Hard to believe, but summer is almost officially over! Cooler weather is just around the corner, and it's always best to be prepared. As Andrea mentioned on Tuesday, one of the best things you can do to get ready for cool weather is have a home energy assessment to find out where you are losing energy and how to make your home more efficient. The steps you take after a home energy assessment will help ensure that you are comfortable and efficient when the cold weather finally hits.

How are you preparing to save energy this fall and winter?

Each Thursday, you have the chance to share your thoughts on a question about energy efficiency or renewable energy for consumers. Please comment with your answers, and also feel free to respond to other comments.

As I walked outside this morning, I noticed something— a chill in the air! I live in Colorado, where the nights get cooler long before the days do. This is the time where it's common to see people walking around with shorts and sweaters in the morning (gotta be prepared).

The sight of my breath was a reminder that soon I'll be running my heater again and will want to run it as little as possible while staying comfortable. If that sounds like your plan, consider scheduling a home energy assessment. Also known as an energy audit, an energy assessment shows you where your home is losing energy and how to make it as efficient as possible.

You can perform a simple energy assessment yourself, or hire a professional to provide a more thorough assessment.

A professional auditor uses a variety of techniques and equipment to determine the energy efficiency of your home, using equipment such as blower doors, which measure the extent of leaks in the building, and infrared cameras, which reveal hard-to-detect areas of air infiltration and missing insulation. At the end of the assessment, you'll know exactly what to do to make your home energy efficient, stay warmer this winter, and spend less money on utility bills.

Many utility companies provide this service for a reasonable fee, and some give discounts for low-income and elderly homeowners. This is one service that can pay you back in energy savings in the short or long term.

Andrea Spikes is a communicator at DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which assists EERE in providing technical content for many of its Web sites.

On Tuesday, Eric told you about the redesign of the Energy Empowers site. Energy Empowers delivers stories about people like you taking both large and small steps to save energy, advance clean energy technologies, and build a more energy efficient and sustainable energy economy. Eric mentioned that even the "little things" we do to save energy make us all important to the movement toward renewable energy generation and wise energy use.

What "little things" do you do to save energy?

Each Thursday, you have the chance to share your thoughts on a question about energy efficiency or renewable energy for consumers. Please comment with your answers, and also feel free to respond to other comments.

I think about energy a lot, and I'm always looking to get other people to think more consciously about energy and the ways they use it. I frequently send links to my friends and family to interesting websites and stories about people tackling our energy issues at home and at work. I also can't help but spread the word on Facebook and Twitter about what people are doing across the country to get smart about saving energy.

Some of my favorite reminders of the rapid strides we are taking toward a clean energy future are the daily stories we feature on our Energy Empowers clean energy blog, and yesterday, we launched our brand new redesigned Energy Empowers Web site. As you may know, this engaging resource delivers stories about everyday people across the country pitching in to help each other save energy, advance innovative clean energy technologies or get to work building a more energy efficient and sustainable energy economy.

The Energy Empowers redesign is great. I love the sleek new look and flashy rotating feature box. Not only is it better organized from the home page on down, it's also easier to navigate, easier to read, and more user-friendly than before. For example, you can instantly jump to a list of stories on any major energy subject or quickly search for stories from a specific state or geographic location using the map feature.

It's also easier than ever to share these inspiring stories with your friends, family or colleagues using the "share" button beside each blog entry. From the battery manufacturer that plans to hire 80 workers in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, to the more than 10,000 low-income households in Ohio that now save money on their electricity bills, people are swapping stories of real progress in reaching our energy goals. Speaking of sharing, we encourage you to tell your own story about how the clean energy economy has touched your life or someone's you know. Clicking on the "Share Your Story" button at the top of the page allows you submit a story idea to the Energy Empowers staff.

The conversation is buzzing about clean energy on your favorite social media sites right now. Energy Empowers is also on Facebook, where we feature the most recent articles and encourage you to comment on stories and share them widely.

On a personal note, when I was a kid growing up in the '80s, I was bombarded by messages about reducing energy use and recycling things like newspapers, cans, and bottles. The public service announcements, combined with my awareness of some of the environmental challenges we face as a planet, created a natural reward system for conserving energy and using energy more efficiently. I'd feel a little bit better when I turned off the lights or when I rode my bike to school—just because I knew I was doing the little things to save energy.

Today I see that I was never alone in this practice. Every day, more and more people are joining us as we work together to find smarter ways to use our energy resources. It has become a movement of energy awareness, and it's at the heart of our global push to build a better economy based on renewable energy generation and wise energy use.

Eric Barendsen is a communications specialist and Presidential Management Fellow with EERE's Technology Advancement and Outreach office in Washington, D.C.

Okay, so we already pointed out the Energy Basics Web site last week. Because I'm going to talk about something on the site, I wanted to remind you all of what it is: a brand new Web site on EERE that talks about the basics of how energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies work. A little place to find out the "What is it, and how does it work?" nuggets of information, basically.

But I wanted to point out something in particular: the Energy 101 series of videos!

There are two so far, although more will be posted in the future. The two that are there now, Wind Turbines Basics and Concentrating Solar Power Basics, provide extremely easy-to-understand, entry-level introductions to the two technologies they cover. So if you need to learn the gist of how something works in just a couple of minutes, be sure to give them a look!

The site in general has a ton of information that introduces you to everything from renewable energy to buildings to industry to vehicles, but since we told you about that last week, you hopefully already gave it a glance!

Elizabeth Spencer is a communicator at DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which assists EERE in providing technical content for many of its Web sites.