1. Reuse Cereal bags – Shake out the cereal and use them to store chips, snacks, even leftovers. Just clip closed with a binder clip
2. Wash your dishes in a basin – Instead of filling the entire sink with water, put a basin like this one or a large bowl in the sink and wash your smaller dishes in that. You’ll save more water than filling, emptying and refilling the whole sink.
3. Timers – Putting timers on your lights and other electronic equipment isn’t just a good way to thwart burglars, it’s energy-efficient too!
4. Keep a bucket in your bathroom – Put it under the shower to catch the water as it warms up. Then use that water later to clean up, or water you plants or pets

I got this great idea from fellow blogger and naturalista Yoli Ouiya after meeting up for tea and coffee one day. (She has beautiful locs by the way). I’ve done oil rinses before, and I’ve made my own deep conditioners, but it had been ages since I actually did a hot oil treatment. Yoli made two great suggestions. Don’t use more than 1/4 cup of oil, unless you have really long hair and apply most of it to a wet scalp, pulling the excess through your strands.

Here’s what I did:

“Hey babe? Have you seen an aluminum foil ball about yea big?” I gestured with my hands as my husband looked at me blankly and shook his head.

“Where was the last place you had it?”

“Oh, it was in the dryer. Have you seen it?”

eyebrow raise. blank stare. smirk.

“Uh..no.”

Sexy is pretty much used to my crazy household experiments, so nothing really phases him anymore. Now, obviously,

Want to be more eco-friendly? Want to lower your heat or gas bill?

Wash your clothes in cold water. Seriously.

About 85% of the energy used to wash clothes goes entirely to heating up the water. Not the movement of the drum or even turning the thing on take up as much energy as heating the water pouring into it. Most clothes don’t require hot water to clean them. It’s true. We still wash the sheets and towels and dirty rags in hot water, but everything else gets washed in cold.

Hotter water doesn’t get the ring around the collar out of my husband’s shirts. Soap and a scrub brush does. Heat doesn’t

credit: Leon Dale

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned tea rinses in my post 10 Ways to Combat Winter Hair Shedding Naturally, and how they were a good way to help prevent untimely loss of hair. Well, I’ve been actually doing the process for 3 weeks now and I LOVE it. I saw a difference in hair loss after the very first week! Of course as the weeks went on, and I got more rest and ate better, the hair loss went down even more. Apparently, the tannins in caffeinated tea help thicken the hair shaft and make hair appear fuller. Also Black tea is a natural astringent, which means that it penetrates the pores of the scalp and dissolve excess sebum (oil produced by the glands).