Frugal Family: Make Money By Upgrading?

Our area of Atlanta is full of older, "established" neighborhoods made up of houses built around 30 or 40 years ago.  With those houses often come older plumbing and appliances. Unless you've upgraded recently, it's possible that you're "flushing" dollars down the drain or unintentionally "freezing" your assets, quite literally. Here are a few ways upgrading those older appliances could work to your advantage.

Both the Gwinnett County Department of Water Resources and the DeKalb County Department of Watershed Management are offering a "Toilet Retrofit Rebate Program" to active water customers with homes built before 1993.  Customers replacing older, less efficient toilets with new water-conserving models ("low-flow") will both reduce their monthly water bill and can earn rebates for up to three new toilets per household. New toilets with 1.6 gallons per flush earn a $50 rebate, and toilets with a 1.28 gallon flush earn $100. Note that this program has been going on for a while. Funds are still available, but are becoming limited, so it may not go on for much longer. The water departments will also supply you with free retrofit and leak detection kits to help make sure you're not wasting water without realizing it, if you request them.

Thinking of getting a new refrigerator, or do you have a secondary fridge or freezer in your garage or basement that you don't really use or need? Georgia Power will come and pick it up for recycling AND send you a check for $35. Refrigerators must be empty, in working order and between 10 and 30 cubic feet in size.

If you're looking at buying new appliances and want to go the energy-efficient route, GE is offering big rebates on their Profile line of energy-star appliances from now through October 2011. Earn up to a $500 rebate (in the form of a Visa Gift Card) based on what you buy.

Here's a great rebate site to check any time you're looking to buy new energy-efficient products, whether they are big-ticket items like refridgerators and washers/dryers, or smaller items like DVD players, printers, and even compact fluorescent light bulbs. Just type in your ZIP code and what you're looking for, and the site will do the walking to find rebates to save you some of that hard-earned cash.