers. This water extracting machine takes things a bit further. We all know that water like this needs to be purified in some fashion before we can drink it. That's why we think that this extractor is really a good idea. It creates needed water from a source that wasn't obvious before...

When you are on the go, you don't always need the best pair of speakers to share music with your friends. Most of the cheap speakers out there are made out of plastic, and plastic isn't the best green material. That's why we think that these speakers, that are made out of recycled cardboard and therefore ultimately customizable, are perfect for your treks. You can play music without worrying too much about them since they actually fold flat...

If you ever wanted to have a green USB flash drive, you'll want to have this one. It's a USB flash drive that's actually made out of recycled cardboard. Now, when technology evolves, you can just recycle the whole thing quite easily. We thought that this was a pretty neat idea, kind of like the cardboard computer and other cardboard devices that are popping up all over the place...

We don't know about you, but we've never really thought much about Styrofoam. Sure, it's perfect for packaging fragile stuff and we all know that it's something that we need to recycle. Sure, kids love to destroy it but we've never thought about using the stuff for lighting. That's what Eric Lawrence decided to do and he didn't just use any Styrofoam. He used Styrofoam that came from Apple...

If you could save between 60 and 80% of the electricity you normally use through your computer, would you be interested? How about if you could download and IM while your computer was in sleep mode? This is what Somniloquy promises. A way to harness the sleeping mode of our computers, since most of us don't really use or need all of that processing power...

So, you've got your new laptop and you want to find the perfect storage solution. Something that will let you take your baby around town, without hampering your style. You've also decided not to buy a rigid case, since they get heavy pretty quickly. Why not try your hand at some more bags made out of sustainable materials? They are great looking and usually not too expensive.

posted originally from: Unplggd

I think that most of us take it as a given that we will use dishwashers to clean up our dishes. I've had a few, but I have to say that I rarely use dishwashers. Most of the time, immediately after using dishes, I just clean them up. It takes a few minutes, but it's pretty efficient. Naturally, this means that we've got dishes drying on our dish rack all of the time, but at least it gets the job done.