Smart Energy Today

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.