While CEO’s scurry around making grand plans to build more power plants and so called environmentalists lecture about the need for sustainable and renewable power, everyone is missing the point. Why Amory Lovins hasn’t gotten farther with his "Negawatts" concept is easy to see. When energy conservation meets your electricity needs, nobody makes the big bucks. And, it requires you to take action instead of blaming our energy problems on utilities, governments, or embryonic industries.
Many Western and Southern home owners could and are harnessing the sun. Plains and coastal states are harnessing the wind. Agricultural states could expand bio-fuels. Any place with garbage could do a better job making bio-gas. In many cases these technologies could be employed by home owners to power their homes, today; no waiting; no government action; no utility action. Yet, these solutions will take a big bite out of your wallet and require you to be the "utility company". The main problem is everyone wants to make sure that they have a wall street style payback and they want juice at the flip of the switch; without learning about battery storage levels or wind speeds. The other problem is that our homes and lifestyles are not built to conserve energy. The housing industry continues to confuse size and space with imagination. And, no one seems to be able to find south until after the house is built. So what’s a Boy Scout to do? It is still possible to conserve energy no matter what your house is like. The key is to learn what uses energy at your place and resolve to take action.
Enough free or low cost actions could be taken, that, when combined across the nation would have a real impact on our national energy appetite. The web has a plethora of sites devoted to energy audits and check lists for saving energy in the typical American home. If you haven’t visited them, this cold winter might be the time to start looking for ways you can save on your energy bill. If you are too lazy to do that, at least read this.
There really is no such thing as a typical American home. Size matters and so does construction, number of occupants, number of teenagers and the number and kind of appliances. Having said that, there are "typical" things that we know about homes.
The largest percentage of energy use in the American home goes to space heating. When it comes to space heating expenses, there are variables that you can so something about for a reasonable price and there are variables that you can’t touch unless you burn your house down and start over. This article focuses on simple non-flammable ideas.
The thermostat is a quick and easy way to cut costs. If you don’t have a programmable setback thermostat, you can save energy and pay for the cost of the new thermostat in about three winter months of heating or about four summer months of cooling. You can do this setback ritual by hand, but the only customer that I’ve known to pull this off was a Professor of Mathematics at a four year college. Even he got tired of it after several years. You save one percent off the heating part of your bill for every degree of set back you practice for ten hours or more a day. Other simple things that you can do to save on space heating costs include adding more air tight layers to windows ( plastic, glass, plexiglass) with more than 1/4 inch and less than 11/2 inches of space between each layer. One really simple thing you can do to lower heating costs is to take the screens off your south facing windows. This allows up to ten percent more of the sun’s heat to warm the inside of your house for free. Leaving drapes open during the day and closing them at night also helps. Leaving drapes closed on the south side is a really bad idea unless you just like sending money to your utility company. One other simple thing that you can do to cut heating costs is to caulk cracks and holes. I’ve read that 40 percent of a typical homes heating expense comes from air infiltration. When in, doubt caulk every inside joint where different construction materials meet. Or, better yet get a blower door test and find out exactly where the holes are. Many electric utilities offer a free or reduced cost blower door test service.
Water heating is the next biggest utility expense. Here again the thermostat is the first place to look. Most utilities have been recommending that water heater thermostats be set no higher than 120 degrees for years. On electric water heaters, you must make sure that both thermostats are set at the same temperature. There are almost always two thermostats on an electric water heater so keep looking until you find both. Adding an insulating blanket is the next best thing to do, unless your water heater warranty says, "no". Gas water heaters can also be insulated, but you must make sure that the installation meets all, and I mean all, safety requirements listed in your owners manual.
After that, doing all your laundry with cold water, installing low flow fixtures for showers and faucets and politely asking people to take shorter showers are about your only choices. There are some tips to getting good quality low flow fixtures. The styles that say "aerated" or "jet air" or something like that make the water travel a little faster and make you feel like you are getting more water. This is especially helpful for shower heads. If the box doesn’t brag about some special feature like this it probably means that the low flow is achieve by just choking off the water. This makes for wimpy showers.
Next on the energy evil doers list for the typical home is refrigeration. Unless you have to have rock hard ice cream and milk so cold it makes your teeth hurt, you can save some money here. You will need a thermometer to do this right. Most refrigerators have useless dials that say "colder" or "warmer". Obviously warmer is less expensive to run than colder but the Colorado State Health Department requires commercial coolers to be 40 Fahrenheit degrees plus or minus two degrees and freezing happens at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, so a thermometer works best. Here again you save one percent off the refrigeration part of your bill for every degree of setback you do. Two other easy saving tips for refrigerators include keeping the fridge full but not too full and keeping the back and bottom of the outside clean and dust free. Many homeowners keep a half full freezer in the garage, just incase they bring home some road kill. If its getting close to empty, stick the rest of it in your half empty freezer compartment of your regular fridge and unplug the freezer.
Then next biggest bite on your energy bill are your appliances. Unless you have a welding machine in the garage, this part of your bill is usually small. Lately news media have been fussing over "phanton loads" and blame today’s high tech "always on" appliances for this expense. The cost and the energy use for phantom loads are small. The only real way to find "phantom loads" and determine how much of a chunk they take out of your wallet is to get an appliance meter and check them. I got a Kill-O-Watt meter for Christmas several years ago and I like to experiment. My stereo has a remote control that powers it up and changes features and volume. As far as I can tell, it only uses electricity when the power is on. Somehow it hibernates very efficiently and draws zero power. My television on the other hand uses 8 watts all the time, even when it is turned off. This adds up to a whopping 69 cents per month. Some recent articles claim that you should install a light stick for these appliances and turn them off. You can spend $10.00 for a simple light stick and in fourteen months you will start saving 69 cents per month. You may also have to reprogram equipment when you kill the power. Only you can decide which way to go.
Lighting is one area that deserves attention. Its not that there are big savings to be had here, but its easy and it works. Fluorescent lighting offers more light per watt than regular incandescent or halogen bulbs. New LED lighting can offer even more savings, but the systems are harder to find and more expensive. There are also some fiber optic lights on the market that can save money over incandescent or halogen bulbs, but they are expensive to install.
In your home, compact fluorescent lights can take the place of any incandescent bulb as long as it fits into the fixture - some can’t. Always measure before you buy. A 16 watt compact fluorescent bulb can save you $36 dollars a year if you replace a 60 watt incandescent bulb that’s on 24 hours a day every day. Compact fluorescent bulbs last ten times as long making them ideal replacements for hard to reach places or commercial applications. Some compact fluorescent bulbs have a hard time starting in cold weather so use caution in outdoor applications. Having said that, I’ve used a 60 watt GE capsule compact fluorescent bulb on my front porch north of Gunnison, Colorado for years without problems. It protests a little when its below zero, but it always gets going after a few minutes.
The key to energy and cost savings in your home is self education. Knowing which pieces of equipment to keep an eye on is the best way to save money and avoid surprises. The following formula is the foundation to that education. Your electric bill equals watts divided by 1000, times Time times the rate per kWh. Or, $ = kW X T X $/kWh. While this is absurdly simple, the challenge of accurately filling in the blanks can drive you crazy. However, if you are serious about saving the universe, putting a halt to global climate change and saving your hard earned cash, you have to bite the bullet and learn this. New appliances and equipment usually have a label near the power cord that lists watts and amps or Kilowatts (KW) and amps. If you know kilowatts (KW) all you have to do is figure out Time, or how many hours a month it runs. Multiply KW times Time to get kWh. Then all you have to do is multiple by the rate. The national average must be up to $0.09 per kWh by now, but rates range from $0.08 to $0.14. That little difference makes a big difference on your bill, so find one of your old bills and get your kWh rate. If you know watts, divide by 1000 to get KW and then multiply by the rate.
For example, my television is so old (1988) that I can’t find anything on it to tell me how much power it uses, but I know it uses 74 watts when its on. I used my handy dandy Kill-O-Watt meter to get the number. If I watch two hours of television per day, in thirty days I use 4,440 watt hours of electricity. Dividing by 1,000 I come up with 4.44 kWh. Multiple that by the average rate of $0.09 and I can expect to pay 40 cents per month to watch television.
Larger appliances like baseboard electric heaters use more power. The watts of power for baseboard heaters is usually labeled on the front on a shiny silver tag. For a 1,000 watt heater that’s on six hours a day, the calculation looks like this:
1,000/1,000 X 6 X $0.09 X 30 days = $16.20 per month.
OK all you watt busters, mount up and ride. It doesn’t matter if you like Nuclear Power or Pulverized Coal or Integrated Combined Cycle Gasification, or Concentrated Solar Power, or Hydro-power or Wind power. New construction of any kind in this day and age will drive up your rates and your bill. Finding "Negawatts" could scare off some of these new power plant plans and keep your energy dollars in your wallet at the same time.
© Mark Daily
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