hypermiling the house

[Snax]

Originally Posted by MetroMPG

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.

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.

[GasSavers_Ryland]

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.

[koinos]

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.

[Snax]

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!)

[jcp123]

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.