- Intro
- Reducing electricity consumption I: Lighting
- Reducing electricity consumption II: vampire/standby power
- Reducing electricity usage III: major appliances
- Renewable energy for the home
- Cutting the Cord
- Reducing heating and cooling costs
- Reducing water consumption
Hi, my name is Markos, and I am an energy efficiency junky. I am obsessed with it. I'm downright OCD about it. It consumes a huge part of my life. I bored my wife talking about it, I bored my co-workers talking about it, I bored my friends talking about it, and I might even bore you talking about it. But if I'm going to go all crazy over something, what could be better than focusing on eliminating my carbon footprint? Heck, I don't want to eliminate it, I want to go carbon negative—generating more energy than I consume, at home and in the supply chain of the goods and services I use.
As you can see in the graph above, I have steadily and consistently reduced my energy consumption over the past three years. I will explain in greater detail what all of that means in later installments, but for now, just note the trend.
In November of 2011, my four-person household used 924 kWh of electricity. In November 2012, with an extra adult living in the house, it was down to 853 kWh. A year later, November 2013, with seven people living in my house, it was down to 511 kWh, and this past month, it was just 418 kWh. On an annual basis, I've gone from 9138 kWh to 7965 kWh to 5681 kWh in those three years.
This is consumption, and doesn't include the power offset by my solar array. And while that reduction didn't come free, it also didn't break the bank, and it's money I'll recoup with a far reduced utility bill.
Thus, this may be the most productive obsession ever, both saving me money, and doing my little part to save the world. So over the next couple of days, I'll be rolling out, in detail, how I've made significant strides in cutting energy use in my household, how much those efforts cost, how much they've saved me, and how far I still have to go (this isn't a journey I'm anywhere near completing). For now, let's start with my rules of energy efficiency upgrades which you can read below the fold.
1. I do what I do to protect my world. The decisions I make, the actions I take, all have an impact on the world around me. I consider it a duty to minimize the impact I make. THAT is my primary motivation. That said, there's no way I would be doing all I'm doing if my efforts weren't essentially paying for themselves, so ...
2. Saving money is important! Even if you're like "fuck baby seals," who doesn't want to save money? Maybe the guy still driving the Hummer. But if we want to motivate the general public to lower consumption and make environmentally friendly consumer and lifestyle choices, it has to be financially beneficial to them.
3. Don't sacrifice comfort. Sure, I can reduce my energy expenditures a great deal if I lowered my thermostat to 63 during the day, made everyone wear sweaters and hats at home. But that's not going to happen. Not only do I personally like a toasty house, but more importantly, so does my family. And if I want to have carte blanche to make efficiency gains around the house, I need to keep the family that lives in that house happy. In online forums, it's called the WAF (wife-acceptance factor), and it's a real thing. Thus, I won't be line-drying the laundry anytime soon, or eating only raw foods, or buying a smaller TV. Sure I could make major efficiency gains by doing certain things, but I'm well on the way toward a negative-carbon lifestyle without sacrificing comfort. It's not an either-or proposition.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the average electrical consumption for US homes in 2012 was 903 kWh per month. Louisiana topped the list at 1,254 kWh per month (AC?), while Maine had the smallest consumption at less than half that, 531 kWh. Maybe cost was a factor? In Louisiana, electricity cost just $0.0837 per kWh, while in Maine it was $0.1466. But even that was nothing like Hawaii's $0.3734 per kWh, which is 1) probably why it had the second lowest usage, and 2) why the state is a national leader in solar production and smart grid deployment.
My California was listed at $0.1534, but because of tiered pricing, I used to pay an average of about $0.19 per kWh. There's no doubt that if you have cheap electricity, like the Pacific Northwest's hydro (Washington $0.0853 and Oregon $0.098), then investment returns for efficiency upgrades become a dicier financial proposition. On the other hand, people in places like New York ($0.1762), Vermont $0.1701), and New Hampshire ($0.1607) will see far greater financial returns.
Now if your electricity is renewable, like Washington and Oregon's hydroelectric grid, then efficiency becomes less of an imperative. But despite some (grudging) investment in renewables, the vast majority of our electricity (just shy of 90 percent) comes from fossil fuels. And those fuel-fired power plants emit 40 percent of carbon pollution, and a third of US greenhouse gas emissions. Fights to limit those emissions will go nowhere in the near future, with Republicans having full control of Congress in the near term, and a pretty solid lock on the House for the foreseeable future. So lowering the demand of that grid is the next best thing we can do as individuals to deliver cleaner air and water.
But as mentioned above, there is also a money component. That November bill 2011? I paid $237 for electricity and $164 for natural gas. That's $401 total. In November 2014, I would've paid $56 for electricity (but won't because of solar offsets) and $75 for gas. So just by focusing on conservation, I've gone from a $401 bill to a $131 one. In fact, let's take a look at my monthly electricity and gas costs:Embedded Content
This chart is a bit misleading—my actual costs are lower because my solar array offset the bulk of my 2014 electricity usage—but I'm estimating what I would've paid in electricity without solar to get a good apples-to-apples comparison of what I've saved on the consumption side. You can see the steady decline in costs as I implemented my changes—a decline that continued even as our household grew from four to five in mid 2012, and then to seven in 2013, before going back to five in early 2014.
The chart shows obvious seasonal fluctuations—here in the Bay Area we have no need for air conditioning, so winter constitutes an outsized percentage of our energy cost. But even in summer, I've gone from $193 in June 2012, to $110 in June 2014, a 43 percent reduction. Annually, I've gone from $3,687, to $3,200, to $1,900 if I didn't have solar. (With solar, my actual annual energy costs this year will be about $500 once December gets tallied.) So in three years, efficiency gains are saving me nearly $1,800 per year.
That's real money. I'll tally what those efficiency efforts cost me in future installments, and I'm still reinvesting much of that money in additional efficiency efforts, but generally speaking, I've been looking at a three-year payoff for each dollar spent. That $1,800 per year is real money, and I did that without doing anything particularly radical. (Remember, I can't sacrifice comfort!) And assuming that energy costs continue to rise (because they will), those savings will only magnify in future years.
There's no reason you can't find massive savings of your own. Me, I'm headed toward a zero-carbon household—nay, a negative carbon one. My goal is to reduce my energy consumption to the point that the utility is paying me because of all the excess power I'm generating, even after powering my fantasy electric car I hope to buy in a couple of years. I've spent countless hours trying to find the standby electric draw of various appliances and devices, and researching whether it made sense to upgrade the insulation in my attic from R19 to R26. I've agonized over whether it was worth spending $100 to shave 2 watts in standby power, while researching in painstaking detail whether the draw of electric blankets offsets setting the thermometer even lower at night. And don't get me started on trying to make sense of the f*ck*d up refrigerator Energy Guide ratings.
Now I get to share some of what I've learned with you. Follow some of these tips, and you'll both be saving yourself real money, and saving the environment. And in life, there are very few win-wins of that caliber. Oh, one last thing for today, these are the two pieces of equipment you MUST have to start this journey. First of all, a power meter to measure the wattage of plugged-in electrical devices. I use this one, the Belkin Conserve Insight:
I paid $20 for it. I just looked around online, and it looks like it's been discontinued. But there are others at around the same price, like this one and this one on Amazon. The second is a thermal leak detector. I have this one, which cost $30.
This is a great tool for detecting leaks in the house. It's one of my favorite toys. Even my kids make a game out of finding new leaks in the house. And leaks don't just bleed air conditioned or heated air to the outdoors, but your money as well. Plugging them is essential. And this $30 will be more effective than any home energy audit you could ever get (and yes, we'll talk about that too).
Finally, there's one more tool that is nice to have, if you can swing it, and that's a whole-house energy monitor. There is the TED 5000, WattVision, Current Cost, eGauge, and the PowerCost Monitor. These devices allow for real-time energy usage in the home. Some of them even allow the monitoring of individual breakers, thus tracking usage by room or appliance. Problem is, all of these solutions are expensive ($500-1,000), and I couldn't justify my three-year-payoff general rule. Furthermore, reading online reviews, all of these systems appeared buggy at times. So while I wanted access to that intelligence, I just wasn't willing to spend that kind of money to get it.
And then, on my 1,000th search for a better solution, I came across this little $100 device, the Rainforest Automation Eagle gateway. You see, California utility PGE smart meters can broadcast what's called a Home Area Network (HAN) signal, this little gateway picks it up, and slaps up the data online. It was everything I was looking for, and it cost just $100? Why the hell had I never heard of it? Well, because PGE doesn't want people to know about it. People who have better usage intelligence cut their usage (empirically proven), so why would PGE want to give people access to data that lowers demand for their product. So yeah, they buried the information, and I, who had spent the better part of two years researching these whole-home systems only found out about it in a fluke (in an academic journal, of all places).
So check to see if your utility has smart meters, and if so, whether those meters have HAN capabilities, so you can have real-time access to your energy usage like this:
And with that, I'll see you guys tomorrow for the next installment in this series.