October Results of Our Energy Reduction Plans
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:
- Electric: 853 kwh (Sept: 891 kwh, Avg: 1043 kwh) - 18.2% Reduction
- 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.