This will be our final post about conserving energy use in the form of electricity. We wanted to show the usage for the past week. In addition show the relative power consumed during on-peak, mid-peak and off-peak hours. We have saved over $400 on our annual bill for electricity this past year and we are very happy about this. We could probably save more, but there is a certain quality of life that we look for in terms of comfort and lifestyle. Some consumers will not know what the word hydro means. It is a term that describes the generation of electricity by using dams with water driving the electrical generators instead of nuclear power or coal or gas fired plants.
But first our chart. This is for a week in August , 2011 when we are running Air Conditioning and a pool pump as well as the usual stuff that you would have in a house. My wife also runs a fan at night in our home in our bedroom as well to move the air around more.
Analyzing Daily Hydro Consumption
We reduced our consumption significantly by following these steps listed below :
- Running the pool pump in off normal hours
- Same with the AC and most lights
- Drying clothes at night or on the weekends
- For more information, refer to our previous post.
- Convert incandescent lights to florescent lights 100%
The weekends were Aug 13/14 and 20/21st. The difference in the height of the columns was caused by the fact that we really ran the AC on the second weekend a lot due to high temperatures and very humid weather. You can see what a difference it makes both in KW consumption as well as cost. Imagine if that had been during on-peak time frames. We try to keep our consumption to the weekends and off-peak hours as much as possible which runs from 7pm until 7am in the morning every day and all weekend long.
Keep it cooler in the Evening
We would like it to be kept cooler for the evening and over night to make it comfortable for sleeping. During the day it is not as important for the house to be kept cool so we usually shut the AC off instead of allowing it to run.
Turning off fluorescent lights really does not save that much. Converting from incandescent lights to florescent lights can make a larger difference in the amount of energy that you save. If you have not changed the lights over to florescent lights, it is time to do so and reduce that part of your electric bill.
However if you are still using incandescent lights, turning these lights off will have a much larger impact. For example we leave 4 lights on all night ( 3 outside and 1 inside) and we consume three cents per hour. I think we can afford that! It takes a few weeks to fully get into the habit to manage your power usage to achieve these savings of 22% year over year. Sometimes the family is more difficult so you just have to keep up with it to reenforce the habit.
What’s Next to Reduce Our Energy Consumption?
Now that we have achieved significant savings in power, we are wondering what is next in terms of power reduction or generation if that is even possible for our family. Future posts will focus more on alternative energy and generation of energy to further reduce our energy foot print.
We heat our home by natural gas, already have a mid efficient furnace in place and a programmable thermostat as well. So we have done all we can to manage the energy consumption in that area as well. We turn down the temperature at night to 17C which some people would consider pretty cold.
We have a gas fireplace which we use a great deal and the efficiency level for the fireplaces is 75% which is not bad for a fireplace.
The next step has to be generating our own hydro electricity and either using power we generate or feed it back into the power grid to generate savings. We are going to look at this subject in much more detail going forward.
Any help we can get would be appreciated. Comments are welcome. For more posts about reducing your electricity consumption, click here.
July 23rd, 2012 on 8:53 pm
personally i do not care about how much the electricity costs me. I just run my AC so it is cool inside. I have lots of money so not to worry, but I can understand that if you are short on cash , this is a good way to save some money by cutting back on electrical use.