This is our energy saving update for January 2011. With the extra cold weather that has been hitting our region, we were a little bit worry that our energy costs were going to be a lot higher than last year. Lucky for us, our energy usage was very close to last years with a slight increase in natural gas and a slight decrease in electricity.
With the cost of electricity jumping every year, households are looking for ways to lower the electricity usage. This goal of this article is to show you that you don’t have to spend any money to reduce your electric bill. How much will the following tips save you? Well, depending on you usage you should save anywhere from 5% to 25% by applying this techniques. Spend a little bit of time now, and save money every month on your electric bill – can’t beat that deal.
Here is our update for 2010. We did not do so well in 2010 and regressed back to some of our wasteful ways. It is quite a let down to lose some of the ground we have covered over the last couple of years. We are planning on really cracking down on the simple things in 2011 to get back to where we were at the end of 2008. Even though this year was bad compared to 2009, we are still way ahead of where we were in 2006.
Simple Home Energy Audit
The fastest way to start reducing your electricity and heating and cooling usage is to identify the areas where you are wasting energy. Otherwise you are just guessing and could be wasting your time fixing things that only provide a very small reduction in your usage. A simple home energy audit can quickly identify areas where you are wasting large amounts of energy. This valuable information allows you to focus your efforts on the areas that have the highest payback. Wouldn’t you like to find the energy hogs that are costing you and extra $10 to $100 a month?
The following guide will help you conduct you own home energy audit. These steps will give you a good idea about where to start you conservation efforts. For a more detailed audit, you can call you utility company and they can do a full evaluation of your home (the cost of this service typically depends on your income level.)
Thermal Leak Detector
Heating and cooling account for almost 50% of an average homes energy usage and cost. So, if you can find a way to reduce your heating and cooling usage, you can put a significant in your energy costs. Well, I have found a simple tool that can help you find thermal breaks in your home’s building envelope: the Black & Decker TLD100 Thermal Leak Detector
This cool gadget is very simple to use. You just need to set the temperature differential you want to detect, and then just point the device. The green light will change to either red or blue to indicate places where the temperature is higher or lower than the room temperature.
Here is our energy usage update for 2009. The following tables show our electricity and natural gas usage throughout the year. Our goal this year was to reach our intial goal of reducing our overall energy usage by 40%. With the tremendous progress we made in 2008, our progress in 2009 would be quite a bit slower. We have already done most of the easy things that provided the most bang for our buck. All of our investments have been very successful and have had a less than 2 year return on investment.
This is our household energy usage update for 2008. The following tables show our electricity and natural gas usage along with the monthly averages for each month throughout the year. Our goal this year was to significantly reduce our energy usage based on the changes we made at the end of 2007. The switch to CFLs, front loading washer, gas dryer, and wood burning insert, will have a huge impact on our overall energy costs. With a price tag of around $3,100 for all the changes, we are really looking for a quick return on investment.
Kill-A-Watt Meter
So you have decided to start reducing the amount of electricity you are using, but you don’t know where to start. Well one of the first steps to start cutting your electricity usage is to identify which devices are using the most electricity. Once you identify the energy hogs, you can determine the best plan of action to reduce their electricity usage. One of the coolest tools to find these energy sucking devices is the P3 International Kill-a-watt meter
The Kill-a-watt meter is simple to use: you just plug it into the outlet, and then plug in the device you want to measure. The device has several settings that you can use to measure the energy usage of various devices, depending on what information you need. After playing with the Kill-a-watt meter I have found that I only use two of the settings: the current power usage (watts), and the overall energy usage (kwh).
This is an update of our energy usage for 2007. The following tables show our electricity and natural gas usage for each month throughout the year. Again, our goal for 2007 was to see if we could reduce both our electric and natural gas costs. As you can see we were not very successful in our efforts this year, but at the end of the year we made some significant changes that we be reflected in 2008′s energy usage.
This is an update of our energy usage for 2006, which was the year we decided to start reducing our energy costs. The following tables show our electricity and natural gas usage for each month during the year. Our only goal in 2006 was to see if we could reduce both our electric and natural gas costs.
