I am not an avid environmentalist, but it became so clear that I wanted to save the earth, eh, $$$. And it is a good game for an engineer because it is clearly measurable.
The baseline was 34.65Kwh/day. The game was started with replacing light bulbs to compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) bulbs. The technology was far more advanced than I thought and the color is like regular light bulbs and there's even dimmer-able ones. These CFLs requires roughly 1/5 of electricity for the same brightness. The only drawback is the slow warm-up. It takes a minute or so to reach the full brightness. There are white LED lights which is even better and it only consumes a few watts, but they are still too-white, dark, and expensive.
Switching to these CFLs saved 6Kwh or so a day. The family room had eaten the most and kitchen was the next.
However, last two months or so, I couldn't bring it down further. I was wondering what was eating that much electricity. It turned out that there was lights in my backyard. Again, these were halogen lights. While it is nice to light up, I really don't see outside much at night, I just decided to turn them off completely. Result? It was great. It shelved another 3.8Kwh/day.
It actually brought the daily electricity cost by 47% to $104.79 while the electricity usage was down by 31%. The reason was electricity's heavy progressive cost structure.
Baseline usage (415.8 Kwh) @ $0.11536
101-130% (124.74 Kwh) @ $0.13115
131-200% (291.06 Kwh) @ $0.24711
200%-300% @ $0.35432
If you use more than twice as the baseline, your electricity is more than 3x expensive. Actually, the gas's cost structure is not as steep as electricity, you may want to use gas appliances over electricity ones. In my personal experience, electric heater was worse than gas furnace, and I am glad that I bought a gas dryer.
The next target is going to be lighting in bathrooms.
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