hypermiling the house
 

Some Ontario electricity utilities are having a promotion this summer: reduce your consumption by 10% in July & August and you get a 10% credit on the next bill.

niiiice i just need to figure out my base line for my house but i dont know how to read the meater so it might be a while

Hmm, I never thought about the garage door opener. I don't think it would work well for us to leave it unplugged, but now I'm wondering how much it really draws just sitting there waiting for something to happen.

have any of you checked your libery for Kill-a-watt meters, or Watt's Up meters? our libery has three of the watt's up meters, as do all the rest of the liberys in wisconsin.

Holy crap!!! You were using 22kw/h a day!?!?! I wouldn't expect that much usage from someone on this site. I currently use about 8 kw/h per day, give or take depending on the season. I could cut it back even more, but I live with two women, and we all know how that is!! haha....

It is really easy to cut back on electricity usage if you actually care. MetroMPG hit the nail on the head -- unplug the crap that you aren't using. In this age of "energy star" ratings and what not, people get lulled into a sense of security in that their appliances aren't draining electricity. Well, that is not the case at all. If it is plugged into the wall, it is sucking juice. You need to either unplug all of the crap, or get a switch to turn on/off the flow of electricity from the socket.

Congrats too on your reduction! Going from 22 to 8 is pretty damned impressive!!! Now I just need to work on the ladies...

I also pay about 20 cents over here in japan for my kilowatt hours... so I would be saving much more than the average person when I cut back.

Yeah, shameful, eh?

Turns out we were already "beating the EPA" too - the provincial average is 30 kwh / day per household! (900 kwh/mo. - https://www.hydroonenetworks.com/en/e..._MeterRead.pdf )

Hockey: just go look at the meter. Mine has a big row of numbers that labelled "kwh". Can't get much easier that that.

Ryland: good idea. I'm going to look into that.

MetroMPG: You actually inspired me to go to town as well. haha... I ended up watching our meter spin, and it was going so slow that I got tired of watching it!!! I logged us as using about 200 watt hours... per, well, hour!! That is without any lights or anything on. In other words, just what our refrigerator, and lan hookups are using. I am not happy with this number at all though. I did some calculations, and have figured out that we are losing at least 100 watts per hour to things being plugged in, but not being used. Since I don't have a kill-a-watt available over here in Japan, I just decided to unplug everything. Yep, no more anything! Problem fixed!!

But yeah, even in the winter, we max out at around 400-ish kwhs. All of our heating is through wall units that do heat in the winter and cooling in the summer. They are really advanced (as is every electronic in Japan) and this helps us achieve our numbers. I want to have a sub 200 kwh month sometime though, so it is time to get serious here!! This summer is cool enough that I could probably bear through a couple mid 90s Fahrenheit 85% humidity days!

Last month our electric bill was for 56 kw-hrs, for the month. Of course, having 1.8 kw of PVs and a wind generator helps, but they only produce about 300kw-hrs a month at the most, in a windy month, and June wasn't very breezy. We have 2 freezers, 2 fridges, a deep-well water pump, and a shop with table saw, radial arm saw, 3 lathes, drill press, welder, etc.

Before the PVs and wind generator, I don't think we used more than 300kw-hrs a month very often.

Apparently you don't have a family that refuses to think about this stuff half the time! I installed CFLs all over the house not for what they save when the lights are being used, but for what they will save when they are simply left on all day NOT being used! (IR motion sensors aren't practical everywhere.)

Anyway, I just checked the garage door opener with the Kill-A-Watt and it sucks 4W doing nothing. Some other things I've isolated as power hogs when off are:

Dish Network PVR at 20W
Fax copier, 7W
Desktop Computer, 22W

Those aren't huge draws, but add them up 24hrs/day over 30 days and it's 35kWh just for the privledge of being there. (Which really only amounts to about $3/month here.) We have started keeping both the fax machine and computer system switched off on a regular basis through power strips, and the Dish/entertainment center is daisy chained off of a GFI outlet that we just trip at night. Unfortunately our 2nd Dish/TV isn't as easy to do this with.

Now I'm wondering how much I'm throwing away on the microwave clock . .

Hmm, I thought about this. If I just shut off the power strip does this work just as well as actually UNPLUGGING the power strip. I know the power strip might draw a minimal drain, but is just shutting it off very effective. I ask because I have a big screen HDTV as well as AC3 receiver, DVD player, Nintendo, PS1, ect, ect, ect all hooked up to same power strip. I can prob save a nice chunk if I just turn off.

No one uses that darn clock anyway, I think I might start unplugging the M-wave too

So if I turn off the power to the stip-cord on the tv,PS2,xbox,stero. And the strip-cord on the 2 computer,printer,speakers. I can save some money every month?

I really don't feel like unplugging and replugging that everyday.

Most power strips have a complete mechanical disconnect within the switch, so it should kill everything just as well as unplugging it would. I've never seen one that didn't.

BTW: The Kill-A-Watt meters are great for checking a plug-in appliance or two (to see how much current it draws). But in my experience one of these "whole house" meters is well worth it, if you really want to see "the big picture":

https://www.theenergydetective.com/index.html
https://www.gassavers.org/showthread.php?t=2053

Yea I just shut off power for 90% of the day starting yesterday to the following. Xbox, TV, Stero, PS2, 2 Computers w/monitors and speakers, Printer, and the vonage phone box(im getting rid of it anyways). The only thing I left on is the Internet modem and router. Im on the wireless laptop most of the time so I figured I would just leave it on cause im lazy.

I'll check my next few bills and see what happens.

Korax - waiting for your bill is like filling up at the gas station. Use your house's Scangauge, man! Go play meter reader and you can see the impact of what you're doing more or less instantly.

Well it's the hot month right now so the electric bill is higher do to the A/C. when the average temps is around 100 you need to use it lol. And I keep the house @ 75 all day do to 4 dogs in the house. And 73 @ night. But my A/C bill is usually still under $100 a month and around $24 without A/C use.

And my A/C unit has a 12 seer rating on it so it's pretty efficient.

I've always wondered: Do those motion-sensored light switches save money? Or does it take more juice to operate them to compensate for the energy savings of the turned off bulb? I used to have one in my bedroom.

Turn your thermostat for heating down by a degree or two (or, increase the temperature by a degree or two if you are using air con).

More extreme : In the winter, open all curtains on the sunny-side of the house, so that those rooms act like a greenhouse.

Get some plastic sheeting which sticks over the window (if done well, you don't notice it). You leave a 2-4cm air gap, and it acts like double glazing, and saves a lot of heat!.

In the summer - open the curtains at night for places where you can (e.g. not your bedroom or downstairs ones if you are in an area where crime is a problem) - let the heat escape overnight.

Make some french-style shutters for your windows (external shutters), and shut them in the midday sun, when the sun is shining through that window! The french style ones have slats in them, so light gets in, but not direct sunlight!. This combined with the opening curtains at night may well remove most of your need for air-con (assuming you have colder nights).

Buy two large extractor fans, have one installed at the top of a wall at one end of the house (or upstairs if more than one storey), and have another one at the bottom of a room downstairs. Make sure they are rated at e.g. 100w max - get the most efficient ones you can.

When it is colder outside than inside - switch them both on. The upstairs one blows the hot air out of the house, while the downstairs one blows cold (and fresh) air into the house!. Again, this would save a lot of power that might be wasted on air-con.

I can't wait till I build my own house :D

I had a instant hot/cold water cooler I got from a buddy, plugged it in and my electric bill jumped $20.00 a month. after 3-4 months I unplugged it, and I got back my $20 a month :)
90% of my lights are the florescent kind that I noticed a diff. in my bills. but the wife likes to fall asleep with the big screen on ,grrrr 5xs this week I woke up for work and had to shut it off.

time for a timer...

A cheap wireless camera could work nicely in lieu of one of those more expensive monitors. One could for instance view it from their bed over a laptop computer and know that somebody has left the garage lights on again. Hook a bunch of it up over X10 devices and you could control it all through a web enabled cell phone.

I haven't checked the motion sensor switches with a meter, but I'm thinking that they were suposed to use around 3 watts, I installed two for our food co-op in the bathrooms, and have a freind who has one on the bathroom exuast fan.
I know GFI outlets use 2-4 watts for the circut that cuts power when you drop your toaster in the sink, the possitive side of those outlets is that they are designed to run multiple outlets, so for a string of 6 outlets in yoru kitchen you could have one GFI (if wired correctly!) controling the rest of the outlets, insted of 6 outlets saving up to 20 watts.

Refrigerator in garage
 

A refigerator in garage may be the biggest electicity pit. Because a garage is not well insulated, and there is a water heater usually. A garage is the hottest point in a house. I often saw a refrigerator in other's house running continuously. I don't have exact calculation, but it will be worth doing that. I broke the glass door of my commecial refrigerator in the garage, ever since my electric bill is around $50.

I don't know what the fridge in our garage was drawing, but I don't really believe it was using over 50 kWh/mo during the summer, so I wouldn't call it a big electricity pit given that. Regardless, I think it makes a significant payback for itself when the whether goes cold.

Unfortunately after 3 years of having the fridge in the garage, we traded it out as down payment on a used hot tub, so I think at least for this time of year our energy useage is a wash. It most likely won't be in the winter, but we'll still be saving money over the $20 to rent a hot tub for an hour once a month as we have been doing for years. (I know, Ewwwww, gross!)

We had a program similar to that in California during the energy debacle a few years ago. I just turned off the lights that weren't being used, and simply doing that lowered our bill by about 40%. Needless to say we got some big power bill rebates after that.

Nowadays, I also power down and unplug computers at night, as well as unplugging power adapters and power strips at night, as well as anything else that consumes power in an idle state (like the speaker setup in my room). That made for a further reduction in our bill.

The energy-saving bulbs really haven't made any kind of difference that we've noticed, however. Plus they can't be put on a dimmer, and in one case, there's a shade that physically doesn't fit them, so we're probably not even going to bother to keep using them.