Smart Energy Today

November has come to an end and it was a cold one here in the Midwest. In fact it was quite a bit colder than last year, so even with our efforts to reduce our natural gas usage we ended up using more than we did last year. We did however do great on the electricity side of things, with the first full month of using our CFLs. Here are our usage figures for November:

1. Electric: 242 kwh (Sept: 853 kwh, Avg: 1043 kwh) - 76.8% Reduction
2. Natural Gas: 239 CCF (Oct. 2006: 233 CCF) - 2.5% Increase
   

If you remember the electric company estimated last months usage high, so we knew that this month would be extremely low. Since we have been tracking our daily usage for the past month, we know that our actual usage was 381 kwh for a 63.5% reduction - quite a bit more than our 50% goal I know that next month is going to be higher since it is the Christmas season and we will have Christmas lights shining throughout the season. I would love to be able to replace all of our Christmas lights with LED lights, but we don’t have the extra money right now.

As for our gas usage, we ran our fireplace and hearth heater almost everyday, but the lower than normal temperatures were too much for our efforts and we ended up using slightly more gas than last year. But adding up our gas usage since we started conserving in September and comparing it to last year usage, we have reduced our total gas usage by 21.2% (345 CCF vs 438 CCF) . This is right on track with our goal! It also has been nice having our wood kept dry and easy to get in our temporary sunroom.

Monetarily, this month we save saved us $70 on electric bill, -$30 on gas bill and $25 on our water bills for a total of $65 this month. So far we have saved a total of $235 on energy costs since September. Our total investment has only been $230 not including the cost of our new washer and dryer, so we have already saved more than we have spent.

December Plans:

Our goals for December are to fill sunroom with wood, stay on top of the energy usage of the Christmas lights, and to just keep doing what we have been doing. One of the most important things is for us to keep the fireplace running everyday, and to make sure that we remember to turn down the thermostat when we leave the house. After this months natural gas usage, I am not sure that we can meet the 20% goal for this winter, but we will continue to try. Next year we definitely have to add some money into the budget to start insulating our walls!

I finally got around to buying the materials and constructing our temporary sunspace on our back porch. I had a rough idea in my head on how I would build it based on descriptions and articles from other people that have built their own temporary sunspaces. Here are the links that got me interested in the idea:

Converted Front Porch into Sunroom - simple, inexpensive sunroom built on an existing from porch. Good ideas on limiting the thermal mass to increase the ability of the sunroom to heat up quickly.

Porch Sunroom - Transformed a screened in porch into a simple sunroom.

Sunroom Lean-to - Another inexpensive sunroom attached to the side of the home. Uses a blower to take warmed air from the sunspace and blow it into the crawl space under a bedroom.

I took a slightly different approach from the ones depicted in the above articles. My design include a vertical wall and a sloped roof all covered in sheeting, to get the most direct gain from the sun.  I used 2X3’s for the frame and 6 mil sheeting for the glazing.  For added strength I used 1X2’s as battens over the sheeting.  This should keep the sheeting from ripping around the staples.

Over the inside walls I attached black 4 mil sheeting, and I also covered the wood and the floor with the black sheeting to reduce the thermal mass of the structure.  This should allow the room to heat up very quickly.  Unfortunately, it has been overcast for the last several days, so I cannot tell how well the structure works.

NOTE: I am working on getting some pictures of the sunroom.

We now have our second month of energy conservation under our belts and the results were pretty good. We did take a vacation during the first week of the month, but we had some people house sit for our dogs and cats, so I don’t think that we saved much energy while we were away. We were able to replace almost all the lights in the house with CFLs because of the great deal we got at Lowes (2 bulbs for $1.) In addition we saved quite a bit on natural gas by not starting up the boiler until midway through the month. Here are our usage figures for October:

1. Electric: 853 kwh (Sept: 891 kwh, Avg: 1043 kwh) - 18.2% Reduction
2. Natural Gas: 86 CCF (Oct. 2006: 171 CCF) - 49.7% Reduction

Unfortunately the electric company choose to estimate this month, so the figure is quite a bit higher than the our actual usage. With my daily meter readings, I figure that we only used 699 kwh for a 33% reduction which puts us on track to reduce our electric by 50% by the end of the year. We did pretty well making sure that we turned things off at night, but now we need to make it a habit to turn anything off when we leave a room. Obviously all of us will have to work on this to make it a habit.

As for our gas usage, we were able to make it have way through the month without turning on the huge boiler in the basement, which made it easy to save on gas. I know that it will get more challenging to keep the natural gas bill in check once the weather turns colder.

Monetarily, this month we save saved us $15 on electric bill, $75 on gas bill and $30 on our water bills (thanks to our new washer and dryer.) for a total of $120 this month. Since we have only invested around $150 in improvements other than the washer and dryer, we have almost made back all the money in the first couple of months. The cool thing is that with these changes we will continue to save on all future energy bills.

November Plans:

We made some great strides in October, and we plan on maintaining the momentum into November. We plan on focusing on projects to winterizing the house. We plan on installing weatherstripping on all the exterior doors, and to install plastic on the porch doors. I also plan on installing a small sunspace (8′ by 10′) that will also be used to store our firewood to keep it dry and easily accessible. We will continue to work on reducing electricity and should be able to hit our 50% mark next month a full month ahead of our goal.

It can be hard staying motivated on your energy saving plans, unless you get regular feedback that your efforts are actually saving energy. Whether you are trying to cut back on electricity, natural gas, or any other energy source, waiting until you receive your next bill to see the payoff of your efforts will make it hard to stay focused. Plus waiting for the bills reading won’t provide you with the information you need to determine which of your efforts are producing the best results.

There are two simple methods that you can use to keep an eye on your energy usage. The first will allow you to track all of your energy usage for free, while the second will only keep track of your electricity usage.

Daily Meter Readings

The cheapest way is to just read your meters once a day. This will provide you with daily energy usage and patterns that you can use to determine what activities use the most energy and/or what changes are producing the best energy savings. This methods works not matter what type of meters you have, so it will work for everyone.

This is the method that I plan on using since I need to keep track of our natural gas usage over the winter months. In addition to the electric and gas meters, I will also take a reading of the water meter everyday.

Remote Electric Monitor

If you house uses electricity only, then a remote meter monitor will provide you with the most information about your electricity usage. It will be able to tell you your current electricity usage in real-time along with tracking your total electricity usage over time. With one of these devices you will be able to at a glance tell whether you have remembered to turn everything off as you go to bed or leave the home. With real-time energy usage figures and costs always displayed, it will be a constant reminder of how your activities are effecting your energy usage. The following are two electric monitors that use slightly different techniques to determine your electricity usage. One hooks to your meter and the other one comes with clamps that you clamp on to your power mains.

PowerCost Monitor Home Electricity Monitor

This set-up includes a small wireless display unit and a reading unit that attaches to the outside of your meter. Once you have the reading unit attached to your meter, you will be able to get real-time energy readouts on the indoor display. From the reviews on amazon, this device only works with certain electric meters.

Brultech ECM-1220.H Wireless Electric Monitor

This device uses current transformers that clamp to your main electric lines inside your panel to read your electricity usage. The setup includes a remote wireless display plus software that allows you to download energy usage data from the the unit. This provides you a way to analyze your energy usage and make sure that your not leaving something on when your not home or asleep. This device is considerably more expensive then PowerCost unit, but it will work for any home electrical setup and gives you the option of downloading your data to your computer for more in depth analysis. The companies site makes in unnecessarily hard to get to the pricing/order form, so here is a direct link ECM-1220.H pricing.

One of our goals this month was to replace most of the lights in our home with CFLs, and after a quick trip to Lowes we got a heck of a jumpstart on that goal. We went to the lighting department and picked up some of the normal spiral CFLs, and some decorative CFLs for our dining room chandelier and our ceiling fans. At the check out the decorative 2 bulb packs rang up at only $1.00, so we went back and bought 12 packs and got 24 CFLs for only $12.00. These packs were originally marked at $9.98 so we got a 90% discount on the bulbs.

With this deal we were able to replace most of the bulbs in our home fairly cheaply. Here is a run down of what we have spent on CFLs for our home.

We were able to get 52 CFLs for only $75.88 which is half our original estimate of $150. I can’t wait to get our October and November electric bills to see how much these bulbs are going to reduce our electric usage. I am betting that CFLs will pay for themselves within the first two or three months because of this great deal.

Well we finally got our September electric and gas bills which show the first month results of our energy reduction effort. Since we were only able to install 8 CFLs most of the savings probably came from the new energy star washer and gas dryer that we purchases and installed at the end of August. Here are our usage figures for September:

1. Electric: 891 kwh (Aug: 1492 kwh, Avg: 1043 kwh) - 14.5% Reduction
2. Natural Gas: 20 CCF (Sept. 2006: 34 CCF) - 41% Reduction

The switch from the electric dryer to the new gas dryer did lower our electric usage quite a bit. In fact, our electric usage has been reduce by 14.5% from our average of 1043 kwh/mo mostly due to the new washer and dryer. As for the gas, I was worried that the gas dryer would increase our gas bill from last year. I was surprised that we only used 20 CCF, our lowest monthly figure since we moved into this house. So I am very happy with the new washer and dryer. Another side effect of the new washer is that our water usage has also dropped by almost 30% and is also at its lowest level ever.

Monetarily, the new washer and dryer have saved us $15 on electric bill, $15 on gas bill and $20 on our water bills for a total of $50 this month. Based on their purchase price of $1,300, the washer and dryer will pay for themselves in 26 months. In looking at the purchase as an investment, the annualized return is around 46% (pretty impressive.)

October Plans:

Now that we have made some headway through the month of September, we are not going to work even harder in October to reach our goals.  We plan to replace most of the lights in the house with CFLs and install powerstrips for the computer system and the entertainment system.  In addition we are going to work on getting into the habit of turning things off or unplugging them when not in use or when we leave a room.  Nothing is as wasteful as leaving lights or equipment on in an empty room.

As the temperatures have begun to drop, we have been thinking about what we are going to do to reduce our gas usage this winter. Our goal is to reduce our natural gas usage by 20% from last winter which could be challenging since we do not have the money to put insulation in our walls or replace our ancient boiler this year. So the following are our plans for things that we are going to do that do not cost much money and can be finished before the cold weather gets here - Hopefully.

Home Winterizing Plans:

1. Shut off heat to side porch and bonus room above garage (Heat will be lowered to 40 degree F to prevent hydronic heating pipes from freezing.)
2. Weatherstrip the door to the side porch and from Son’s room into the bonus room. Since this part of the house is not going to be heated, we need to weatherstrip these doors like they were exterior doors.
3. Replace weatherstripping on front door. The current weatherstripping is the original copper mechanical type weatherstripping that has seen its better days.
4. Put plastic film on the doors to the back porch. There are 3 sets of french doors that lead out to the back porch and all of them have large areas of single pane glass.
5. Lower the thermostat to 66 degrees F at all times, and lower it to 60 degrees when we leave the house. Since I work from home and my wife home schools, we are in the home most days.
6. Open all the shades on the South side of the house to take advantage of the free energy from the sun.
7. Keep our fireplace running during the day. We have installed a nice hearth heater that does a good job of keeping the living room nice and warm. Since the thermostat for the main house is in that room, we can keep the boiler from running for most of the day. This does mean the rest of the house is much cooler, but we plan on dressing for the coolness.
8. Build a simple temporary sunroom on the back porch. This temporary sunroom will serve two purposes: 1. add supplemental heat to the home on sunny days, and 2. keep the wood for the fireplace dry and accessible throughout the winter.

Hopefully, by implementing these winterizing strategies we will be able to achieve our 20% gas usage reduction goal. I figure that all of the materials including the lumber and plastic film for the sunroom will only cost us around $160, but if we achieve our goal we will save over $400 over this winter alone.

As I was doing a little research on solar power and refrigeration, I came upon a company, Matteran Energy, that has an interesting and promising new solar technology. It seems to be in the prototype stage currently, but the technology looks fairly sound.

It basically is a very low temperature pump-less rankine cycle, that can run with fairly low heat sources from 130 to 200 degrees F.  This means that it can be powered by heated water from most solar water heating collector panels.   Take a look at this animation that gives a great graphic explanation of how the system works and how it relates to a typical rankine cycle.

One issue with the technology is that you would need a continuous supply of both hot water and cool water.  For the hot water you would need a fairly large array of solar panels or evacuated tube collectors to provide enough energy to keep the hot water flowing.  As for the cool water, you could either use a nearby water source (stream, pond, or lake) or go geothermal to use the coolness of the earth.

It will be interesting to see how well this technology develops and to see how well their current 2kW prototype works.

As you may remember from the post on our plans to reduce our electricity usage by 50%, one of our main strategies was to switch to using compact fluorescents. I believe that this simple change will give us a nice large decrease in our electricity usage, because most of our electricity usage in our home comes from our lighting usage.

CFLs are not cheap so we are planning on replacing all the lights in our home in stages. First we are going to replace the lights that are used the most to get the most impact out of each purchase. The following is the list of lights that we plan to replace and the estimated electricity savings that we expect. If my estimations are correct, this strategy will provide for most of our 50% reduction in electricity usage.

Fixture	#bulbs	Wattage Savings	Hrs/Day	kWH Savings/Day	kWH Savings/Month
Dining Room Chandelier	9	471 ( 8 x (60 - 7) + (60 - 13) )	8	3.77	113
Living Room Fan	4	212 ( 4 x (60 - 7) )	5	1.06	32
Kitchen Overhead	3	141 ( 3 x (60 - 13) )	6	0.85	25
Pantry	2	94( 2 x (60 - 13) )	8	0.75	23
Kid’s Closets	2	66 ( 2 x (40 - 7) )	10	0.66	20
Master Bath	5	253 ( 3 x (60 - 7) + 2 * (60 - 13) )	2	0.51	15
Living Room Lamps	2	194 ( 2 x (60 - 13) )	5	0.47	14
Library	2	94 ( 2 * (60 - 13) )	4	0.38	11
Master Bedroom Fan	4	132 ( 4 x (60 - 7) )	2	0.26	8
Outside Entry	2	106 ( 2 x (60 - 7) )	2	0.21	6
Kitchen Sink	2	94 ( 2 * (60 - 13) )	2	0.19	6
Upstairs Hall	2	94 ( 2 * (60 - 13) )	2	0.19	6
Downstairs Hall	2	94 ( 2 * (60 - 13) )	2	0.19	6
Laundry Room	2	94 ( 2 * (60 - 13) )	2	0.19	6
Down Bathroom	2	66 ( 2 * (40 - 13) )	2	0.13	4
Entry	2	94 ( 2 * (60 - 13) )	1	0.09	3
Shoe Closet	1	47 ( 60 - 13 )	2	0.09	3
Total					300

So from these calculations our family will save approximately 300 kWH a month just by switching to CFLs. Based on our average usage figure of 1043 (Starting Our Smart Energy Journey), this would be a 29% reduction in our electricity usage. This would account for over half of our 50% reduction goal and save us $30 a month on our electric bill.

I figure it will cost us around $150 to replace all these lights, so our payback period is only 5 months!

Note: CFLs do contain a small amount of mercury, so they must be handle with care if they are broken and must not be thrown away when burned out.  The best way to handle burnt out CFLS is to take them to the nearest recycling center that handles CFLs.  Go to  Earth911 and enter CFL and your zip to find the closest recycling center.

As you may remember from the post on our plans to reduce our electricity usage by 50%, one of our strategies was to eliminating phantom loads within our home.

First let me start by explaining what phantom loads are and how they have crept into our homes. A phantom load is the power that is consumed by any device that is either turned off or in standby mode. Right now you are probably thinking how can a device that has been turned off still be using power. Well look around your home at night and you will probably see lots of green and red glowing LEDs using up electricity. In addition to these LEDs are the devices that operate by remote control, they are always using up a little electricity in the circuitry that responds to the remotes signals. Basically any device or appliance that is left plugged in could by using small amounts of electricity even when they are off. These small amounts can add up to a lot of wasted electricity usage because of the number devices involved and the fact that they use electricity 24 hours a day.

Finding the Phantom Loads

As described in the last post, you can use your electric meter to determine the electric usage of the various phantom loads in your home. Here is the method that I used to find the worst phantom loads within my home:

First, I turned everything off including all lights, the refrigerator (don’t want it kicking on during the test), and all electronic devices. At this point I have not unplugged anything. I then timed the meter disc to determine our homes base electric load.

With the base electric load measured, I then unplugged devices and re-timed the meter disc to get the new electric load measurement. The device or devices load could then be determined by subtracting the new measurement from the base measurement. This took a little time an effort but I was able identify phantom loads that I could eliminate - computer system, entertainment center, and kitchen radio. Take a look at the following calculations I did to figure out how much we would save by eliminating these phantom loads.

Base Load Calculations
Disc Rotation Time: 267 seconds (161.8 Watts)
Daily Usage: 3.9 kwh
Monthly Usage: 116 kwh

Phantom Loads Unplugged Calculations
Note: Calculations based on using the device for 4 hours a day and unplugging it for 20 hours.
Disc Rotation Time: 490 seconds (88.2 Watts)
Phantom Load: 73.6 Watts
Daily Usage Savings: 1.47 kwh
Monthly Usage Savings: 44 kwh

Just by installing a couple of powerstrips we had laying around, we were able to reduce our monthly usage by an estimated 44 kwh. We are still using a base load of 88.2 watts which adds up to 63 kwh a month, so there is still some phantom loads that probably can be eliminated. But this is a good start.

Reducing electricity consumption is easy once you determine the main energy hogs in your home. So how can you determine how much energy a device is using? One way is to use a Meter like the Kill-A-Watt meter, which will tell you the power consumption of any appliance plugged into the meter. Another way is to simply use your electric meter, which will provide allow you to take measurements of your entire home. Using the following method you can use your electric meter to determine how much electricity a device or set of devices (i.e. entertainment center) are using.

This method only works with the electro-mechanical type meters - the ones with a spinning aluminum disc and a series of dials. If your meter is one of the new solid-state types with an LCD display, you will not be able to use this method.

An electromechanical meter operates by counting the revolutions of an aluminum disc which is made to rotate at a speed proportional to the power (watts) flowing through the meter. Each revolution of the disc represents a given amount of energy in watt-hours, and can be determined by finding the Kh factor displayed somewhere on the face of the meter. This Kh factor tells you the number of watt-hours used for every revolution of the disc (7.2 is a common Kh facter.)

Once you find the Kh factor for your meter, you can now determine the power consumption at any time by simply using a stop watch to time the number of seconds it takes the disc to complete one revolution. Then use the following formula to calculate power (P) in watts, where Kh is the factor for your meter and t is the time in seconds for the disc to complete one revolution.

P = ( 3600 x Kh ) / t

Example: On a meter with a Kh factor of 7.2, and one revolution of the disc takes 27 seconds gives you a value of 960 watts.

P = ( 3600 x 7.2 ) / 27 = 960 watts

This tells you that the devices and fixtures running during the time of your test are using 960 watts of power. To measure a specific device(s), turn off everything including the device(s) you are testing and take a measurement to get a baseline. Then turn on the device(s) to test and take another measurement. Now subtract the baseline measurement to determine the power consumption of the device(s).

NOTE: Make sure that the refrigerator or freezer compressors do not kick on in between the two measurements, or you will get an incorrect power value.

It is always dangerous for my wife and I to visit our local Lowes. For some reason we always end up spending money that we had not planned. Well yesterdays visit was no exception.

While perusing the lighting aisle for some CFLs, my wife spied a front load washer and dryer pair that was marked down. They were discontinued Samsung front load models that were being replaced with a new model. Since our washer was on its last leg, we had talked about getting a front load washer when we replaced it. But because of the mark downs, we ended up with a front load washer, matching front load gas dryer and the utility drawers for only $1,300 total.

Obviously these were not in our budget right now, but the deal was to good to pass.  And since the washer is an energy star rated model and the gas dryer is replacing our old electric dryer, they should have an immediate impact on our electric usage.  An added benefit of the front load washer is that it will also reduce our high water bills, since it uses about a third of the water our old model used.

We will have to see the actual impact on our bills, before we can determine the payback period for this purchase.  The dryer will increase our gas usage, but I believe the savings on electric usage will far outweigh the increase in gas usage.  But of course we will only know for sure after we have used them for a couple of months.

In our last post we made a goal to reduce our electricity consumption by at least 50% by the end of the year. We have been using an average of 1043 kwh a month which is 36% more then the average home in our region. To reach our goal we have to lower our usage to 522 kwh a month, which would make our usage 32% lower then the regional average.

Right now we don’t have a lot of extra money to invest in reducing our electric usage, so all of the strategies that we are going to use in our plan are either free or are low cost.

Electricity Reduction Plans:

Here are the strategies that we are going to use to try and reduce our electricity usage by 50%:

1. Switch to Compact Fluorescent BulbsLighting is one of the largest sources of electricity usage within our home, so switching to CFLs which use a quarter of the energy of incandescent bulbs should give us a nice reduction in our electricity usage. Due to the number of fixtures in our home and the cost of CFLs we will replace all the lights over the next several months.
2. Eliminate Phantom LoadsThis will require us to plug all of our computers and entertainment equipment into power strips that can be turned off when not in use. We already have several power strips laying around so this will only require me to install them and to train everyone to use them.
3. Turn Off Anything that is not in UseThis is free strategy that could provide a tremendous amount of savings. It only requires that everyone in the home learn to turn lthings off when they leave a room. With 4 young children this one may be the hardest to implement

I believe that if our family can implement all these strategies, that we can cut our electric bill by 50%. That means that for a small investment ($100+ for the CFLs) we will be reducing our electric bills by $50 a month. That looks like a great investment to me with a pay back of 2 to 3 months.

Over the last three years, our family has been living in a 70 year old energy hogging home. Looking back over our bills for the last three years, I am ashamed of how wasteful we have become. Just how bad is it? Pretty bad - our household energy usage is way over the national average. Take a look at our energy usage (Midwest regional averages are in parenthesis - 2001 data from )

• Electricity: 1,043 kwh/mo -> 12,517 kwh/yr ( 767 kwh/mo -> 9,206 kwh/yr )
• Natural Gas: 189 ccf/mo -> 2,268 ccf/yr ( 76.7 ccf/mo -> 920 ccf/yr)

This means that we are using 36% more electricity and an amazing 147% more natural gas than the average home here in the Midwest. The fact that are electric is so high even though it is not used to heat our home or to heat our water shows just how wasteful we have been.

As for the high natural gas usage, our old house is larger than the average house (3800 sq. ft.) and lacks insulation in the walls. I don’t even want to imagine what our gas usage and bills would be like if we had not already replaced the old single pane windows and added 18 inches of blown in insulation to the attic when we moved in three years ago.

Becoming Smart About Our Energy Usage

We now recognize and admit that we are energy hogs - admitting that we have an energy usage problem is just the first step. Our family is now vowing to change our ways and work on reducing our energy usage and thus our homes environmental impact.

Our initial goals are to reduce our electricity usage by 50% before the end of the year and to reduce our natural gas usage by 20% this winter. These may seem like large goals, but we have a lot of energy fat to trim. In fact, I think it will only take slight changes in our usage habits to reach these first goals.

Our longer term goals are to reduce our energy usage to the point where it will become feasible to install renewable energy sources to provide most of our homes energy needs. This will probably take several years, as we way the costs verse our budget.

Join our Smart Energy Journey

We invite you to follow along as we work on transforming our home from an energy hog to an energy efficient one.