Energy efficiency starts in the home, but the policies and practices of your local municipality play a big role as well. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) recently compiled an efficiency ranking for 51 of the largest cities in the United States, looking at local government operations, community-wide initiatives, buildings, energy and water utilities, and transportation. The scorecard is mostly concerned with policy actions at the government operational level, but the criteria have an effect on consumers as well, through areas like building codes and efficiency incentives. Read on to find out where your city ranked.

Boston Takes the Crown

You don't have to be a master electrician to understand that saving energy means saving money. It also means less impact on the environment through fossil fuel-induced climate change. Therefore, top cities are being both fiscally sound and good members of the world community.

Boston is the top city for efficiency, followed by New York City and Washington, D.C. Washington was also one of the three most improved from a 2013 report, along with Los Angeles and Chicago. Bringing up the rear of the 51 cities ranked are Raleigh, Birmingham, and Oklahoma City.

“Our findings show that cities continue to be laboratories of innovation when it comes to energy efficiency, with many pushing the envelope for more energy savings in the last few years,” ACEEE research analyst David Ribeiro said in a press release. “Cities are also improving their approaches when it comes to tracking and communicating their efforts to save energy.”

Find Out Where You Rank

If you live in one of the ranked cities, you can check out how your community performed. If your municipality didn't make the cut, the organization encourages interested participants to fill out a self-scoring tool to help build up their data.

For each city that does show up in the rankings, you can drill into the information and see where they did well and where they came up short. For example, Philadelphia, slotted in 14th place, got credit for its government sustainability plan, its tracking of energy use for large buildings and its comprehensive public transit system. It scored lower in the community initiatives area, among other places.

What it Means for You

The building and community initiative sections are particularly relevant to homeowners. Building codes, of course, dictate what you can and can't do when constructing or adding on to a house. More stringent codes can mean more red tape, but they can also make buildings more efficient overall, which can save consumers money in the long run. Community initiatives, meanwhile, refer to programs that encourage, track or incentivize efficiency measures, which can take the form of elements like rain barrels and tree-planting programs.

You don't have to lobby your city government if you want to make an impact on energy efficiency in your own life. There are plenty of initiatives you can take to cut back on electricity use around the home and become an energy-saving master. Electricians will marvel at how low your bills are if you take just simple steps like using Energy Star-compliant appliances and unplugging your devices when they aren't in use. For even more ideas, have a master electrician conduct an energy audit on your home today. The expert electricians at you local Mister Sparky® are always here to help!

We are very proud of our LED Retrofit Kits – DesignLights Consortium came out with a new standard, Version 4, that allowed the most efficient LED Retrofit Kits a higher efficiency category. So be careful, there is no need to purchase DLC Standard LED Retrofit Kits when there are DLC Premium Qualified LED Retrofit Kits available. And this is important, because the more efficient the product is, the more you save. And the savings don’t end there. The whole reason for the more efficient standard was to offer larger utility rebates at time of purchase.

So you save 2 ways: potentially at time of purchase and over the life of the product. Let’s do the math, because the numbers don’t lie.

Maciej Winiarcyzk using more than two thousand digital photographs just over a month ago.

I have never had the privilege of seeing the northern lights in real life, but my sister lives in northern Canada and has told me about them. (She’s a pretty credible source: She even named her daughter Aurora.) After asking her, “What ARE the northern lights,” several times, I now understand the aurora borealis to be a visual effect of the collision of solar wind and magnetospheric charged particles with the thermosphere. Can you see why I had to ask what the northern lights were more than once? The northern lights are most spectacular near the North Pole and during spring and autumn equinoxes. (And, by the way, no. The northern lights are not Santa’s off-season hobby.) But the northern lights, if there are some geomagnetic storms a-brewin’, can be seen closer to home, too, visible occasionally as far south as Chicago or New York.

Anyway, this guy Winiarcyzk is an astronomy enthusiast who lives in Caithness, which is at the tippy top of Scotland. There’s isn’t much light pollution way up there, so it’s a good place for such a sky-minded person to live and enjoy his hobby. Wonderfully, with this time lapse video of the northern lights, we get to enjoy his hobby, too.

Take a look. Have you ever seen anything more lovely occurring in nature? You know, with all this solar wind, magnetospheric particles, thermospheres, and geomagnetic storms, it sure seems like there is a lot more going on in nature than we can readily sense.

There are a wide array of hidden problems that homeowners may discover in their first few weeks occupying a property. This is especially true in older houses, where the new buyer is hardly the first occupant. Many such older homes in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., are generally solid structures but have minor electrical or plumbing issues that aren't apparent when visiting an open house.

One of the more costly problems that you'll want to watch out for is "hot wiring" throughout the property. This is when, somewhere in your house, the electricity is causing a dangerous amount of heat. Whenever there is too much heat coming from one particular spot in the home, there is the potential for fire, which could end up costing you significantly in the long run - or worse, fatally harm members of the household.

The wall switch is one area where you should be especially worried about poor wiring. These switches are designed so that heat won't build up if correctly installed, so any rise in temperature is a sure sign something is amiss. It is relatively common for a dimming switch to build up heat over an extended period - they are, after all, powering at least 600 watts' worth of light bulbs. However, heat at a receptacle is another matter; a connection there needs immediate improvement to prevent a fire.