I just found this video of Les Stroud from the Discovery Channels’ Survivorman series. He and his family live off grid in Western Canada. Check out this video.
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Today marks a shift in this blog. While I will continue to write about home energy savings and my pursuit of energy independence, I’ll also start writing about family and life in general. I’ve got a lot more to say than just the topic of energy efficiency. So, I hope you will join me on this journey.
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We’re 1 month into the “great experiment”. While the kids may disagree with me, I call the experiment a success. We’re all spending much less time in front of the tube, although I’m currently watching the MLB All-Star game. The kids still watch some shows that are still on our Dish DVR, but the frequency has gone down.
The wife and I don’t find ourselves flipping through numerous channels mindlessly looking for something to watch. At first, I must admit to spending a few nights flipping through our 6-8 channels trying to find a good show. Since it doesn’t take long to flip through the channels anymore, I generally snap out of it and read, work on a project, or just spend time with my wife.
Having said all of this, I probably won’t continue the experiment through the fall. I’m a huge football fan and while the networks broadcast their share of games, I’m looking forward to getting ESPN back. The challenge will be to take what we learn during this experiment and watch less TV even when we have many more options.
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June was a tremendous month. Our energy usage went down 173 kilowatt hours this month! The changes we’ve been making have really made a difference! The reason I’m so excited is that our AC was turned on all month and we still saw a decrease. The previous month the HVAC system was turned off for 3 weeks. I’ve previously written about the changes we’ve made to reduce our electricity consumption. It appears the work is paying off.
I think the biggest change we’ve made is just making the commitment to tracking and monitoring our usage. In other words, we took the time to pay attention. The changes we’ve made have no impact on our lives, just a few behavior modifications. Americans have started worrying about the economy, the environment, and generally living by the fear created by the media. Some have gone so far to make a few changes to their spending habits or maybe even adjusted their thermostat a few degrees to save some energy. How many have actually made a commitment to reduce their energy usage. I’ve always said that energy efficiency is not a political issue. Whether your motive is to save money or save the environment (or both), whether you are Republican or Democrat, energy efficiency is for you.
June update:
Our house is all-electric, except for gas used for cooking.
Electricity Usage 6/5/08 - 7/8/08:
Kilowatt Hours: 1,856 (vs. 2,029 last month)
Kilowatt Hours per square foot: 0.60
Electric Bill in $: $152.45
Electric Bill in $ per square foot: $0.049
We’ll see how the next month goes. The temperatures are starting to go up — we’re in the dog days of summer.
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I was helping a friend install some light fixtures in his house Saturday and it required that we spend some time in his attic. The house is 25+ years old, in good shape overall. As we were climbing through his attic, I was talking to him about my interest in energy savings and the good progress we’ve been making on reducing electricity consumption in our home. About the time he asked me for some recommendations on his house, I literally stumbled over a gaping hole in the air duct in his attic.
After catching myself from falling through the ceiling, I inspected the problem. As the air conditioner was running at the time, I could feel cold air coming from a 6″ wide gap between sections of ductwork. To make matters worse, there was no insulation on this section of ductwork. This is a big problem. My friend is paying a lot of money to cool his attic, albeit unintentionally. I know the attic is the place you store all your precious items that you can’t bear to part with, but is it really necessary to heat/cool the space? Of course not!
Actually, since it was getting warm in the attic by this time, the cool breeze was welcome. We finished the lighting install and then discussed what he needed to do to correct the problem. Below are the things I would do to solve this issue:
Double Wrap Ductwork for Greater Savings
Double-wrapping your ductwork is a great project for a beginning do-it-yourselfer. All you need is a sharp utility knife, a few rolls of insulation, and a few rolls of the same tape used on the ductwork (see above). Use a small piece of plywood to lay across your ceiling rafters as a safe place to sit or stand as you work. Depending on how much ductwork you have, this project should take one day of your weekend. The savings could be 10-20% on your heating and cooling bills. Since HVAC costs are the largest components of most homeowner’s energy bills, the savings could be significant. Total cost for this project should be in the $250-$500 range depending on how much ductwork you have.
I hope everyone had a great 4th of July holiday. Have a great day!
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May’s energy usage was essentially flat compared to April’s bill of 1,996 KWH. In last month’s update, I reported a fuel price increase and the need for me to do some more research on it. I didn’t get any more good answers from SWEPCO. Our AC ran for most of the month, and still we only had an increase of 33 KWH. I consider that to be a stellar month. Ordinarily, I would have expected the increase to be larger, but we made several changes that helped out.
First, we got serious about making small changes to reduce our energy usage. I changed out about 30 light bulbs that previously were not CFL’s. The biggest thing has been the continuation of the Kill-A-Watt Project (discussed here and here). As I’ve discussed before, you must have an Energy Saving Attitude. Consistently making small changes, progressing little by little will get you where you need to go. Keep at it, that’s my philosophy.
May update:
Our house is all-electric, except for gas used for cooking.
Electricity Usage 5/6/08 - 6/5/08:
Kilowatt Hours: 2,029 (vs. 1,996 last month)
Kilowatt Hours per square foot: 0.65
Electric Bill in $: $165.98
Electric Bill in $ per square foot: $0.054
June is shaping up to be a great month as well. As of today, I’ve used just under 1,000 KWH in 17 days of the billing cycle. That calculates to less than 1,800 for the month if things hold up.
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That’s right, we did it. Actually my wife did it. We decided that our family had become too addicted to our television, so we decided to cancel our service with Dish Network. With vacations, long summer evenings, and plenty of activities to keep us busy, watching re-runs of the same old shows just doesn’t make sense. I’d much rather spend time with my family in activities that engage our brains. We’re going to give this a test run for the summer and see how it goes. My two daughters aren’t quite sure what they are going to do without Dora the Explorer and Hannah Montana. We haven’ completely given up television. I installed an HDTV antenna this past weekend which gives us access to 4-5 channels of network programming. We get the local affiliates of CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, Fox, and the CW (whatever that is). This should satisfy our television needs without letting us succumb to watching some of the drivel that is put on some of the channels we received.
To tell you the truth, I’m going to miss several shows myself. In fact, here’s a list of the top 5 things I’ll miss about not having satellite TV.
Technically, we didn’t cancel our service. We put it in “vacation” mode. This basically means we pay them $10 a month to not have service. At first that sounded crazy, but if we decide to re-establish our service, we can do so with a 5 minute phone call instead of jumping through the hoops of signing a new contract.
I’m actually looking forward to reading more, spending more time outside, and generally relaxing. I forget how hard it is to relax with too many distractions. I’m trying to learn that simple is better.
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I’ve been going a little nuts with my latest gadget, the Kill-A-Watt. In my last two posts (here and here), I talked about using a Kill-A-Watt meter to track energy usage on specific devices to see what they are costing me. Primarily, I’m trying to eliminate phantom electric loads — electricity used by devices even when they are turned “off”. Below is an update to my progress and the changes I’ve made to lower energy usage.
In going through this process, I’ve realized that energy efficiency is very much an issue of attitude. If you decide to make the changes necessary to save energy, you will be successful. Attitude means you think about energy conservation when walking through the house and turning lights off. Attitude means turning off brighter overhead lights in favor of smaller lamps. Small changes are what will make the difference over the long haul. I keep hoping I’ll find the big energy hog that will reduce my electricity usage in large amounts. Reality is, if I keep at it over the long haul I will eventually get where I want to be — energy independent.
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Sorry for the gap in posts. We have had some major problems with our home internet connection over the past two weeks. What started out as intermittent outages turned into numerous phone calls with AT&T. Ultimately, the problem required a visit from a technician who changed out a port at a junction box somewhere in our neighborhood. Problem solved, right? Wrong. Now the modem had to be reset. More phone calls with AT&T. Finally got that fixed and then our wireless network went down. It took me a couple of days to diagnose and fix the wireless network. Everything has now been stable for 24 hours, so I think we’re good to go.
The Kill-A-Watt project is progressing, however. I measured the energy usage of my home theater system when turned “off” over the Memorial Day weekend while we were out of town. In just over 48 hours, the system used 2.13 KWH. Round this to 1 KWH per day at $0.08 per KWH and it’s costing me $30 per year just to keep the home theater system “off”. I wasn’t sure what the cost would be, but I must admit to being a little surprised. There are probably at least 6-8 other places in my home where these phantom loads are costing me.
The easiest solution is to use a power strip and turn it off when the system’s not in use. Sounds simple enough. However, most of our power strips are ugly, hidden behind furniture. My solution is to integrate a switch into my power strip setup. The switch will be located on the entertainment center in a convenient location. We can turn it on only when the TV is in use. This definitely fits in the category of making small changes. If I can make several of these changes, the savings will add up.
Other projects: I’m planting a couple of trees on the south side of our home. During the summer the sun beats down on this side of the house causing the brick wall to heat up and transfer the heat to the interior of our house. It will take a few years for the trees to provide any real shade, but they are Bradford Pear trees, which are fast growing.
Once again, sorry for the gap in posts. It’s great to be back!
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I’ve been tracking my electricity usage daily since my last post and even though it’s just a few days worth of data, I’m starting to get a little concerned. With mild springtime weather allowing us to turn off the HVAC system for the last several weeks, I fully expected my energy usage to be better. The last few days have been averaging 60 - 70 KWH. Not bad. This equates to a monthly usage of 1,800 - 2,000 KWH. However, since my largest energy hog is turned off, what can be using this amount of electricity. I plan to attack the problem over the next couple of weeks by employing a gadget I purchased a while back but haven’t used much — Kill-A-Watt. This cool device plugs into a normal wall receptacle and measures the amount of electricity used by anything plugged into the Kill-A-Watt.
My hope is that by systematically testing several items around the house, I’ll figure out which items are the biggest energy hogs. Below is a list of the items I plan to tackle first.
I hope by paying attention to the little things, we can make a dent in our monthly usage. The Kill-A-Watt will be the biggest tool I will use to measure energy usage on these items. Persistence will be the key to making real changes. It will take a lot of small but deliberate moves to slowly lower our electricity needs. I’ll give an update in the next few weeks on my progress.
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