Tony Brewer

One of the things I’ve always been interested in is how to save money, and the planet. Conservation has always piqued my interest – from natural resources to wildlife. I admit it, I’m a tree hugger! So it is no surprise that I am always looking for ways to cut down on the cost of home energy.

Ever since I heard about compact fluorescent bulbs and how they conserve electricity I’ve been replacing the incandescent bulbs with the compact fluorescent bulbs. I was sure that the Energy saving would offset the initial expense of buying the bulbs themselves. After all, they are expensive to purchase! And they are supposed to last longer than incandescent bulbs (although I find myself having to replace the bathroom vanity bulbs more frequently, which annoys me to no end!)

And when we moved into this house, we replaced all of the home appliances. Although I’d like to say that energy efficiency was the motive there, it was simply a case of the fact that the appliances were all broken and we needed new ones! But we made sure to buy Energy star appliances. After all, they save money in the long run!

So I was more than willing to sign up for an account with a new website I’d heard about – the microsoft-hohm.com site. I was expecting to find more ways to save energy and money. It took a few minutes to answer all of the questions, to create my profile. I found it annoying that it kept saying that my profile was incomplete, yet it did not give me any way to complete it! However, based on the information provided, I felt that the site gave some good tips on saving energy, and even though I’ve already done all of the tips, I suspect that most people have not gone to the extremes that we have gone to. 

I did not see anywhere that they were trying to get me to pay any money for anything, they did not seem to be trying to sell me anything.  I suspect that signing up for an account with them will probably put me on some junk mail lists, either by email or snail mail.  That’s probably their angle, to make money off of selling our information.  If I find myself the target of a lot of that kind of activity, I’ll have to try to figure out a way to get that stopped.