Opinions, information and references that you may find useful.

        Enjoy   :-)

1. •Plant a tree? Yes, several please.  You can cut your AC bills by planting deciduous shade trees on the east, south and west sides of your house.  Plant evergreens on the north and northwest to break the wind in the winter.  You will conserve energy, get some lovely cool shade and suck up some of that controversial carbon dioxide.  IMHO: Go ahead and plant them close, maybe even fifteen feet.  Yes, you will have to do some pruning and clean the gutters more often, but that is a small price to pay.  My favorite here in N.VA. is the sycamore, but those dreaded instant-gratification silver maples aren’t really so bad.
   

1. •Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) A leaky house is bad, but an airtight one is bad too.  Air leakage wastes heating and cooling, but an airtight house will probably have poor air quality.  The answer is to seal it up tight and put a hole in it.  Well, a controlled hole...  The problem with natural ventilation is that you get the most fresh air when it is really cold and windy.  You get very little when the weather is mild.  If you have a natural draft furnace or water heater, you may also have conditions that suck the exhaust back into the house. IMHO: Get rid of those old natural draft furnaces and water heaters, seal the air leaks and install an energy recovery ventilator (ERV).  And yes, ERVs aren’t cheap, but there are other options too. 
   

1. •CFL, LED, Halogen, Incandescent...can you see the light? The proof is in the light delivered to its destination.  Look at the “Lumens” rating on the bulb before you buy it, and compare it to the listing on a good old incandescent bulb.  Pay no attention to the “replaces up to XX watt bulb...” stuff, since that is often very wrong.  If the bulb has no “Lumens” rating on it, put it back and look for a different brand.  Not all bulbs are good for all uses.  CFLs (Compact Florescent Lamp) are good for flooding light over a wide area.  They aren’t very good spot lights and, since they take a minute to warm up, may not be good in that hall closet where you turn the light on and right back off as soon as you get your coat out.  LEDs are still expensive and there are some bad ones out there that perform poorly and don’t last.  IMHO: Use the CFLs where they fit, keep that halogen spotlight on the artwork, leave that old bulb alone in the hall closet for now and keep watching for the LEDs to take the lead (eventually)...
   

1. •CFLs, tuna and Mercury? Yes, there is some, but do the math.  Modern compact florescent bulbs that replace a 60W incandescent contain as little as 1.4 to 2.5 mg of mercury.  US standards for fish (1ppm) would allow 1.4 mg to be in just ten 5 oz. cans of tuna fish, which you would eat.  Coal fired power plants will release 1.2 mg to fuel a CFL over its life, but 5.8 mg to fuel incandescent lighting for the same duration, along with all of the other crud that goes up the smoke stack and leaches out of the ash pile.  If you break a CFL you may inhale some tiny portion of the mercury, but probably nowhere near as much as you eat in a can of tuna.  IMHO: use & recycle the CFLs; stop feeding mercury to the tuna...
   

1. •Electrostatic Air Filters?  Powered electrostatic air filters make ozone, some of them a lot.  Ozone in your lungs is BAD. IMHO:  Pull the plug, NOW!
   

1. •High performance furnace filters?   Well, not really.  Those top dollar 1” thick air filters may really cramp air flow, particularly (pun?) when they get dirty.  Reduced air flow means reduced system efficiency, possibly even mold in the summer.  In this case, you don’t get what you pay for.  The cheaper fiber mesh ones do what they need to do and don’t choke the airflow.  IMHO:  If you must have extra air filtration, get some of those (noisy...) standalone air filters, a special “whole house” system or maybe a 4” thick pleated filter unit for your central air handler IF it is a new high efficiency variable speed system that you can run at low speed all of the time.

P.S.  This page is always Under Construction.