Total Home > How to cut your Electrical Usage
Installed 11/8/1996

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How I Saved Money on my Electrical Bill (by Dave Knapp)

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How I Saved Money on my Electrical Bill
By Dave Knapp

May 28, 1996

Dear DO IT HOMESTEAD,

Hello! We are writing you today to give an update on our family's crusade to reduce energy consumption.

We moved into our current home in northern Illinois in 1991. We picked a ten-year old house that "seeme" to meet our needs very well compared to the house we were leaving. A few months after moving in, I received a copy of HOME POWER MAGAZINE in the mail. Interested in renewable energy, I had only previously used it in Ham Radio applications. Hopelessly hooked on Renewables, I read all I could after obtaining all of the available back issues.

I had a dream of building a house out in the country that was independent from the power grid. After reading about the dozens of families in HOME POWER that we doing so, I thought it would be easy! WRONG! First, I had to learn how to stop consuming lots of non-Renewables and to start recycling the Renewables that we did use. My family, thinking I was crazy, needed convincing there was truly a better way to live. The image of us living in a shack without shoes or electricity definitely was not ours!

We decided not to get radical and live in the dark without electricity. Living in a suburban neighborhood, our transformation from consuming raw materials to preserving them would have to come slowly and steadily.

We decided to take a look at our current house. It's a ranch style home of about 1100 square feet plus basement and two-car garage. Although smaller than most newer suburban homes, it was about right for a family of three. Placed on one-third of an acre, we knew we needed more space if one day we would require a large wind generator.

These were the things that we found wrong with our current home. The roof peak runs north to south. There were no windows on the south side. We had three large maple trees to the South and a large black walnut tree to the East. Although the trees helped with keeping the home cooler in the summer time, it left very little room for solar panels! The good thing about our home was that on the north side is the garage. It provides some protection from the north winds. Our future home would require south facing windows and trees positioned to keep the roof cool, but not shielding the day lighting effect.

Our electric bill the first year averaged about $100 per month. It peaked at $135 that August! This bill seemed acceptable, after all this home was a little larger than our first. The yuppie way of life dictated that you keep acquiring more appliances, then you simply plug them into the wall. If your electric bill is a little high, you simply work a little overtime. When asked, most people could not tell you how much power they consumed! We would have to learn this in order to succeed at our new venture.

Our $100 electric bill broke down to 840 KWH (kilowatt-hours), including a $10 meter charge. Upon examining our current light fixtures, the previous residents had not installed any florescent lighting or compact florescents. Every where there was a fixture rated at 60 watts, they had installed 75 watt bulbs! The basement switch turned on seven 100 watt bulbs at a time!

The first thing I did was to rewire the basement lighting to only turn on the individual zones (e.g., the utility room, kids play room, office, etc.). Compact florescents had better quality by 1992. I purchased one compact florescent per month. I could save $40-60 over each light's ten thousand hour lifetime. A compact florescent was well worth the $10-30 price. The biggest mistake one could make is to put the wrong style of compact florescent in a light fixture. There are many different styles of compact florescents. A "globe" style compact florescent will not necessarily be a good choice for fixtures that fit a "circular" style of light. Please consult the manufacturers labeling to determine best applications for each style of light.

Currently, we have over 35 compact florescents in our home. We still use incandescent lighting, but only in places like closets. Our main lighting, which comes from well-chosen florescent and compact florescent lighting are generally lights that we use more than thirty minutes a day.

An example of big savings was our main bathroom vanity lighting. There were two hanging lamps with 75 watt bulbs for a total of 150 watts. I replaced the lamps with two-15 watt compact florescents for a total of 30 watts. We are saving 120 watts and you no longer sweat profusely while shaving in front of the mirror! Our ceiling fan in the dining room went from four 60 watt bulbs (240 watts) to four 15 watts compact florescents (60 watts). In the main living room, there was a large floor lamp with a 200 watt three-way bulb. I changed this to an electronic ballast instant-on 27 watt circular florescent light. It gives nearly the same light as before, but saves 173 watts. All of our lights are the electronic ballast type. This means they turn on instantly and have no annoying flicker like old fashioned fluorescent lighting. As a general guide, a 15 watt compact light is equal a 60 watt incandescent. Several new style lights are the same size as incandescence bulbs. The main difference is that they take a few seconds to come up to full brilliance (but they save 45 watts each).

Our electric bill by now was down to about $50-60 a month. We had saved a lot, but still are far from our goal. It would take over 100 solar panels and a big wind generator to power this home. Up until now, my family had adjusted nicely to our new lighting scheme. We had found a way to change our impact on the Earth without drastically changing our lifestyle.

Then I read about phantom loads! There are dozens our power robbing demons in the average home! I armed myself with a meter and confirmed the worst. A lot of our appliances were consuming electricity whether they were on or not! Each of them consumed only a little at a time, but collectively they added up to big bucks. The alarm clock in the bedroom used 2 watts. That added up to 1.44 KWH per month! We replaced it with a large LCD battery powered clock. The original clock would have required one solar panel by itself. The little power cubes that recharge cordless screwdrivers used tremendous amounts of power when left plugged in all of the time. Now we only plug them in when actually charging. Once recharged, we unplug them. Their inefficiency's attributed by the manufacturers cutting costs to stay competitive!

Each of our TVs and VCR's each used 6 watts when switched in the off position. This is equivalent to over three-50 watt solar panels and power is being consumed while the appliance is waiting for you to use the remote control. Although it took a little being used to, we added power outlet strips to these appliances. When we want to watch TV, we just flip the switch on and then use the remote. After a few days, my family became used to it. It's true that we have to reset our clocks, but on the rare occasion that I want to tape something, it's a 30 second job to program the VCR. I usually have to redo the time from our many grid power outages anyway. We also put our microwave oven and cook stove on outlet strips. Their clocks used allot of power and the outlet strips quickly became part of the ritual of cooking.

We found out our gas cook stove used 210 watts of electricity to bake a dozen cookies! The manufactures are using cheap glow plug schemes for safety. Since our stove was getting old anyway, we purchased a quality stove that used electronic spark ignition. We turn on the outlet strip to use the stove and the electric ignition consumes less than 2 watts to bake a dozen cookies!

When our washing machine died, we purchased a Staber horizontal axis top loading machine. It consumes only about 200 watts per load. Using only one ounce of soap per load, it gets the clothes really clean! It uses one half the water also, which will greatly reduce the amount of well water we would need to pump!

At this point, our lowest electric bill was down 214 KWH. That's less than $32 including meter charge. That is still over thirty-three solar panels! For the average on-grid home, that is pretty good, but we could do better. Because we have an open floor plan in a not so large home, we can get by with a small window air conditioner. Last year during the terrible heat when my neighbors were having $250 electric bills, ours was only $57! $57 is not a bad deal, but it's still not so good for solar.

We decided our future home would be an Earth sheltered home. We toured several of them and liked the fact that none of them got above 75 degrees F during the summer. Heating cost less than $20 per month in the winter! Those who chose to heat their earth sheltered homes with wood, did so with less than one and a half cord of wood. That beats the nine cords Grandpa used in the old farm house!

I purchased a surplus single phase watt-hour meter like what the utility uses in apartments. My refrigerator uses 1.9 KWH per day. My 13 cu ft chest freezer uses 1.5 KWH per day. Our electric clothıs dryer uses 5 KWH per load to dry towels. We had spent years collecting them and had wished we had known these appliances had energy efficient replacements before buying them.

We use a cloth's line in the summer time. The dryer is being replaced with a Natural gas version. This will save a lot of money. I saved 250 watts with the chest freezer by placing a two-inch thick scrap peace of closed cell insulation on top. One must be careful to keep objects clear of the sides. The cooling coils, located in the sides and front of the freezer, need room to allow for proper ventilation. The freezer now consumes only 1.25 KWH per day. This is still too much, but we are saving up for a slightly smaller European brand that only consumes about half as much. We will also eventually replace our refrigerator with a similar brand. I am also looking into replacing my power hungry PC with a laptop model. With our current and future savings, we expect to consume about 100 KWH per month. This equates to about $20 including meter charge. This would be about 16-fifty watt solar panels! There are many off the grid homestead's using half of this and some use more. In reality, this would be good enough for a suburban home attached to the grid. It is easy to do and pay back for the slightly more expensive appliances would take less than ten years.

The above mentioned power usage does not include battery storage, nor inverter inefficiency. These would require about 25% more input from Renewables. It is real important, but not too difficult, to make a list of the appliances you use and how long each day you use them. This will make your dealer's job a lot easier and offer fewer headaches for everyone.

I am in the process of adding a small solar emergency backup system to our home. Sometimes we lose grid power for many hours during storms. The eventual dual solar panel system will have 12v compact florescent lighting and a medium sized inverter to run AC appliances. We will also use it to run all of our basement lighting, TV, VCR, Stereo, and ni-cad battery chargers. Such systems are very worth while, specially when you are the only home in the neighborhood with power during a 24 hour utility outage!

I hope this gives you a good overview of our past, current, and future energy consumption plans. We will be integrating all of these ideas into our new home. My spouse Sheila and son Patrick, have been more than willing to adjust to the minor living changes. Most important, we are all aware of how our habits affect the home's energy consumption. When we need electricity, we consume what we need and save the rest for another day!

If you would like to contact David, please email us and put his name in the subject area and we will forward it to them for you. Please write him if you have any questions as to how he did it and what you can do :-)

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