Set sprinklers to water the lawn or garden only - not the street or sidewalk.
Use the microwave to cook small meals. (It uses less power than an oven.)
Purchase "Green Power" for your home's electricity. (Contact your power supplier to see where and if it is available.)
Scrape, rather than rinse, dishes before loading into the dishwasher; wash only full loads.
Cut back on air conditioning and heating use if you can.
Turn off appliances and lights when you leave the room.
As the cost of gasoline soared over the past year, small businesses took steps to mitigate the damage to cash flow and profits. Now, even though gas has fallen from the record levels of mid-July, companies are making those strategies permanent.
Of course, gas that averages $3.70 a gallon nationally instead of $4.10 still isn't cheap. But even if the decline in gas becomes steeper, companies have found the changes designed to cut fuel and energy bills are helping them work better.
Companies whose business involves deliveries, such as florists, are making fewer trips each day, or bunching stops near one another.
Many businesses that need to buy new vehicles are looking for smaller ones, or hybrids.
Wing Zone, an Atlanta-based franchise chain that sells chicken wings, decided this spring to convert its company-owned delivery vehicles to run on used cooking oil – something in great supply at a store frying wings all day.
Matt Friedman, Wing Zone's co-founder, estimated the company's fuel costs have risen 50 percent over the past year.
He said it costs about $4,000 to convert a vehicle to run almost entirely on vegetable oil (it needs diesel to start), but using cooking oil instead of unleaded will save $8,000 per vehicle per year.
Wing Zone has five company-owned stores; each has three to five vehicles.
Some companies are taking steps to reduce energy costs not for themselves, but their employees.
Mindful that soaring gas prices have eaten into workers' spendable income, they're making it easier for staffers to work at home or travel to the office less.
When Janet Buck moved her consulting firm, Emergent Success, from Northern California to the southern part of the state four months ago, she decided not to take permanent office space, but to use her home office and the Internet.
That allowed her employees to work at home if they weren't visiting clients. She used conferencing services so employees who lived hundreds of miles away in San Luis Obispo, Eureka and San Francisco could take part in meetings without traveling.
Along with making life easier for her employees, she estimates that eliminating the commutes is saving her company $2,800 a year in mileage reimbursements to workers.
As gas prices retreat, Ms. Buck said, she has no plans to change her strategy.
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