Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I am surprised it is the lighting. In most cases it's heating/cooling (incl. washing, drying, freezer).

Great actions. I hope it will help you to lower your usage a lot!

Total power consumption from June 1st up to August 31st: 64 KWh.

BAM!

FBeyer wrote:Total power consumption from June 1st up to August 31st: 64 KWh.

I think I used more than that yesterday.

This is my new focus. I'm going to try and cut our usage in half.

As I stated elsewhere: We've got Scandinavian summer hours and absolutely no need for any kind of AC. I think that I'm leveraging some serious geoarbitrage here

I got the first full-month's bill after switching to LED lights. Our usage dropped by a little more than half.

@jp, is that on a year-ago basis or month-ago basis? If year-ago, that's impressive.

We put LEDs in during our renovation and haven't noticed that kind of difference at all.

Year ago. Month ago is much bigger difference because I ran the AC that month. I've made other changes, but this is the biggest difference. We have a lot of can lights and I think they're the culprit.

I still need to lower our usage some more, so I'm eyeing the extra fridge and freezers now.

We're still not getting below 600kwh/month - but we are mostly home all day, and cook most meals on the electric stove, etc.

I just moved into my apartment in a 100 year old house, so my bill from last month is the only one that counts so far. I used 490 kWh last month, and paid $65. I use the AC at night, not during the day, and I don't cook save for the weekends. I have a small TV for my computer screen, HBO, and Netflix. I do leave two lights on at night. I think the biggest way I'll save money is when it gets cooler in the winter. I live in the southern US, so it's still warm at night.

Avg usage over the year of ~180kWh/month. Everything is electric.
Avg usage for a similar home in my area 243kWh/month. So while I am doing better than the average, I still think there is a ways to go.

Approximate usage breakdown for a month
Hot Water Cyl 70
Fridge 54
Elec Kettle 6
Washing Machine 1
Laptop etc 17
Oven 10
Other un-measured 22

The fridge is a big hitter, it is very old and poorly insulated, but still functions fine. It is hard to justify a new fridge, even getting the highest efficiency rating available it would take 12 years to pay the fridge back from the energy saving.

So on my list of things to do, is convert a small chest freezer to a fridge. They are generally much better insulated and of course the cold air doesn't fall out when you open them. It changes your usage configuration a little, but the energy used is generally way less than half the energy used for a conventional upright fridge.

Laptop etc used more than I thought it would. I have turned a few accessory devices off and try too remember to turn it off if I am not going to use it for a while. This needs a bit more thought.

Hot Water is the largest energy hit. Two months ago I had to replace the cylinder, I was expecting to see some saving from material improvements and design, but it hasn't happened. Will look into adding extra insulation to the cylinder and pipes at some point.

Energy costs are much higher here (Queensland Australia), the monthly connection charge is ~$30 and on-demand power is ~$0.25/kWh. Hot water is run off peak and charged at ~$0.20/kWh.

I bought a Kill a Watt and I've been testing everything in the house. Our cable boxes were a surprise. The DVR cable box was drawing a lot more power than our other regular cable box. About $10 more/month. I moved it to a TV where it's easier to unplug the box when we're not recording anything.

I know most of you eschew cable, but I thought someone might find this helpful if they have it.

Any other surprises? I have wanted a kill a watt for a long while, but just haven't bought one.

I installed electric outlet/switch foam insulation all over the house. Probably only really needed to do it in the external walls, but I figure even the internal ones might open to the roof, so why not ...

The small uptick in feeling warmer is probably just placebo, but there could be a real effect.
http://www.usinspect.com/insights/blog/ ... skets-work

@CM--One of our chest freezers was drawing a lot more than the others. We couldn't figure out why so we transferred the stuff to the other freezer and unplugged it. Our Home Depot has a large number of scratch and dent appliances on sale right now, so we might replace it. The other (pleasant) surprise was the power needed to run the xboxes. Very low. We figured since they were Microsoft products they would be inefficient.

From now on, whenever I get a new appliance I'm going to hook the Kill a Watt up right away to make sure the appliance is as efficient as advertised. I wish I had bought it years ago.

Today is VERY windy from the west. The first cold windy day since we sealed up all of our walls with foam insulation cans. Absolutely no drafts around the outlets/baseboard/windows anymore! Temperature is very evenly distributed. It used to be our large livingroom was alwasy 5 degrees colder.

Also, we haven't turned on the heat this year yet, but this week looks like we might be turning it on. I'm excited to see how our bill stacks up this year after all the work we did.

My PC (on an average of 16 hours/day) is over $60/month. That has to change. I'm thinking of switching to an iMac. I need to look into how much of a cost savings that would be. The computer is over 10 years old and needs replacing anyway.

My desk lamp is $15/month, even with an LED light. I have no idea why. Unfortunately, my office is dark and I need a light when I'm working. I'm considering moving my desk.

@jp - Just received our electric bill for September: $31.20 total ($8.65 is actual usage for 147kWh, the rest is fees and taxes). When I replaced my computer last year, I originally figured on getting a desktop rig and keeping up with hardware upgrades. However, realizing that I practically never switch my computer off, I went with a mini pc (intel nuc) which consumes about 10W. It's also easy to take with me if I travel.

My electrical consumption at my cabin varies between 110-120 W/day. My electrical system primarily consists of lights, but I do charge up my laptop every few days and things like cameras, ipod and drill every once in a while. Right now, the sun is barely up above the horizon so I have to charge my batteries up by generator. If I am being conservative with my batteries, this necessitates a charge every 12 days. My neighbors charge every day. By extrapolating my current usage over the rest of the dark period, my yearly electrical costs (with extra thrown in as a buffer) come to be $100. I could likely decrease this with a more efficient generator, but I'm not going to drop $950 to save $20/yr.

Water consumption prior to putting in the well was about 2 gallons a day. One becomes quite conservative with water usage when you are the one that has to haul the water! Now that I installed a well, I'm less stringent. But still probably using only about 3-4 gal/day.

I'd like to measure wood consumption. I have not taken any steps in this regard yet.

Having to provide for my own power really opened my eyes to how much energy is wasted throughout the world, but especially in America. I am consuming an amount of power that is minute to the average homeowner, which in turn is minute to that of the power consumed by cities. It is still too abstract to firmly grasp how much is used (at least for me), but this increased understanding leads to irritating and more depressing thoughts.

theanimal wrote:My electrical consumption at my cabin varies between 110-120 W/day.

So you are using 1 KWH every 8-10 days. Where I am billed that's $0.08/10 days or less than $0.25/month. This is really impressive, well done.

@Cmonkey- Thanks. It's almost too bad I'm not connected to the grid..$0.25/month! Here it's roughly $1.50/hour to run a generator.

It's not so challenging to have low consumption with a small space. I have special dimmable 10 W LED lights that put out 1100 lumens. They can go down to 1 watt. I usually have them around 6 watts or so.