Your car, your furnace, the air conditioner, even the lights all contribute to the amount of energy that you use in terms of electricity as well as a fuel that you burn in your furnace. By turning your temperature gauge up or down you can save significant amounts of energy and reduce the overall cost of heating and cooling.
Our natural gas supplier has recently announced a 40% increase in the cost of gas. This is what we use to heat our house in the wintertime! A 40% increase is huge and will add a great deal of cost to our annual budget. In addition our electricity provider has also increase the cost of electricity provided to us by 4% which is a lot smaller compared to what our natural gas supplier did. Still this is more money out of our wallets and on an annual basis we’ll probably add at least $100 to the cost of electricity that we use. This is why it is important to reduce the energy that we use to leave more money in our wallets!
Efficient Energy Use – Direct Savings
By simply turning down the thermostat by one or 2° in wintertime will save you at least 10% on your overall energy costs. You will use less fuel and less electricity on your furnace and electricity that you use to run the furnace. Turning off the lights will also save energy. Managing how often you drive your car and bunching together errands will reduce the amount of gasoline that you use. Gasoline recently increased by 20% so makes a lot of sense to be a smart driver. Reduce the amount of gasoline that you actually burn every day. These are direct savings that you can make simply by being smart about how you use electricity. Also fuel to heat your house and gasoline to drive your car.
Efficient Energy Use – Indirect savings
Believe it or not you can also be more efficient energy use indirectly as well. Purchasing larger quantities of food reduces the amount of overall packaging that you have to throw away. The energy that it took to produce packaging is reduced. This will save money in the long run for you in terms of your food costs. Also reduce the amount of shipping and manufacturing cost as well.
Another great example is our water bill. Our water costs are included in the taxes that we pay on our property. Since we don’t have a meter we tend to use a lot more water than we would if it was metered and we had to pay by the cubic meter. By reducing the amount of water that you use you can indirectly affect your tax bill and keep it as low as possible over the coming years.