If, like many of us, you’re concerned about the environment and minimizing your family’s carbon footprint (as you should be!), I’d like to humbly suggest a few easy and relatively painless ways you can — with a few small changes — substantially reduce your home’s burden on our larger shared home, the earth.

I should note that I’ve never been anything close to an environmentalist — having a strong aversion to both The Grateful Dead and hacky-sack playing — but I honestly believe the time has come for all of us to step up and actively make changes in our homes and how we use them, for the greater good. So, to that end, here are five simple, low-cost but high-impact things you can do right now to change your home for the greener:

1. Switch every light source in your home to compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). If every family in the U.S. did this, greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by one trillion pounds!
2. Caulk and add weatherstripping around windows and doors. Doing so will not only save energy and reduce your heating and cooling bills, but eliminate drafts and improve the comfort of your home.
3. Insulate and turn down the temperature on your water heater. You can buy an insulating jacket at your local home improvement center for under $20, and save that much in one year on your heating bill. Turning your water heater down to a “Warm” setting will still provide plenty of hot water, but reduce the potential for scalding (and save energy too, of course).
4. Keep heat at 62F or lower in winter, AC 78F or higher in summer. Doing this will not only drastically reduce your home’s carbon impact, but save you 10% on your heating and cooling bills year round. A programmable thermostat is also a good idea, and it will help to keep you honest (heh).
5. Use your dishwasher, but turn off heated dry. Hand-washing dishes wastes a ridiculous amount of water, so always use your dishwasher when you can, making sure it is as full as possible when you start it. Turning off the heated dry setting saves additional energy (if you turn your dishwasher on before you go to bed at night, the dishes will be dry by the time you wake up in the morning).

Clearly these small steps are just a beginning point. But if every household in the U.S. did all five of the items on this list, the impact would be monumental. And you have to start somewhere, right?

For more ideas on how to live green(er), please follow these links:

Ideal Bite

The Green Guide

Low Impact Living