Environmental Science major Maya is constantly trying to educate her parents about their energy consumption and convince them to reduce energy waste. When she heard about unwasteNY and the opportunity to have an energy monitor that would allow her to track the energy use in her parent’s home, she was immediately interested. “I’ve been trying to help my parents become more aware,” she explains, “and I know that our energy use is not the best so this is a concrete way for me to show them what we’ve been doing and what we can do better… this is proof.”

Maya had already begun to encourage her family to make energy saving changes in their home—replacing light bulbs with energy efficient CFL bulbs, unplugging appliances not in use, and even utilizing their programmable thermostat to turn down the heat when no one was home and at night. But even with all of these changes, Maya and her family still felt that they were unnecessarily wasting a lot of energy. They decided to become members of the Unwaste Lab. “We just thought it would be a great idea to learn where it’s going and who’s consuming it…”recalls her mother, Connie. “We leave a lot of things on so we’re trying to train ourselves to turn things off,” she explains, adding that “we’re thinking that when we can monitor it we’ll be able to tell what we should be turning off or on.” Now, with their energy conscious habits intact and their real-time monitor installed, it seems that Connie has begun to take on her daughter’s zeal.  “I don’t think it has to be a sacrifice at all because making small changes really has very little impact on our lives but can have a massive cumulative effect,” she says.