In August I wrote about my Electricity Eco-Challenge here at the house. The goal was to reduce our power consumption as much as possible, without having to always live in the dark or anything. I now have an update almost a year later, and after the initial success the electrical savings have kept rolling in, (or not rolling in, depending on your point of view). Hydro-Quebec has a nice chart of my electrical use on their website:
As you may be able to see from the chart, (click it if you want a bigger version), for 6 months of the year we have reduced our use by 200kWh per month! At current rates, we saved $64.80 in the past year on our power bill. However, in real life we saved more, because by reducing our power consumption we kept our use below the threshold where the price of power increases.
We are now looking for ways to reduce our use even more. I have set up the office so I can shut off almost all of the phantom loads in it by flipping an easily-accessible powerbar switch. We’re also trying to hang dry as much of our laundry as possible. I’ll post again in a few months with results.
