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Old 11-21-09, 06:16 PM   #1
Ryland
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Default I've cut my electrical useage, now what?

I've owned my house for just over a year now so I can now start to compare my utility bills with what I had a year ago, last year it was 28.8KWH per day and this year it was 15.3 KWH per day for the month of October, I realize it's still pretty high but last year it was only two adults in the house this year it was 4 adults.
We have an electric hot water heater, electric range, electric tea water kettle, 50 gallon electric water heater, fridge, smallish chest freezer, dehumidifier in the basement and a natural gas hot air furnace with a fan for the sealed combustion and a fan to move the air around the house and this year we turned the heat on 4 weeks earlier then last year.

So now I'm looking for more ways to cut back,
The dehumidifier is energy star rated and is near the top for a household size and it's set at 60% so it kicks on a few times a day for maybe 30 minutes, more in the summer, it was running non stop before we fixed the drainage problems around the house and got gutters.
The hot water heater now has a water heater blanket on it, it also has a timer that kicks it on at 5am till 7am and 3pm till 6pm, I've also replaced the old 3/4" iron water pipes with 1/2" pex for faster hot water delivery, this has also cut down on our water usage in waiting for hot water to take a shower with, last week I finely got around to replacing the 2.5gpm shower head with a 2gpm shower head, I might try to find a 1.5gpm but they seem harder to find.
Other areas of seem pretty low use, so I'm not really sure where else to cut back, my electric car is once again put away for the winter and it was only using a 3 to 4 kwh per day as it was, we have no TV (15 watt Asus EEE laptop and a Mac Power book of one of the room mates... not sure how much the power book uses) The radio is only on a few hours per day, we do cook but only bake once or twice a week, lights are all low wattage CFL's in the 7 watt to 13 watt range and one 3 watt LED and non of them seem to get left on if they are not being used.
The room mates all want hot water in the morning and in the evening and it's already at a reasonable temp, the basement needs to stay dry for food storage and that my co-home-owner does not like mold, mildew, or dampness and pays half the bills.

So any ideas?

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Old 11-22-09, 02:26 PM   #2
knowbodies
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Considering what you've listed, I'm not sure there's anything you can do that doesn't involve major expenses. Solar hot water - BIG expense. You could look at a more efficient fridge and freezer. Perhaps a larger fridge with a larger freezer compartment would mean you could get rid of the chest freezer altogether.

Other than that, get a Kill-a-watt and use it. I found a couple of crazy things with mine. My coffee maker used to use 10W 24*7 just to keep the clock running. There are 3 other clocks in the kitchen so now I just unplug it when I'm not making coffee. My old cordless phone and answering machine used 15W 24*7. I replaced it with an energystar labelled combined unit that draws 2W instead. An average house probably has 10 to 20 devices like that that are constantly drawing power - they add up.
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Old 11-22-09, 11:35 PM   #3
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The fridge uses around 1.3kwh per day if I remember correctly, I had a borrowed kill-a-watt on it for a week or more when we got the fridge, it's small with a single door and the small freezer inside of it, I looked around and realized that the only fridge that would use less would be something like a fridge without a freezer, I'm not sure what the chest freezer is using but I'm pretty sure it was less then 2kwh hours per day as well, both of these were free so replacing the would have a longer pay back, but it is an option in the next few years if we can find something that is better.
As far as I know we don't have any plug in clocks, I have a single battery powered atomic clock with the indoor outdoor thermometer then everyone has cell phones that have alarm clocks, this takes care of the answering machine draw, the clock radio draw, the cordless phone base draw and the cell chargers that have transformers get unplugged when not in use, mine is a switching power supply that shows -0- on the kill-a-watt over the course of a week if the phone is not plugged in to it.
Coffee is either cold proses coffee, or hot water heated up in the electric tea kettle (50 watt hours to heat 4 cups... if I remember correctly) then a press pot for hot coffee, both are double wall stainless to help keep the heat in.
Solar hot water is on the list as we could use it for space heating as well to help cut down on our natural gas use, but in talking to a friend who installs solar hot water systems he's a little worried about the heat pump water heaters being more cost affective then solar hot water... like for the same money you could get a heat pump water heater and enough PV to power it.
On my list of things to do still are, insulate more hot water pipes.
I already turned the dehumidifier switch from 60% to 65% to see if I notice any dampness problems, for a while I had it set at 55% and for some reason at that point the circulation fan never turns off, at 65% I'm not sure if it will even come on for the next few months.
I currently have a bath fan that comes on with the light, this seems wasteful, I want to get a twist timer switch so it's turned on when it's needed and turns off after the set time.
I also need to check the door bell transformers, I think my house as three of them, all of them are 50+ years old.
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Old 11-23-09, 06:21 AM   #4
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It sounds like you've cut down your electric quite a bit. I think the next logical step would be to start looking at your gas usage. I don't know how bad your house is, but in January of last year, I used 660 kWh of electricity, and 5400 kWh of gas. Thats 8 times more energy in heating (water and forced air heat) than just the base electric load, and that was just one month. Even in the summer, my gas usage has always been higher than my electric usage when converted to kWh. IMO, this makes insulating properly waaaaaaay more important than lowering electric usage, the next runner up would be water heating. I'm planning on making an enclosed shower very soon to reduce shower hot water consumption similar to this: Cozy Low-Energy Shower. I also loooove those http://ecorenovator.org/forum/conser...-recovery.html systems, its just that installing one in my basement is a bit tricky.
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Old 11-25-09, 10:37 AM   #5
Ryland
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I plan to cut my natural gas usage as well, but it's harder to compare as the weather varies so much, we turned the heat on almost a month sooner this year then last, but we have all new windows and doors this year... we also have heat vents open in more rooms this year, I know that per square foot of house my heat bills were low compared to my friends.
Why I was starting out with electrical usage is it's easy to put a meter on, it's also a year round cost.
Last year I used 111 therms of natural gas, or 3253kwh of gas in the month of January to heat a 2,600 square foot 1920's house, in Wisconsin.

Last edited by Ryland; 11-25-09 at 10:48 AM..
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Old 11-29-09, 11:38 PM   #6
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Default I've increased my usage by about 6.5 kWh a day..

By using a heat pump for home heating, instead of oil heat.

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/5055-post120.html

Next month it's going to be much colder and my average usage will be higher.
Maybe 8 to 12 kWh.?.

But, I think the heat pump might still be cheaper than burning oil..

We shall see.
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Old 11-30-09, 03:51 PM   #7
Ryland
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Currently our furnace is in good shape, it was cleaned, inspected and had a year warranty slapped on it a short while back, it is nearly 20 years old so it will not last for ever but it is also a sealed combustion high efficiency model...
Punched our full utility bill in to an online template that our utility has avalible and we use one third the fuel to heat our house of what other houses in our area that are of simaler size and age tend to use and last year were using 2/3 of the electricity, with how we've cut back that electrical usage should drop to 1/3 or less of what everyone else with a house our size and number of people.
The site also allows vague details about usage, so it's not comparing someone with central air to someone without, or a gas water heater to an electric.
It also gives rough prices and savings of different things, like heat pump units and it looked like the pay back would be 15-20 years, at that point I would just go with solar hot water as we have an ok lot for solar, we checked that out before buying the house.

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