energy tips

I found some useful tips in "How to Fix Your Life in 2008," in today's Wall Street Journal. The energy section is particularly interesting. One thing they recommend is to go to the energystar website and see how your energy bill stacks up against similar homes across the country. You can find it at www.energystar.gov under Home Energy Yardstick. I just completed my audit for 2006 and found that we are in the bottom 1%. That means we are better than 99% of homes. I am happy to say that our 2007 energy bills are much lower.

To give you some background, we do live in an above average sized home in California. It definitely qualifies as a luxury home. We are not some hermits living in the desert. We do have and use the latest and greatest appliances including a home theater system with widescreen TV -no plasma though-, gaming consoles, several computers -that are used daily and nearly round the clock-, high speed internet access, and the like. And no, I do not feel like we had to cut back or restrict ourselves in 2007. And we still have a ways to go as most of our light bulbs are the conventional incandescent type. Not because we do not like CFL's, but why replace a perfectly good bulb? When it burns out we will replace it, but for now things are fine.

We do not have solar panels, wind mills, or any other energy producing device. We buy all our power from the utility and we pay regular prices for it. Apart from electricity our home uses natural gas to cook, to heat water and for the furnace. All other appliances are electric. In our area 2006 was a year with 2932 heating degree days and 1019 cooling degree days. You can find out more about that on energy star, but suffice it to say, a regular year.

Our key improvements over the last two years have been in removing all appliances that work in standby mode. You know these boxes that are plugged in and use electricity even when they are "off." Removing these is as simple as putting them on a powerstrip and turning the powerstrip off. It is actually easier than using the individual off buttons -even with remote- that do not turn things off. Our whole home theater system is on such a strip. When we are done using it, I get up and flip the switch, simple. When I need it I flip the switch again and all the boxes light up and are ready to go. We did the same for many kitchen appliances. We no longer have fifteen clocks that all read a different time and that all need to be reset several times a year (where we live the power goes out at least 5 times a year).

But most importantly we turn things off when we don't need them. Although the WSJ does not mention this trick, I believe it is the number one energy saving method, and the easiest one too. Turn things off. It isn't hard.

There are no extra lights here to brighten the sky, and even the always-on internet box goes off when it is not in use for more than 10 minutes (say during lunch). That too is easy. The computers sleep when they are idle for 5 minutes and their sleep modes are very efficient. They spin down the disk and turn off the displays. Both reboot very quickly and I never feel I have to wait. But our key improvement for 2007 has been to retire the clothes dryer. A huge savings and our clothes look better than before. Nothing like sun and wind to dry clothes. It is the cheapest solar power you can get. The $5.00 clothesline has already paid for itself several times over. It has the best return on investment so far this year. Even though my stocks did quite well, they did not come close.