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Emu in Fred’s Fridge $0.99 … |
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Brita 35530 Ultramax Dispenser $27.97 Brita’s advanced water filtering systems help remove chlorine, sediment, zinc, and other harmful substances such as cadmium, copper, benzene, lead, and mercury, for clean, great-tasting water. With a tank that holds up to 1.13 gallons of water and fits neatly on countertops and refrigerator shelves, the Ultramax Smart Dispenser is the perfect size for a small office or family. It comes with an inn… |
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Arm & Hammer Fridge Fresh Refrigerator Air Filter-4.3 oz $2.07 Arm & Hammer Fridge Fresh Refrigerator Air Filter Easier to maneuver and store, Arm & Hammer Fridge Fresh allows for up-front storage, creating 2x more odor-eliminating availability!Baking soda is usually kept in the back of the refrigerator where it cannot be spilt.Arm & hammer Fridge Fresh is able to hang and cling to doors, walls, and just about anywhere you want it.Comes with a convenient repl… |
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Five simple things you should do to cut your energy costs
If you’ve already upgraded some of your light bulbs to CFLs, bought a new energy saving air conditioner, or taken other actions to cut your family energy costs, you may feel you have run out of energy saving options. A look at the dozens of websites that provide energy saving ideas will usually provide the same set of basic strategies – many of which, I suggest, don’t save you money at all. In this article I will put forward five easy ideas for reducing your energy use, that you likely won’t find on a typical government website or home energy savings site.
1. Measure your energy usage
Any wholehearted attempt to reduce consumption should start from knowing how much you use. If you don’t know how much energy you consume, and where or when you’re using it, efforts to cut excess may be misdirected. You want to focus your efforts on choices that are the most productive in terms of the savings they generate. You also want to measure the result of your energy reduction efforts, to see if they had the expected savings.
I’ve heard many neighbors boast that they’ve converted their tungsten lights to compact fluorescent lights, but on further scrutiny it seems they merely switched lights in infrequently visited rooms. A CFL located in a furnace room may only be on 10 hours a year. The energy savings from that replacement amount to just 3 pennies per year, which means the price of the compact fluorescent will never be regained in energy savings.
When you think about both the power consumed over the lifetime of a fluorescent light and the resources used to manufacture a CFL, there are probably no energy savings to upgrading light bulbs in seldom used areas. By measuring or estimating the annual energy usage of each appliance, light, or other energy-consuming item in your home, you can determine which areas will yield the most savings by moving to a more energy efficient alternative.
For plug-in electrical appliances it is easy to measure their energy usage with a household electricity monitor such as the Kill A Watt meter. Using such a monitor, and some straightforward math, I was able to calculate the total power consumption, in kwh, of dozens of devices in my house. The calculations helped me determine that some devices that used very little electricity were in fact major electricity wasters (because they were connected 24×7 although they were really only normally in use a few hours each day), while some big devices had almost no impact because they were seldom used. This process helped us permanently cut our home energy usage by over 30% in a matter of a couple of months.
once you calculate and prioritize the ways to achieve your energy goals, be sure to measure overall home electricity consumption every so often thereafter to see whether your reduced costs are making a difference. In one study, researchers found that merely providing homeowners with a regular update on their electricity consumption resulted in electricity reductions averaging over 10%.
2. Do less
This may sound trivial, but the easiest way to save electricity is not to use it. Try not to use lights, for example. When our youngest was in Preschool we hired a nanny who had grown up in the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. I often came home from work to find her and my son sitting indoors with the lights out. She told me that in Saint Lucia it would be considered wasteful to turn a light on when it’s daytime. Since then I’ve attempted to get by on daylight alone whenever I can, although on a cloudy winter day you occasionally do need a little boost from the odd light bulb!
Other ways in which you could do less are doing less laundry, driving less, heating and cooling less. You might not have to launder that shirt or pair of trousers you wore for a night out, just because you wore it once. And you can dry clothes on a line or indoors on a drying rack rather than use an electric dryer. As for driving, you might live in a suburb where walking to the supermarket, schools, or work is impossible, but I live in a fairly urban area where I can walk or take the bus to all of these places, and yet many of my neighbors still drive for all their errands. Even if you live far from public transit, you can often cut back on car usage by being careful to plan trips ahead of time and by combining two errands into one drive. Even calling ahead to make sure a store is open can save a pointless trip to a shop that turns out to be closed.
Doing less driving not only saves you the costs of gas and wear and tear and insurance (we get a discount on our car insurance because we don’t drive to work), but improves your health by keeping you more active. I always laugh, when I leave my office job at 5pm to cycle home, to see a dozen coworkers in the office sports facility cranking away on exercise bikes. When they’re done that they’ll hop in their SUV’s and drive home (to homes nearer the office than mine). If they simply biked to work as I do, they would get as much workout without polluting or spending their money on fuel.
You can lower your heating and cooling costs easily by doing less: lowering the thermostat in winter (and adding slippers and a sweater to your indoor attire) and pushing up the thermostat in hot weather (and dressing down).
We manage our cold Canadian winters with the thermostat set to 66F when we’re active in the house, and set back to 60F at night, and down to 56F when we’re typically out of the house and don’t need to keep the place warm.
In hot weather you can likely cope with warmer indoor temperatures just by growing acclimatized to a higher thermostat setting on your AC system. We found this out while staying for ten months in Central America without air conditioning; within a couple of months of moving there we became quite acclimatized to temperatures of 85-90F inside. Unfortunately, many offices are kept considerably cooler than that in hot weather, which makes getting used to a warm house more challenging, but it can be done.
Doing less will often save you more energy than you can save by investing in more energy efficient appliances, or home energy upgrades. Many efficiency upgrades have no effect on savings because we tend to use a more efficient appliance more often since it costs less to run. If instead of upgrading you just try to stop using the item as much, you will certainly save money.
The Jevons paradox is the term used to describe this phenomenon. The main idea of the Jevons paradox is that any increase in efficiency (whether in energy use, money use, or other) is almost always matched by an equivalent and offsetting increase in usage. When the first washing machines were introduced, the result wasn’t less time spent doing laundry – people spent just as much time doing the laundry, they just started washing more clothes in the same amount of time. In my grandmother’s youth people wore the same clothes again and again without washing them, but most people today throw everything in the laundry bin if it’s been worn only once.
You can see the Jevons paradox happening with many modern household appliances. Refrigerator technology has made significant of progress on energy efficiency in the last ten years; it takes far less electricity to cool a given air volume now than it did in 1985. But improvements in efficiency have been eliminated by an equivalent rise in refrigerator size. My mother in law, who lives on her own, recently purchased a refrigerator that looks large enough for the Brady Bunch. It’s an ENERGY STAR refrigerator, because it consumes less electricity than the minimum required standard for a refrigerator in its class. But even though she thinks she is saving electricity, she will actually pay more money on cooling her food than she used to. (Even worse, there will probably be even more waste, as the increased size of home refrigerators in America has been matched by a significant increase in discarded food. A bigger fridge often just means more room to lose leftovers or last week’s meatloaf.)
“Energy efficient” TVs are another trap to watch out for. The new ENERGY STAR specification for TVs sets energy use limits per square inch of screen size. That means that a 62 inch screen may receive an ENERGY STAR rating, while a 20 inch screen that is less efficient per square inch, might not, and yet the 62 inch screen could be consuming over ten times more power as the 20 inch TV.
Try to avoid the trap of buying an energy saving appliance that lets you continue using the same amount of power in exchange for using it more. It’s a game you’re guaranteed to lose. Look for energy saving appliances where the increased efficiency doesn’t just result in your using the appliance more. For example, when upgrading your fridge, get an ENERGY STAR replacement that’s the same volume as your current one (or better yet, even smaller). That will ensure you’ll actually save money, instead of just using the same amount of energy and creating more work for yourself!
3. Avail yourself of free cooling and heating sources
We survive muggy Ontario summers, where the temperature often hits 90F, without any air conditioning at all, just by sucking in cooler nighttime air into our home through window fans, then shutting the house up all day to trap that cool air inside. It’s not quite as comfortable as central air, but it costs us only $10 a year to run the fans. With a central air system you’re looking at about $250 a year just to cover the sticker price spread over the unit’s anticipated lifetime, and annual maintenance costs; then another $250 to $2,000 to operate the system through the hot weather, depending on how warm it gets out of doors and how cold you keep the temperature inside.
In cooler weather the sun is a free heating source. If you live in a cooler climate and have the proper type of low-emissivity windows for your zone, those windows should let sunlight into your house but keep the heat from that sunlight indoors so most of it doesn’t escape. Keep curtains open on south facing windows in daylight hours to allow the house to warm up. Then shut your window coverings overnight to prevent heat from escaping.
4. Revamp your window coverings
Homes lose a great deal of energy through their windows. Even the most efficient windows are far less efficient at stopping heat transfer than your average insulated wall. By putting energy efficient curtains, blinds, or other window coverings on your windows you can really lower heating and cooling expenses, without spending a lot of money upgrading windows.
The most efficient window coverings block airflow around the window glass, to interrupt the convection currents that usually occur. As air touches the cool window in winter, it cools, and falls down, pulling more heated air in from above. This convection airflow hastens the cooling and the flow of heat outside. The opposite process happens in summer, as heat coming through the glass from outdoors warms the indoor air, sending it upward and pulling more cooled air up from below. If you install window coverings that block this circulation – for example, shades that tightly cover the window glazing, or curtains that have a header blocking airflow from above and that touch the floor or rest on the sill, you will slow down or halt this energy losing airflow.
Ideally window coverings should offer some level of R-value too. You can make your own roman shades with a small amount of insulation, or you can go with multi-layered honeycomb shades that insulate between the glazing and the indoors. Both these choices are energy saving choices as well as looking good.
5. Buy local, unprocessed food
If you’re serious about reducing your energy consumption for green reasons, you should try to buy local foods that are minimally processed and low on the food chain (fruits, vegetables, grains, beans). A lot of energy feeds into meat production and food processing, and it takes energy to ship food over large distances. While switching to foods with lower energy inputs won’t cut your household energy bills, it will help reduce your ecological footprint and improve your health!
Of course it’s not always a given that only buying local foods will cut your environmental impact. For instance, an apple produced at a local farm in the fall, and kept in cold storage at the farm until April, involves a lot of energy to operate the storage facility. It could be that a fresher apple harvested in April and shipped by boat from halfway around the planet has a lower energy input than the October apple bought in April (and it may be crisper too!). But sticking to fresh local fruits definitely helps when they are available.
Buying minimally processed foods will also help, not only because many processed foods require a significant energy input over and above their unprocessed ingredients, but because the processing can remove much of the nutrition of the original ingredients, although usually the net effect of this is reduced health benefits, not one that relates to energy consumption.
Finally, staying low on the food chain – cutting down on meat and fish – will reduce your energy costs. It takes about 40 times more energy to produce a pound of beef protein as a pound of grain protein. And it takes about 3 pounds of fossil fuels to harvest one pound of ocean-caught seafood. So consider this the next time you bite into a T-bone or a red snapper fillet: you’re eating fossil fuels. This is true for farm raised as well as wild-caught seafood, because most fish farming involves feeding fish pellets harvested from the ocean to the farmed fish.
So there you go – five simple and original ways you can reduce your energy use. Measure your usage, try to use less energy by not doing as much, take advantage of free forms of heating and cooling, cut your heating and cooling expense through better window coverings, and switch to a more sustainable diet. It’s clear that none of these ideas will save you a huge amount of money, but if every one of us takes these steps, as well as the run of the mill energy saving ideas we’ve all heard for years, the earth will be a better place to livefor all of us.
About the Author
Robin Green owns an energy saving homes site designed to help homeowners with saving electricity. The Killawatt meter is one energy saving device he has used to reduce his household electricity use by over 30%.
