Trying to cut your electricity use? Before you begin, start by measuring your current use.
If you are trying to cut your electricity bill, begin by measuring. That's my first tip for saving electricity. Once you know what you're using for each light, appliance, or other device in your home, you will easily find ways to cut waste.
I ought to know. Our family foursome went from using a mere third as much as comparable families in our province, to only one sixth as much. We measured our electricity consumption, and from there it wasn't hard to find ways to cut waste. Most of our neighbors are amazed when we tell them how little electricity we use.
We had a solar engineer do a site assessment back in 2006, when we were thinking about installing solar panels to generate our own power. The engineer said we should really cut our energy use in half first, since it is always cheaper to conserve energy than to generate more of it from solar panels. But we were only using 11 kilowatt hours (kwh) per day, I told him. Well, then, he said, you should cut it to 6 kwh.
This amazed me - we already used far less power than our neighbors. Could we cut another 50%?
The engineer assured us we would figure it out, if we measured our electricity usage carefully. He sold us a Kill A Watt meter, which measures the power consumption of electrical devices, such as watts used for a light, blow dryer, or fan, or kilowatt hours over time, for a chest freezer or washing machine.
We measured or estimated the energy use of every light, appliance, or other electrical device in our house. The furnace fan, the central air conditioning system, window fans, kitchen and bathroom fans. Laptop and peripherals. Television, DVD and VCR. To measure lights, you can just read the light wattage printed on the bulb, and estimate how many hours the light is left on each day. For electronics, fans and the like, measure the wattage with the Kill A Watt meter and do a similar calculation. For the fridge and freezer, we used the kilowatt hours measurement of the meter over a 72 hour period, then calculated kwh per day. For the washer and dryer, we checked kwh per load, and estimated number of loads per year.
Once we had our numbers and could calculate approximate electricity use per year, we went to our past year's bills. Surprisingly, our estimates were bang on.
Our next action was to tackle the major energy users, and the many small items that are constantly running but provide little benefit.
The top energy users in terms of kwh used per year were a wine cellar, chest freezer, refrigerator, and lighting. Combined, these used a total of over 1,600 kwh/year. Energy users that provided little or no benefit included computer peripherals (cable modem, router, a printer used once a month or less); and a coffee maker, bread maker, and other devices with electronic clocks, that stayed connected when not in use. All told, these phantom loads used over 300 kwh/year.
Our first action was to switch off the wine cellar. We decided it wasn't ecologically sustainable to use as much energy as is found in 500 pounds of coal, to keep a wine cellar running, so we just kept the wines at the basement's natural temperature. The second thing I learned about saving electricity is that you need to challenge yourself to redefine necessities as luxuries, and give them up. Other so-called necessities you might decide to treat as luxuries might be air conditioning, basement beer fridges, and any appliance our grandparents managed perfectly well without.
A temperature check of our energy efficient refrigerator showed that someone had accidentally turned the freezer thermostat down, so the compressor spun constantly and kept the freezer temperature far too low. We now check our refrigerator and freezer temperatures monthly, to avoid accidentally wasting electricity on our fridge and freezer.
Next we shut down our chest freezer, which we were no longer making much use of. It was no more than half full, and much of the food inside it had been frozen for over a year. We used to preserve a lot of our own food, but had stopped a few years before, but we had somehow kept on using the freezer. By eating, composting, or moving food to the fridge freezer, we added 360 kwh per year to our electricity savings, which yields the third lesson I learned about saving electricity: Challenge your own ideas about what you consider necessary.
Lighting was another big area to cut electricity use. Here are two important tips on how to save electricity on lighting: use lights less (turn them off, use fewer lights in a fixture, use dimmer switches, take advantage of natural daylight), and install more energy efficient lights such as compact fluorescents and LED house lights. We probably eliminated 40 kwh/year off our lighting by taking such actions.
The devices that used a few watts while providing no benefit were easy to deal with. We put the computer and peripherals on a power supply bar, which was switched off when the computer wasn't being used. Five watts may sound like almost nothing, but multiply it by a half dozen devices and by 24 by 365 hours, and it adds up to a bundle. We were using 180 kwh/year on peripherals, and got that down to 15 kwh/year. The VCR, and other devices with electronic clocks were using another 125 kwh/year. So here's my fourth key lesson: unplug anything that isn't immediately needed. Any appliance that has an AC adapter, or that can be switched on by a remote control, should be completely unplugged when you don't need it. Anything with a digital clock must be drawing a small amount of power to keep the clock showing. This might only be half a watt but more often it's closer to the 1-3 watt range (9-27 kwh/year). That includes furnaces and AC systems when they're not running - turn them off at the circuit breaker.
As we cut down on waste both big and small, our electricity consumption dropped from 11 kwh/day to 8 kwh/day, a quarter of the typical usage for our area. And as we cut out big electricity consuming devices, addressing smaller energy wasters started to matter more.
For example, our stove only accounted for 5% of original energy use, but after our first energy saving measures, it accounted for 7.5% of the new total. So we changed our cooking habits. We began to use our crock pot more, and did less roasting and baking. We got careful about measuring water before boiling it on the stove. No more opening the oven door every three minutes to check the cookies. This brings me to my fifth tip on saving electricity:
Keep raising the bar. You can always find more ways to cut.
Keep setting more ambitious savings goals. You'd be surprised at how little energy it takes to live a happy, pleasurable life. Do daily meter readings to see if your use is falling as expected, or staying level, or starting to climb.
Believe me, once you have started measuring, and eliminating waste, and seeing how much energy you save, you'll be hooked, just like I was. Who said saving energy couldn't be fun?
Robin Green owns Green-Energy-Efficient-Homes.com, a website that helps people cut their home energy use. For more on saving electricity, see How to save electricity and Kill A Watt meter on Green Energy Efficient Homes.
