Blog Action Day

Chris and I are trying to reduce our carbon footprint, and feel that we have made great headway with our electricity usage, which I share with you below.

:::I should note here that we do not receive our electricity and gas from the same company. The gas we have in the house is our hot water heater, range top, oven, and in the winter, heater and fireplace. The electricity powers the lights, most appliances, and the AC. I will not compare our gas bills here because most of the items that use gas are necessities, however we do practice conservation; we wash all of our clothes in cold water, take short showers and shower at the gym whenever possible, and do our best to wear warm clothes in the winter. Unfortunately (and YES, I say unfortunately), our water is not metered, so I really have no idea how much water we are using, and conversely, how much water we can save.:::

It has been a sort of game for us to see how low we can get our electricity bill.

I our old house was built in 1978, and we “enjoyed” the original AC unit until 6/2006, so our summer bills would regularly reach $150+ for electricity (cheap by some standards) and reach the 1200+ KWh range. Our new house was built in 1998, and the envelope is sealed much tighter, minimizing drafts and keeping temperatures relatively constant inside the shell. Our highest KWh usage at the new house is 585 KWh. We use the cool air of summer nights to cool the house by opening windows at night and closing them in the morning. Surprisingly, the house stays cool to the point where the AC usually doesn’t kick on unless it reaches 98^o+. This has definitely helped with the electricity bill since we probably only used our AC a dozen days this summer.

In April 2007 we replaced 85% of the light bulbs in our house with CFLs (compact fluorescent bulbs), put most phantom energy loads on power strips where we could shut them off (do I really need to leave my coffee maker plugged in all the time?), and made a concerted effort to use only one light in the room we were in at any given time after it was dark.

And boy, have these changes made a world of difference.

Since we have lived in our current house for a year, I now have 12+ months of electricity bills in which I can share to show how much energy we are using. In researching this post, I assumed I still had access to the last 12 months of usage data from our old house, but this is not the case. And at one point I had a sheet of paper with the previous owner’s usage of our current house, but that somehow was thrown away also. That would have certainly made for fun comparison.

Our Electricity use in our new house, 1875 square feet built in 1998
9/2006 – 8/2007

In the table, I include kilowatt hours (KWh) as the measure of electricity used. The cost of our electricity, although relatively low, continues to climb yearly, and price is not a fair measure of energy use and is not listed here. I noted the years above, but only show the months in the graph for illustration purposes.

KHw---Month
380* September
563 October
451 November
585 December
586 January
483 February
488 March
456 April
427 May
385 June
553 July
492 August
499 September
392 October

*Partial month

The changes we made have not lessened our quality of life, and in fact using candles and not lights has improved our quality of life (nudge nudge, wink wink). But really, I’m excited to see these results and look forward to seeing how much farther we can take this. I urge you all to do the same.

I call it the carbon footprint shrinking game! …And every little bit helps!