It’s been almost two weeks since I declared that I was going to work on bringing down my electric bill. According to the power company, I’m on track for my next bill to be nearly 1/3 of my last bill. This will be accomplished primarily due to the fact that the weather has finally cooled down. I’m not certain, but I think that I turned off both air conditioning units last Tuesday evening which accounts for the drop beginning Tuesday. I did three loads of laundry and ran the dishwasher on Saturday which accounts for the increase on that day.
Here are a few habits that I have been trying to establish to help keep the costs down:
- I rarely turn off my computer. I have however been trying to be much better about putting it to sleep when I’m going to be away from it for awhile.
- I have also been trying to be vigilant about only powering on the printer when I’m actually printing something. That should be pretty easy, since my printer lives on my desk.
- Running the dryer accounts for much of the electricity used in a household. I run one load of delicates every week that I hang to dry. For the rest of my clothes, I run a load of darks and a load of lights, then I have been drying them all together. So far, I have not had any trouble with color bleeding.
- I keep a few items that I don’t use very often (my phone charger, my traditional phone system, and my bluetooth gateway) plugged into a power strip. I only turn on the power strip when I’m using these items. If left plugged in all the time, these items would be drawing electricity even when I don’t need them.
I find it interesting that I actually had two days in my first week of the challenge that were less that any of the days shown above. I’m going to see if I can accomplish more 4 kWh days. I wonder how I did that.
