So while looking at our electric bill yesterday, I noticed that our electric company has a feature to show the last 24 months of invoices. "That might be cool," I thought, and when I saw it had our kWh usage per day, I just had to put it in a graph. (I use Excel FAAAR too much at work and school.)
We just barely missed finishing below 10 kWh/day last month (10.03 to be exact). After looking at this we've decided to set ourselves a goal of 5 kWh/day. Seems pretty daunting to me, cutting our energy use in half when we've already done most of the easy things.
Fortunately, there are still a number of things we plan on doing to hit this goal.
- Stop using the clothes dryer, and instead line-dry our clothes/towels.
- Use the air-dry setting on the dishwasher instead of heat dry.
- Replace the remainder of our lights with either CFLs or LEDs. Our kitchen lighting setup consists of eight 50W MR-16s in a couple of fixtures, which we need to replace since this is one of our most commonly used sources of light. Also, we need to replace our bathroom lights, which consist of six 40W bulbs.
Those are probably going to be the biggest thing to helping us meet this goal. We already unplug everything, have all of the other lights replaced with CFLs, and rarely use the AC.
Wish us luck. Summer is almost here, and we'll need to do everything we can to keep usage down when it is in the triple digits.
