Improving Your Mood With Lighting

There is a great posting on hometips.com titled Cheer Up Your Home with Light. It provides insight into how light has a significant effect on our mood and our overall health.The author also provides helpful tips on how to improve your mood and your home with a lighting make over. Improving your lighting scheme for mood enhancement should not be limited to the interior of your home. Many of us enjoy our outdoor patios, dining areas and out door living rooms, it’s important to make sure these areas are included in the make over as well. As proven by a number of studies, notably in regions with extremely abbreviated daylight hours, light can make a big difference in how we feel. So think about adding lamps and light fixtures to brighten dark areas and gloomy spirits. And, when natural light is available, enhance your home with energy lighting that enhances your mood and fits your sense of style.I’ve found some great resources at Home Tip.

Home Made Solar Panels

This was an interesting article that I found in the Blog section of Bob Villa’s home improvement site On The Level. The tile of the article is Sun, Sun, Sun Here It Comes, it’s a great Do It Yourself home project that utilizes solar energy and it’s easy on the pocket book. I’ll just quote from the article.

“Built using a combination of materials found in a junkyard and materials on-hand, the solar heater panel was the brain-child of a member of The Sietch, an online community of environmentally-conscious folks who come up with cool and cheap new ways to cut energy costs and preserve our planet. The motivation for the project was simple enough—much of a home’s energy usage is from heating hot water, and since the sun is free…So they raided a junkyard for parts and put together a solar thermal panel that was capable of heating water up to 170º F—hot enough to scald. Their eventual goal is to modify the unit to get the water up to boiling. I can’t wait to read how they do it. Kudos to these folks for their innovative and resourceful ways. Check out the website to see the step-by-step construction of the solar thermal panel, and then go out and do it yourself! If we all did a little bit, we’d save a lot.”

If you would like the complete story on how to make your own solar panels go to The Sietch where you can get details and photos on the entire project.

Steel vs. Vinyl Siding For Your Home?

For those of us who want a maintenance free home there are a few options, steel and vinyl siding. These two options come from a number of reputable retailers and manufacturers but you’ll find that the steel option is the better way to go. Both will afford you the luxury of not having to paint you home every 5-10 years but the advantage of steel is that it can be completely seamless. ABC Seamless is a company that specializes in exterior home conversions with steel siding. Their siding is different from the others, because it’s SEAMLESS. Other sidings must be constantly overlapped every 12 feet to reach the length of your home, creating a pattern of unsightly splices. When evaluating a home for this type of make over you’ll need to take into consideration that the home will have 130 splices (cuts of material) to complete the job. That’s a lot of overlapping pieces that are easily visible for the street decreasing your homes curb appeal. ABC Seamless’ patented steel siding and manufacturing technique eliminates the UGLY splices. The most unique aspect of the process is that the manufacturing plant is portable! That’s right portable! Every piece of steel that goes onto a house is measured, formed and cut on site.

Vinyl siding will give you the same look but with splices, give good durability and requires little to no maintenance. But Vinyl won’t do well in a fire.

Now for your science lesson, vinyl melts at a temperature of roughly 300 degrees Fahrenheit, as opposed to steel, which is 2500 degrees Fahrenheit. With this information you would choose steel, naturally. We are used to seeing wood siding houses with the splices and cracks, if you could have a home without these cosmetic defects and obtain a more energy efficient home, wouldn’t that be the way to go? With ABC Seamless Steel Siding, the siding is cut at the home site; there are no ugly gaps for moisture and rot to congregate. Your home will stay warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer, allowing you to save money on your energy bills and do your part in helping the environment.