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Old 04-25-14, 05:37 PM   #71
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Another month, another bill. Thankfully this one is significantly smaller than last!]
Good work Daox!

But have you considered including the automotive fuel that you (and presumably your wife) use?

I suspect that as a percentage of your monthly home energy use, your automotive fuel use may be fairly significant.

It is energy consumed and money out of pocket.

I really wonder how big a slice automotive fuel would occupy on a pie chart.

-AC

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Old 04-26-14, 10:54 AM   #72
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That is an interesting question! Thankfully, I keep track of all my fuel economy over at EcoModder.com.

In March, we used 841 kWh of gasoline. Add that to the 1765 kWh of usage at the house gives me 2606 kWh total. So, my gasoline fuel usage is 32% of my energy usage, and the house use is the remaining 68%.
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Old 04-27-14, 09:07 AM   #73
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That is an interesting question! Thankfully, I keep track of all my fuel economy over at EcoModder.com.

In March, we used 841 kWh of gasoline. Add that to the 1765 kWh of usage at the house gives me 2606 kWh total. So, my gasoline fuel usage is 32% of my energy usage, and the house use is the remaining 68%.
That's a sizable chunk of your energy use, but it is a good bit smaller than I would have guessed.

I checked over at Gasoline gallon equivalent - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and found that the energy content of gasoline is 33.41 kWh/gal.

Since your gas consumption was 841 kWh, that means that your gallons used was:

841 / 33.41 = 25 gallons for the month for both you and your wife.

Sounds like your wife doesn't have a car and you live pretty close to work.

Amazingly thrifty!

-AC

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Old 04-27-14, 09:27 AM   #74
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Our main car is a 2004 Prius, so the gas mileage is pretty good (lifetime average of ~50mpg). The other car that I drive right now is a 1997 Sunfire that averages about 30 mpg in (almost nabbed a 2003 Honda Insight the other day, but thats another story). I also have a 1981 Honda CM400 that gets me 45+ mpg that I ride when weather allows. My daily commute is 14 miles round trip. Hers is about double that. We also are conscious about combining trips, and if we can, we'd rather walk (weather allowing). So, nope, we don't use a ton of fuel.
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Old 11-20-14, 03:34 PM   #75
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This thread is well overdue for an update. In mention of cars, I've somewhat recently replaced the 97 Sunfire with a 99 Metro that basically double the gas mileage of my commuting. I don't have a full month yet of fuel usage, but next month I can do that analysis.

This month was comparably quite cold though. Actually, it was the coldest November since I moved into the house. We averaged 26.9 HDD/day. Last year was horribly cold and we only averaged 24.6 HDD/day. I hope we're not in for an even colder winter this year. Time will tell.

Of course, this all means I used more energy than last year.

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Old 11-27-14, 02:30 AM   #76
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Impressive usage. Going through my bills. While my usage has gone down over consistently over the last year, my lowest in the last 24 months, which happened this cycle was 684 kwh. A good 176 over your highest. You win sir!
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Old 11-28-14, 06:27 AM   #77
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Thanks. I've worked a fair amount at reducing my phantom loads. All in, I'm under 100W base load. I also have a gas dryer and gas heating. However, the water heater is electric. Those things all make a big difference.
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Old 11-28-14, 06:51 PM   #78
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All in, I'm under 100W base load.
Good Work! I can't seem to get my base load below ~350W. Then again, I loaned my Kill-a-watt and spare TED 1001 to a buddy at work who had a couple of $300+ electric bills over the summer. I need to bug him about getting those gauges back, and just charge him a percentage of the savings I can find and just go through his house for him.
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Old 11-28-14, 07:05 PM   #79
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...I can't seem to get my base load below ~350W. \..
It was very interesting, when I did the Rent-a-Flir, to see how much heat energy is coming from a single GFI device. I didn't put a Kill-a-Watt on it to find out what the wattage draw was, though it would certainly be possible.

Modern building code requires GFIs and ArcFault devices on many if not all circuits, so that could be a source of power leakage.

I tell you, the Rent-a-Flir taught me a lot about wasted power.

-AC
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Old 11-30-14, 09:53 PM   #80
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Good Work! I can't seem to get my base load below ~350W. Then again, I loaned my Kill-a-watt and spare TED 1001 to a buddy at work who had a couple of $300+ electric bills over the summer. I need to bug him about getting those gauges back, and just charge him a percentage of the savings I can find and just go through his house for him.
Whoa, that's over 10 times my base load. I tracked down my base load vampires by using the $20 ebay TED and went to the breakers and shut them off individually while I wrote down the results with a pen. Found my doorbell and thermostat/furnace transformers are just over 10 watts together. Oddly enough they are on the same circuit. Even with those on I'm sitting at 27 watts right now versus the 50 or so I was at before. I dumped the TED and now have an eGauge. I trip the GFCIs to an unused bathroom and trip the GFCI in the kitchen when I'm not using it because the oven's control panel is hungry. Oddly enough my garage door opener ended up on one of the GFCI circuits so I'll trip that too.

I'm not sure how much my wireless router uses but I'm thinking it might be about 15 watts of the remaining puzzle. I can't monitor my eGauge live without it being connected to the Internet but I suppose I should search for my Kill-a-watt.

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