SanJoseGreenHome.com

Use Less Energy and Earn 70% OFF Coupons

Once in a while there comes a program that sucks creative juices out of its designers dry and delivers something we can all be proud of.  Green Energy Match (GEM) is one of those programs.  It is brought to you by the City of San Jose and is a cutting-edge energy-efficiency program to assist home owners and renters in San Jose reduce their energy consumption and save money at the same time. It provides a free online software that helps residents use energy more efficiently and presents customized energy-saving recommendations.

This online platform is San Jose’s approach to competing with nine more cities to be named the Coolest City in California. When a resident signs up for GEM this also enrolls them in the Cool California Challenge, a UC Berkeley sponsored contest between ten cities to see which one can sign up the most people and save the most energy. Other cities competing in the contest include Santa Cruz, Davis, and Sacramento. You can help San Jose win — sign up now and spread the word!

But the best part is as participants save, they earn 70% off coupons for San Jose stores and restaurants. This truly (more…)

Which part of the world does your bite come from?

It seems not just that many years ago, imported food was considered a status symbol, no matter what condition it was in when it finally arrived at the table.  This was just as true in Eastern Europe, where I grew up.  My mother used to be a “produce director” at one of the biggest grocery stores in town.  Once in the blue moon she would bring home what everyone called “deficit” goods.  Those included exotic nuts from India, baby fruit purées, and of course the mighty banana!  Gosh you should have seen the looks in our eyes.  My sister and I were more excited to see a banana than most people buying a brand new hybrid today. 

Those days are long gone and now Europeans as well as Americans live in economies where food is so plentiful that we are faced with hundreds of choices of fruit and veggies from every corner of the globe.  Things change but today we’re facing a very different dilemma.  There is a growing awareness that the food that ends up on our dinner plates has a much higher price tag than what we actually pay for it with our hard earn dollars.  What does this mean? 

In many cases, Western society routinely purchases food that was grown more than 1000 miles away and transported to the local grocery store.  While food prices in the store are relatively inexpensive, the environmental cost of transporting our food is often very high.  You see, all these trucks, trains, and boats, all of which consume fossil fuels, are the primary methods for transporting large quantities of food around the world.  Inevitably, transportation of these goods leave a trail of pollution and produce (more…)

Love and relationships are our biggest assets

Before you bought your home or rented an apartment, did you consider how green is your community?  Chances are you haven’t.  Most people don’t.  Not only majority of folks have no clue as to what a “sustainable” community really is but for years, there has not been much need for it.  Today, however, we’re much more aware of our carbon paw prints, wasteful lifestyles and the ever growing need to just simply connect with people around us.  Fact is, sustainability of the community is becoming a huge factor when choosing a place to plant our roots for the future. 

So what is a sustainable community?  After looking at many definitions, perhaps the UK Sustainable Communities Plan defines it best: “Sustainable communities are places where people want to live and work, now and in the future. They meet the diverse needs of existing and future residents, are sensitive to their environment, and contribute to a high quality of life. They are safe and inclusive, well planned, and offer equality of opportunity and good services for all.”  Ahhh… the English, they do get some things right, don’t they?  

So ideally, a true gage of sustainability is where the environment prospers along with the people who are living in it.  In order words, the housing developments must be incorporated in the natural environment already present on the ground and not the other way around which was much too common years ago.  

Such an idealistic concept as community living in harmony with the environment and local ecosystems may sound far fetched but its not.  In fact, one such example in Bay Area is (more…)

Did you know that millions and millions of dollars are spent each week on advertising campaigns to give us the perception that bottled water comes from some pristine mountain spring or magical underground aquifer, assuring purity and quality?  So I decided to put a couple of our local delivery services to the test and… it seems like the two services available in San Jose area like Alhambra and Arrowhead Water are not all what they are cracked up to be.

This time I was only concerned with the PH levels of the water and not the impurities or the taste.  There is a growing awareness that our bodies are way too acidic because of our life style, pollutants in the environment and our diets.  Human body’s normal PH levels are about 7.4 and we have a “perfect” PH balance when we’re born.  But after we’re able to visit the potty room on our own and independently reach into the cookie cupboard we start exploring foods that are much less friendly than our moms would put in our mouths when we were babies.  We then start eating what “tastes good” instead of what really is “good” for us.  Then come the pizzas, fried foods, coca colas, burgers, steaks, beer, and of course… fried calamari.  Combine all this with an acid pumping stress day at work and we are now bathing our cells in acid bath.  The body’s natural defence system kicks in and it does everything it possibly can to compensate for the acid by introducing alkalinity back into the blood stream and try to pump the acid out with liquids – water.  But where does the body store the alkaline substances to compensate for this acid influx of acid?  Well, most proponents of this theory say that it comes from our cell tissue and our bones.  Our body borrows it from our flesh and bones.  And what happens when it can no longer do that? (more…)