Happy Summer Solstice! 7 ways to trim your summer energy bill.

Summer solstice is here, and your  home energy costs will rise right along with the temperature. Here are seven easy ways to keep cool and save money on your energy bill.

5. Switch energy providers

Cleveland Museum of Natural History/PRNewsFoto/File
PNC SmartHome Cleveland being moved from The Cleveland Museum of Natural History to its permanent site in this October 2011 file photo. You may not be able to match the efficiency of the PNC SmartHome, which uses 90 percent less energy than the typical house, but you can get a good start by shopping around for energy providers in your area.

If you have multiple energy providers to choose from, you may be able to save money by switching. Before you sign up with a new company, however, make sure you understand how you'll be billed and exactly what you'll be billed for. For example, hidden fees and unexpected monthly charges can quickly negate potential savings.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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