Saving Electricity
 

Over the past year I have done all I can figure to save electricity just wanted to share.

Did an energy audit with my local Electric company. Mainly cause they gave 10 60watt eauivalent 9watt LED bulbs and two power strips Free. The power strips liet me put the TV to sleep and it also turns off the stereo, cable box, etc. Turning the TV switches power on to everything else.

Cut my energy bill from a little over $200/mo to under $100.
Power savings were from...
LED bulbs
Powerstrips.
Few LED night lights so can navigate at night without turning lights on.
Cook in 1500 watt toaster oven instead of 3500 watt oven.
User smaller 1000 watt burners instead of bigger 1500 watt burner.
Cook more on propane smoker/roaster/grill.
Fill free space in fridge and freezer with 1/2 gallon milk jugs of water.
Make sure only turn lights on when needed and off when leave a room.
Turned water tank temp down.
Open and close blinds for best heating/cooling depending on season.
Only plug in chargers when something needs charging, then unplug.

Use a Smart Hours thermostat with setback and run the temps as high as we can stand in the summer and low as can stand in the winter. The smart hours gets me a cheaper electric rate except for peak hours. The thermostat cools 4 degrees cooler before the peak and does not cycle the a/c until after peak unless it gets above our set point. Thought we would notice, but we don't and it actually does save even with higher rates during peak times.

Part of the audit recommendation was replacing the windows and adding insulation in the attic. Looked at the cost of windows and insulation about $4000 in materials alone. With the bill being under $100/month now, even at 50% savings it would take 6 years to recoup the expense.

I like to leave a porch light on. It has a 9watt bulb. It is a daylight to dusk light. Thought about replacing the switch with a timer so it would turn it off from midnite to daylight. The switch is $17. It would take 2 years to recoup.

Any more tips or hints to help?

One thing I've thought about lately is garage door openers. I have 2 openers that are almost never used, I don't know how much power they draw when idle, but it's not zero.

Here's another dumb one - I have a zoned heating system, and the original zone motors were power closed, spring open. The thing is, when the system isn't calling for heat, all the dampers are closed, 8 watts a piece. And since they're powered all the time they didn't last more than 6 years. New motors are power open, power close, so they draw no power when they aren't moving. Didn't have to change the controller, just flipped a switch.

I wish brighter (100w equivalent) leds were cheaper. I still have incandescents in the garage.

All new construction in Hawaii requires solar water heaters. We went full photo voltaic, so I can finally stop feeling guilty about every teeny excess .. Net metering, so the power company gets to sell our considerable extra output. Next step: off the grid entirely

We have gas heat, cooking and water so the only electric we have is electronics and lights (incandescent because LED and CFL bother my eyes at night). Even with everything on we still struggle to use more electric than the service charge on our bill. Average bill for us is $30 with $22 of that being fees, surcharges and taxes. Turn on our electric AC in the middle of summer and our bill goes up to $60 running it 24/7 with 100 year old 32"x 80" single pane double hung windows without storm windows. Another plus for living in a small house.

On the water heater - lowering temperature setting is good but I also have a timer that turns it on and off at certain times of the day when I know I will need more hot water (mornings and evenings).

It's a basic timer like this one:

https://cloudfront.zoro.com/product/...-0rqufo5oy.JPG

Going to LED vs. halogen where possible is also a fantastic way to reduce electrical consumption.

For anyone who has low voltage landscape lighting, you can swap your bulbs out in most cases (depends on your fixture sometimes). Walmart has the best prices now on these but you can also buy at HD. All come with various warranty periods.

I bit the bullet and went solar a couple of years ago. The house is all electric, except for two tankless water heaters that use propane (about 1.7 gal./day average). The 30% tax credit and getting in on the net neutrality program were incentives. It will take about six years (4 more to go) to recoup the after tax credit cost, but after that I'm skating free. I'm glad I went that route.

Water heater is gas. Checked on a timer for hot water usage...Have it set on standy instead. Keeps the temp in the 60's so it don't freeze. Found when you start using hot water the newly heated water is first out of the tank. Ends up plenty warm for the amount of hot water we use, ie showers. Otherwise you'd never notice.

Have just one door garage opener. Put a wattmeter on it. Uses less than 1 watt listening for the opener. Considered putting a wall switch in and only powering the opener when a car is out. Don't know if that messes with the remote programming though.

Have thought about powering down wifi, but haven't come up with a convenient way to do it. Computers, phones, TV, Stereo, printers, all use wifi.

Have a couple of internet servers wired and not on wifi. The watt meter says when inactive they only use 15 watts total for the servers external drives, router, and modem. The servers go to low power sleep and wake up for network activity. They don't have monitors, bluetooth, or wifi turned on since they are servers. They also cache most active files in memory and the drives sleep as well.

Been kind of entertaining seeing what saves electricity and what doesn't.
My electric company has a web site I can see hourly electricity usage and cost.

I slashed yearly power usage from 30MWh to 11 MWh by converting from direct electrical to geothermal heating. Nowadays, 1/3 of bill is household electricity (ovens, TV's computers, lights) and 2/3's is heating/hot water. It did force me to install water heating system (I chose floor heating as it is more effective with heat pump). Expected break-even is roughly 7 years. Lower power draw also made it possible to go down from 25A to 16A main fuse contract, which is substantially cheaper per year (like 300$ or so).

This is cold climate though.

You might consider a cheaper, lower throughput WiFi router. My AC1900 has a far smaller power adapter than my AC5000 router.

LEDs are great.

Baz - Have you looked into an on-demand water heater? should work great for you in Fl.

I had the 2nd highest electrical usage in the neighborhood. I don't care, I want to be number 1.

At my house, I was using 40000 kWh per year.

Primary change: swapped out the 1 hp pool pump for a VFD. This saved about 6000 kWh per year.
I switched to all LED lights, with the exception of a few closets up stairs which received curly fluorescent bulbs from elsewhere in the house.
I replaced my powered attic fans with turbine ventilators. This saves about 1700 kWh/year.

I'm down to about 30000 per year.

Hot Water heaters are gas, as it the stove. Ovens are electric. If there were a replacement gas wall over, I might consider it.

The main way for me to further reduce power consumption would be Air Conditioner change out. I will do this when the units fail. They will be swapped out for VFD units in the 20+ SEER range, depending on the price. My estimate for Air Con usage is 17500 kWh per year. 20 seer would reduce my usage by 35% to about 11,500.
I would also like to install a "mini-split" unit in our master bedroom. We like it cool at night and at present, this means lowering the whole downstairs temperature at night. It uses about 8kWh per night. If the mini-split reduces this to 1kWh, then that could save about 2500 kWh per year and get me near 20000.

The other pool related thing I can do is to eliminate the pool cleaner pump. It uses 2kW per day, and could theoretically be replaced with a valve and the VFD pump. This could eliminate another 600 kWh. The rest of the electric usage is mostly refrigerators and computer servers/network equipment.

With everybody being so green, I had to wonder how much power is needed for a pair of electric cars?

Being green...hmmm.

I remember reading once that if the only change we made in the US was that everybody unplugged device chargers when not in use, we'd never have to build additional capacity.

They might pull a Watt or so while not in use. Let's say there are 100M homes with 10 each. That would be about 1000 MW or about 2 combined cycle plants.

A client has 2 Teslas. He uses about 30 kWh per day on charging.

That would be about 10,000 kWh per year, or about $750. If instead he used gasoline, it would be around $2000.

Slow clothes dryer machines down to 1/10 rotation speed.
But boost airflow 2x.

(or just put clothing on racks to naturally air dry and not pulverize the fabric.)

What is the benefit of using gas instead of electric? You are still spending money and burning carbon.

I have been told that turning the Water Heater down is excellent since that one device uses more power than any other appliance in the home. I wonder if having it shut off unless for an extended time (like a trip out of town) since it will work that much harder to get the temperature back up.
I know for a fact that with heat pump heating there is a point where it costs more to drop the temperature very low at night than to just reduce it a smaller amount since you have to reheat the house in the morning and the system will kick into auxiliary (very inefficient) heat if the gradient between the room and thermostat is more than a few degrees.

now that's funny

How many total miles per year does he drive?