Five Percent: Conserve a Little Energy

As I have often mentioned in these pages, we had an energy audit last Spring. The audit was a seminal moment in my understanding of our household energy usage.

Mission Accomplished! (Or Is It?)

I talk to a lot of people about their energy conservation measures. Naturally, not wanting to look uncaring, people talk about how they have changed and are going green. Perhaps a light bulb or two changed to CFL. Perhaps they a jacket on their water heater. Some weatherstripping on their door? A programmable thermostat?

These changes sound fine, and they may actually make a difference. But there are two ways that just making changes alone doesn’t really change things.

Perhaps your two CFL bulbs reduce your electrical use a little, but isn’t it important to know how much? (For example, the oft-repeated water heater jacket is of almost no value if you have a relatively newer one). So it’s possible that your changes haven’t improved anything. And the second way changes alone are bad: you may feel like you have “gone green” … mission accomplished.

So to my great chagrin, I realized recently that I had very little clue what my heating usage was, or for that matter what it should be. I had made lots of great changes. Mission accomplished? Not so fast. (more…)

In the summer, we use our whole house fan to stay cool — it draws cool, fresh evening air through the house making us comfortable enough that we never used an air conditioner this past summer. Our electricity bill was great.

But now that it’s fall, we might as well call it a “house hole” instead :-)

We have a 32″ square hole in our attic. We had an old mattress cover that was about the right size and we tossed it over the top every fall thinking, “close enough”. Then we had our energy audit last Spring, and this is what we found: the picture on the left is of the louvers that cover the fan opening when it’s not on; the picture on the right is an infrared photo of the same area taken (with our mattress cover installed). Blue is cold, and cold is bad.

Whole House Fan, or House Hole (click for full size image)

Blue is bad.

Since the energy audit, we have had the house insulation filled in where the first contractor messed up, and topped off the insulation in the attic. But I still needed to improve on the mattress cover. (more…)

Oh yes, I have it.

This afternoon, we started cooking dinner and I made the mistake of glancing at my TED 5000 display. It was reading 1,019 watts at the moment. What the…?

This wasn’t right. We had three lights on in the kitchen at about 35W each. The TV was on in the living room — nope, that’s only 180W. To confirm, I asked Carter to turn the TV off, checked the display, then on again. Yep, about 180W. The fridge was on — I had just gone to the market and opened the freezer and fridge sides so it was re-cooling. That’s around 200 Watts.

I checked downstairs to see if the dryer was on, or something else. Nope. Was the Smart Strip working (the kids had been playing on the Wii earlier, but I have it set up to turn everything off when the TV goes off.) Nope.

Fish tank? I had been suspicious of it for a while and had my Kill-A-Watt plugged in to the socket. But it’s 100W heater, when on, used 100W as advertised. The filter was just a few watts. The fish are safe … for now.

I checked upstairs. Carter’s computer hadn’t gone to sleep … but that couldn’t explain it. I put his computer to sleep. Hardly any change. Theresa’s computer was off, mine was asleep. What the…?

So I looked at the TED graphing, and here’s what I saw: (more…)

My NStar bill came the other day, and it was the lowest bill I have ever had since moving into this house in 1997 — we used an average of 13.1kWh per day; last year for the same period was 14.5kWh per day. That’s a reduction of almost 10%, year over year. Yes, it’s true that we were away for 6 days, which is why this period is historically low, but last year we were away for over two weeks. The vacation is the main reason that our consumption fell from the prior month’s average of 16.8kWh/day.

What did we do? I’m honestly not sure. It was about a month ago that I installed the new TED 5000, but we still have been mostly using the PowerCost Monitor from the year before to keep an eye on our electrical use.

I guess all those little changes we keep making, even in our fifth year of working at it are still adding up. (more…)

Today researchers at the Scotland-Hapsburg Energy Engineering Partnership reported a breakthrough fiber that reportedly can save home owners hundreds of dollars on home heating bills. Being naturally skeptical of such claims, I checked it out, and I believe their assertions are valid.

This bio-tech innovation allows specially bred species to emit a fibrous substance having remarkable thermal insulating properties. Whereas most home insulation is done to create an envelope around the house, this material can instead be used to create an envelope around the items in the house needing the insulation, thus creating an order or magnitude or greater efficiency gain versus heating the air of the house.

Remarkably, this technology has been in use for thousands of years, and it is only recently that researchers understood how it could be used as an energy efficiency tool.

Of course, I am just being baaaad. (more…)

As I have become aware of my energy use, I have grown more interested in understanding the details. I have used four methods to measure my electrical use:

1. (actually) reading the electrical bill,
2. using a Kill-A-Watt meter to measure usage of things we plug in,
3. installing a PowerCost Monitor to display total house usage right in our kitchen, and
4. installing a TED 5000 monitor that measures and records our usage in great detail

Each of these methods is effective, and each has resulted in incremental changes. For us, the incremental changes have added up: we now use less than half of the electricity we used to. Everyone can do at least the first of these — I hope I’ll show you why it makes sense to go a step further. (more…)