Webware

The winter months are on their way. Soon, we'll be continually running our heaters and leaving the lights on longer. During these months, energy bills soar.

But there are online resources that can ease the pain. They probably won't chop your bills in half, but they do offer suggestions that will help.

Energy Savers
The U.S. government's Energy Savers Web site provides some of the finest resources on energy efficiency of any tool in this roundup.

When you go to Energy Savers, you can learn all about energy conservation. The site has content on renewable energy, ways to reduce your energy consumption, and more. It also has information on how to perform home-energy audits to see what you could do to reduce your energy bill. All in all, Energy Savers is an extremely useful site if you plan to reduce your energy bill.

Energy Savers helps you find energy-efficient products.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Energy Star
Energy Star has quickly become a buzzword in the home-energy space, but its Web site is one of the most useful in this roundup.

When you get to Energy Star, you can do quite a bit. I used the site to find information on energy-efficient appliances. The content it provided was outstanding. Aside from that, Energy Star features tips on how to address some inefficient energy issues in your home. One of the site's best resources is its list of potential tax credits that you can get by acquiring Energy Star products. The page provides several links for you to find the products that help you qualify for the credit. I really liked Energy Star. If you're looking to find appliances that match your financial goals, this site is for you.

Energy Star lists all the tax credits you can qualify for.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Going "green" is quickly becoming an important part of our lives, and Web entrepreneurs have taken notice. A variety of green social networks have cropped up that help us live more sustainably. From reducing your carbon footprint to raising money for environmental causes, these social networks will back up your efforts.

Green social networks

BigCarrot BigCarrot is based on the premise of rewarding people for the good deeds they do. After signing up, you can start creating prizes for people to receive if they achieve a goal that helps the environment. So if you want to donate $20 to the first person to plant 20 trees in your area, you can do it. Users who prove that they have completed such tasks will be rewarded in more ways than one.

Unfortunately, BigCarrot is designed poorly. It's difficult to make your way around the site, and creating a new prize is far more difficult than it should be. But its community is relatively active. Finding friends is easy and winning prizes isn't as difficult as you might think. It's not the best social network in this roundup, but it's worth trying out.

Win some cash for completing green tasks on BigCarrot.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Carbonrally Carbonrally tries to get its users to reduce carbon emissions by working together to achieve that goal. After you sign up for the site, you can create your own challenge. To complete that challenge, you'll need to find team members to help you out. You can also sign up for challenges created by other users.

In either case, you'll communicate with your other team members, discuss what you've done to help achieve that goal, and comment on how to tweak the challenge to make it more meaningful. Luckily, the tasks generally aren't hard to complete--one of the more popular challenges is to alter your air-conditioning level by two degrees for a week.

Carbonrally lets you pick a challenge to help the environment.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Google's goat army.

(Credit: Official Google Blog)

The economy is still in shambles, we're all panicking about the bacon fever, and even those bright and shiny "green" initiatives might not be so green. Sad!

But did you know that Google is conserving energy by cutting its Mountain View, Calif., lawns with adorable goats?

Yes, it's true. The company has enlisted an innovative start-up called California Grazing to bring some of the Google greenery a more carbon-friendly, less polluting alternative to lawn mowers. It sounds like the use of goats is confined to peripheral fields where weeds and brush could cause wildfires, so it's not like Googlers run the risk of having goats wander into their office buildings. No word on whether they pay the goats in leftover free food from the company mess halls.

"A herder brings about 200 goats and they spend roughly a week with us at Google, eating the grass and fertilizing at the same time," a post on the official Google blog read. "The goats are herded with the help of Jen, a border collie. It costs us about the same as mowing, and goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers."

Happy Friday!

Assembling a Tweet-a-Watt kit: the weekend project to assuage carbon gluttons' guilt.

(Credit: Adafruit Industries)

Like many of you, I'm addicted to Twitter. It's not just that I like knowing the real-time minutia of my friends' lives (sorry friends, you're all boring), but I like the idea of what Twitter can become. It's evolving in a free-form way, and there's no telling what it will be in the future. But right now people are learning to utilize it in very interesting ways.

The Tweet-a-Watt is one such example. Using a modified version of a $20 off-the-shelf wattage meter, the Tweet-a-Watt kit, now available online for $90, tracks daily power usage for an outlet. It then reports that information back to your followers via your Twitter account, including the daily average and your daily goal.

The kit includes the wireless transmitters and receivers needed to report the data, plus cables and various components needed to get it all wired up. It's the product of an open-source hardware project that had the main goal of wirelessly tracking power usage for a household. The Twitter aspect is a fun byproduct of this idea.

For DIY'ers, there are instructions for making your own kit and links to download the software for your project.

If you can't decide where to move but want to live close to where you travel every day, Optimal Home Location ( via EcoGeek) suggests a spot. If you hope to shrink your carbon footprint, reducing your commute time can be a key factor.

First, Optimal Home Location found a spot smack in the center of my job and daily pit stops.

This Google Maps-based tool integrates with real estate site Zillow to display a given area's home prices, taxes, and the percentage of households with children. I plugged in six addresses for the places I visit most around San Francisco, including work, where friends live, and my favorite restaurants and grocery store. The site computed the location most central to those places, where I neither desire nor can afford to rent or buy a place.

Optimal Home Location then asked for details about the order in which I frequent specific locations. It also requested the commute of someone else in my household, which happens to be virtually identical to my own.

The site wound up telling me to live on the same street as my office. I took this as a perhaps depressing hint that my life centers around work, and promptly decided to take a class--mosaic making, hang gliding, welding, anything--in a far-flung neighborhood.

This service is fun to play with, but it's no more than a nice start for plotting a potential move. If you're familiar with a city, chances are you already have a sense of where you'd like to hang your hat versus what's realistic for your budget or other lifestyle limitations. As Optimal Home Location explains, its geometric calculations "do not take into account the feasibility of the area for living." Maybe something more sophisticated in the future could blend more data with community suggestions.

This Web site ultimately told me to live at work.

Still, you can also describe alternative driving commutes among various spots on a map for estimates of the traveling time and gas expenses you'd face over a year. One big flaw, if you're trying to "green" your life, is the lack of information about bus and subway stops, walkability, and bike lanes. At least you can add pinpoints to the map to mark personal points of interest.

This service would be most helpful paired with other online maps and ratings tools. For example, you could type an address from Optimal Home Location's suggestions into WalkScore (more here), which rates an area's friendliness for trekking around on two feet. Google Transit (more here) would also be helpful for public transit routes.

Also see our Moving 2.0 roundup of services including maps of housing prices, fair rent calculators, and more tools to find data about a neighborhood's demographics and lousy neighbors.

Web sites that promise to pay for your old gadgets look bright around the holidays, when every extra dollar can count toward new gifts or even utility bills. But are the services worthwhile? How much can you earn?

We examined nine services that pay for your unwanted digital wares. These are among the newest options to help keep electronics waste out of landfills, while uncluttering your closets.

Click on this image to see what seven services quoted to pay for 11 used electronics.

(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CBS Interactive)

We looked up what each service said it would pay for working iPods, PDAs, laptops, gaming consoles, and more, with cables but lacking their original boxes. For dead devices, some offer a pittance, or will connect you with willing recyclers and charity recipients. Our chart (at right) shows what each site claims it pays for specific equipment. Keep reading for highlights of the trade-in services.

We can't yet vouch for the start-to-finish experience of mailing in products to these companies. Those that find your equipment in worse shape than you estimated will downgrade the trade-in value.

If you only need to offload an old phone, look out for our upcoming comparison of sites that specialize in refurbishing and recycling handsets, including Cell for Cash, Simply Sellular, and ReCellular.

Homeowners who dream of their electric meter spinning backward may seek solar panels to slash bills and carbon emissions. But where to start?

Before you call a contractor, these sites can assist with the early steps, like summing up what you could spend or save in your neighborhood.

The pioneering San Francisco Solar Map offers personalized evaluations.

San Francisco Solar Map

The San Francisco Solar Map helps locals lay their solar plans. A Google map pegs projects already up and running. Type in your address for estimates of installation fees and long-term utility bill savings and to find installers listed by the California Energy Commission.

Fog City's municipal rebates, added to state and federal incentives, probably make it the least expensive place for homeowners and businesses to add photovoltaics. Residents taking advantage of all discounts might drop the hardware and construction costs from, say, $25,000 to $7,000. The Web site supports Mayor Gavin Newsom's goal of 10,000 solar rooftops by 2012. It's the work of the San Francisco Department of the Environment and CH2M Hill, a consulting firm.

Solar Boston's map displays the solar potential for an address or even a city block.

Solar Boston

Mayor Thomas Menino's Solar Boston project aims to ramp up installations from half a megawatt to 25 megawatts by 2015. Its Flash-based map tracks solar, wind, biomass, and hydropower sources around town. You can enter an address, select a building, or even highlight an area on the map, to view the potential in dollars and kilowatts for topping roofs with photovoltaics.

Both San Francisco and Boston belong to the Department of Energy's Solar America Cities initiative to fast-track the spread of solar power. The two cities' maps are early, model tools. I'd also like to see peer comments and Yelp-like ratings of services and products. And I'd expect such services to help consumers share tips and report about the longest-lasting equipment as the solar sector matures. For instance, I found more than three dozen installers within 30 miles of my San Francisco apartment, but I'd have to do research elsewhere to decide whom to trust.

How do solar panels affect a home's resale value? Somebody should integrate solar maps with real estate listings, in the style of Trulia or Zillow.

Cooler Planet's maps include regional incentives around the country to estimate solar costs and savings.

Cooler Planet

Cooler Planet's solar maps cover territory from coast to coast. Google Maps mashups from the Seattle environmental marketing firm chart solar rebates, existing installations, costs and savings, and installers around the country. We learned that photovoltaic panels atop a three-flat in Chicago, where only federal incentives are available, could halve the $300 monthly electric bill and pay for themselves after 28 years.

Cooler Planet also rates solar incentives by state, painting Louisiana and Oregon as surprisingly bright. Another map tracks the growth of solar in California since 1999.

Choose your building, and Sungevity will create an estimate of its solar potential.

Sungevity

Sungevity asks you to pick your San Francisco Bay-area building on a map and describe the roofing material in exchange for an e-mail quote of solar costs. Technology from Microsoft Virtual Earth enables the company to take into account the angle of a roof, which affects the light available to solar panels throughout the day. That could lead to fewer measurements in person, saving time and money.

RoofRay relies on your rooftop drawing to figure a slanted roof into its cost estimates.

RoofRay

RoofRay also looks at the slant of a roof, although with less precision than Sungevity. Locate your building on a Google Map, draw an outline of the roof, and estimate the pitch. RoofRay asks for your average monthly electric bill, then spells out a detailed financial analysis. The site requires registration and asks for snail mail and e-mail addresses with a phone number. To put an interactive RoofRay widget on a blog, code is available for a quick cut-and-paste.

This rapidly-growing grassroots effort aims to get more than One Block off the Grid.

1BOG

San Franciscans Sylvia Ventura and Dan Barahona launched One Block Off the Grid in June to help bring cheaper solar power to the people. The effort organizes homeowners to bargain together with businesses to drive down the costs of installation. Several dozen people who joined the first campaign enjoyed savings of up to 40 percent, according to 1BOG.

Last week, the couple sold their nonprofit to Virgance, a social media and activism start-up. The 1,153-member solar effort has spread to 20 cities. It's even taking a stab at solar agreements between tenants and landlords. Neighborhood Solar is a similar grassroots purchasing program in Denver, where 1BOG is establishing a toehold.

Wattbot's recommendations of cleaner energy technologies are set to launch in January.

Wattbot

Wattbot, which remains in preview testing, promises custom evaluations in January to help households save money and carbon emissions. Share your address, and it will detail potential energy-efficiency and renewable technologies for your address. More than a solar-referral tool, it will also evaluate the financial impact of modest tweaks, like swapping old lightbulbs with compact fluorescents. You'll be able to contact service providers, take notes on projects, and connect with fellow users.

For now, there's just a simple U.S. heat map of renewable energy adoption. Wattbot is also building a service for clean-tech companies to track sales leads and get market research. The planned features, if realized, could make this site a unique hub in the clean-energy, green-building marketplace.

This post was updated to add a more detailed image of a quote from Sungevity.

People use Twitter to warn of natural dangers including earthquakes and hurricanes. Other environmentally related uses for the micro-blogging tool include measuring energy use at home and rigging up plants to "tell" Twitter when they're thirsty.

For a green-news junkie overwhelmed by dozens or even hundreds of RSS feeds, Twitter can be an entertaining and mobile filter. Writers at blogs and traditional publications increasingly use it to broadcast 140-character alerts of stories and observations, which can provide an early and more casual take on their blog posts and formal articles.

Plus, you can interact with the authors via replies and direct messages that can be more immediate than an e-mail or comment on a full-length story.

Here are some of the "green" feeds we keep up with on Twitter. Some simply provide instant links to freshly published stories, while others mix in commentary and personality. Check out who they're following to find even more feeds.

• To start, find CNET's Green Tech posts here.
• Think of the never-dull Grist as The Onion for green news, only with more truth than truthiness.
• Preston Koerner of Jetson Green focuses on green building, and compiled this exhaustive list of green Twitter feeds.
• The EcoGeek team tracks green tech.
• Green Options is a network of a variety of green-themed blogs.
• GreenBiz.com is a hub for green business news.

• Inhabitat's bloggers share a fine eye for ecologically appropriate design.
• Sustainablog from Jeff McIntire-Strasburg is one of the longest-running green blogs.
• The Greenwash Brigade from American Public Media's Public Insight Network investigates sketchy-sounding green corporate claims.
• Green Wombat is the work of Fortune writer Todd Woody.
• DotEarth comes from Andy Revkin of The New York Times.
• TheOilDrum covers energy and "peak oil" issues.
• Global Warming and ScienceNews mention related stories around the Web every week or so.
• Ecorazzi: Think Us Weekly meets An Inconvenient Truth, launched by Michael Destries.
• Worldchanging's writers keep up with cutting-edge trends in sustainability.


Green lifestyle pointers and DIY tips come in more than a few flavors:

• Siel, aka GreenLAGirl, writes the Emerald City blog for the Los Angeles Times and still keeps up her original blog of her tips and adventures around town.
• Surveys show that people become more concerned about greening their lives when they become parents. Eco Child's Play speaks to them.
• Beth Terry's well-researched Fake Plastic Fish blog chronicles her quest to reduce her use of plastic.
• Green Map guides, in hundreds of cities, chart local green resources.
• Pointers for crafts enthusiasts come via Craft and Make magazines and Crafting a Greener World.
• The Green Guide from National Geographic offers household-greening tips. So do LighterFootstep and GreenTweet. Earth911 is a go-to guide for recycling and more.


Micro-bloggers from green nonprofit groups and businesses share their inside perspective:

• AIDG "tweets" often from Haiti, where the Boston nonprofit helps communities with renewable energy and more. The abbreviation stands for a mouthful: Appropriate Infrastructure Design Group.

• Enviroblog from the Environmental Working Group details toxic ingredients in everyday products.

• NRDCSwitchboard comes from the Natural Resources Defense Council, which prints the excellent On Earth magazine. The National Wildlife Federation and Sierra Magazine use Twitter, too. Greenpeace activists are ever-active.
• The World Resources Institute think tank is based in Washington, D.C.
• Can you build a green home for $100,000? Philadelphia developer Chad Ludeman takes up the challenge with the 100kHouse.
• Max Gladwell, whose blog blends social media with green living, describes on Treehugger how to add your "tweets" to a GreenStream channel to make them easier to find.
• Strategist and GreenBiz founder Joel Makower just began using Twitter in September.
• Social entrepreneur and GreenSkeptic Scott Edward Anderson challenges conventional assumptions about green tech.
• CleanTech.org says it's "where entrepreneurs and investors meet to commercialize clean technologies.
• CleanTech is updated by Denis DuBois, an expert on marketing for sustainable energy.
• Marc Alt, a sustainability consultant, also develops environmental conferences.
• Sopogy is among the solar start-ups with a Twitter presence.

• The Greensearch search engine donates part of ad profits to environmental groups.
• The GreenCollarGuy, from Green Collar Media, and GreenJobs specialize in sustainable employment.

Of course, you'll find some of the same voices on rival services to Twitter, but it happens to be the most popular. Feel free to chime in with more suggestions in the comments.

See also: The greening of social networking, Wikipedia's Wales launches Wikia Green, Growing green friends, Will social networking stop greenwashers?

There's a new self-serve extended warranty program for consumer goods launching Saturday night: GreenUmbrella. Unlike the typical extended warranties you may get when you buy products, this is an umbrella plan: $9.95 a month covers nearly everything you own. It's a good deal when compared with other extended warranties, although that's not saying much.

The cool thing with GreenUmbrella is that if you are on the plan, you can just say, "No, thanks" when the drone at Best Buy tries to push the extended warranty on you. The GreenUmbrella program covers repairs to your computers, game consoles, cameras, refrigerators, TVs, air conditioners, etc. Anything less than $5,000 is eligible, and is covered for three years from purchase date.

To get a new purchase into the system, all you have to do is go online and enter the info about it. You don't need your receipts to register a product, but you will when you file a claim.

Repairs are handled by The Warranty Group, which maintains a network of certified repair shops for consumer goods. When you call in with a claim, ultimately you'll be routed to one of their providers for the repair or replacement of your item.

There are limitations, however. The service does not cover accidental breakage, doesn't cover your mobile phone, and doesn't cover products more than 3 years old. Also, keep in mind that all new products come with their own warranties. If you have a device that fails during the period of the warranty that comes with the product, GreenUmbrella might help a bit by offering a smoother experience through its service bureau, or by covering, perhaps, consumable parts (like a projector bulb) on a repair for a product whose native warranty only covers malfunctions.

But for the most part, the GreenUmbrella plan only covers products during their most healthy period--the two-plus years that fall between the product's in-warranty infancy (when it is most likely to fail), and its slip into creaky senescence when it's more likely to suffer wear-related problems or become obsolete. It's when you are most likely to need the plan that your products will not be eligible for its services.

You can put a product on your warranty plan after you've purchased it.

(Credit: GreenUmbrella)

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