Greetings from Northern Indiana!
 

I'm here mostly because I'm interested in learning new creative ways of reducing my NIPSCo bill (electric / natural gas utility) while making my home perform like I want. I'm pretty excited I just slashed my natural gas usage by installing a water heater blanket on my new water heater, not to mention the basement it's located in will remain cooler where I have some food storage. I did this about 5 or 6 weeks ago and just got my first NIPSCo bill since then and it looks like my summer usage dropped from an average of about 1 therm per day down to less than 0.6. It may have helped :rolleyes: that I also shut off the pilot for the baseboard heat boiler for the first time. I also have clothes dryer and kitchen stove / range running on natural gas.

Thinking about super-insulating my 2x4 frame house. This probably won't happen for a few years until I can afford to replace the plastic siding with brick. Been lurking here for about a month, looking forward to learning from the wealth of experience and knowledge shared here.

Welcome to ER:)

Looks like you're off to a good start, reducing your water heater's energy usage by 40% is quite impressive. You should find lots of ideas here, and if you have any questions just ask:)

Can you line dry your clothes? No point in wasting energy to do what the sun and wind do for free.

Seal up any leaks first. This is much cheaper, helps alot, and you can do it yourself. Have you added insulation to the attic?

Thanks, Piwoslaw

I've sealed up all the holes in my ceiling but I need to fix some small leaks in the AC handler and ductwork which all starts in the attic. I think I need to box in the air handler and the trunkline with foamboard to isolate from the warm attic. There's about a foot of blown-in cellulose in the attic which I plan to add to after the other issues are resolved. Meanwhile I'm debugging my diy whole house fan I put in the attic access so as to reduce the need for AC. It works but I need to add an electrical switch with maybe a timer or thermostat so it can run a few more hours in the cool of the morning after I've gone to work.

The idea of an outdoor clothesline has several problems that the wife will not tolerate, but she does conserve on the dry time for most loads and hangs things up indoors to finish drying them. So far there has never been a moisture problem in the house that I could detect, although I know it's something I'll have to watch as I seal things up more.

The house is 24 yrs. old and we've lived here for 5 years. This is our first home ownership experience. AC system was added to the house 9 or 10 years ago.

Daox has a setup which draws warm air from the attic on a sunny day to reduce heating use, and (iirc) reverses it in the summer. He's using an Arduino to control it, so it has lots of potential.
Using attic heat for the house