by Marcy Tate
 
Energy conservation is not only good for the planet, it’s also good for your pocket. It’s pretty simple to conserve energy at home and you’ll notice the savings right away. Still, changing your energy habits isn’t easy for every homeowner. Start by picking a few energy conservation techniques and gradually add a few more each month. As you go along, remind yourself how much of a help your efforts are for the planet and how much lower your utility bills will be. That should give you the inspiration to turn your energy conservation habits into a way of life. The tips below do not involve high investments. 

1. Light Bulbs

Those curly-shaped light bulbs, called compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs have been around for over a decade. If you haven’t replaced your energy wasting incandescent bulbs yet with CFL bulbs, then make this your first move in greening your energy spending habits. CFL bulbs last up to 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs. Here’s a chart from General Electric that will help you select your CFL bulbs:
 
Standard Bulb = CFL Bulb
40w = 10w
60w = 13w-15w
75w = 20w
100w = 26w-29w
150w = 38w-42w
250w-300w = 55w
 

2. Dimmers

Dimmers let you control the lighting in your home. When you need less lighting, you can easily dim the lights and save energy and money. Dimmers are inexpensive and can be used with most lighting fixtures, including pendant lights and recessed lighting. Dimming a light by just 10 percent more than doubles the bulb life.
 

3. Programmable Thermostats

A programmable thermostat is not only good for conserving energy, it’s extremely convenient. You won’t have to get out of bed if you have forgotten to lower your thermostat. Instead, you can program the thermostat to lower the temperature each night at a designated time. According to the US Department of Energy, you can save approximately 10% a year on your heating and cooling bills by turning your thermostat back 10°–15° for eight hours. Programmable thermostats give you the ability to do this easily.
 

4. Appliances & Electronics

Refrigerator

Refrigerators account for about 20 percent of household electricity use. Raising the temperature in the refrigerator will help lower your electricity usage. Check the gaskets around your refrigerator and freezer doors to make sure they are clean and sealed tightly. If they are not clean, it will cause the refrigerator to work harder, wasting unnecessary energy.
 

Water Heater

Turning the water heater temperature down can also save energy. Many thermostats are set to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Lowering it by 20 degrees can save almost $100 a year.
 

Computer

Turn off your computer at night. According to the US Department of Energy, you can save an average of $90 a year. If you are in the market for a new computer, consider a laptop. They use less energy than desktop computers.
 

New Appliances

If you are in the market for new appliances, select energy-efficient models. Look for the Energy Star label on appliances. The label means that the product is an energy saving product.
 

5. Standby Power

Standby power, also known as vampire power, is the electric power consumed by electronic appliances while they are switched off or in a standby mode. Unplug appliances, power adapters and other electronic devices when not in use and you’ll save.
Microwaves, cell phone chargers, televisions, and power adapters for laptop computers should be un-plugged for optimal energy savings.
 

6. Weatherize

The little cracks and crevices around your home can cause hot or cool air to exit your home. Sealing the cracks and crevices can save you up to 15 percent in heating and cooling costs. Depending on where the draft is, you can use weather stripping or caulk to fill in the crack. Weather stripping is easy to install and your whole house can be weatherized in one day.
 

7. Insulation

Do you find that you need to run your heating or air conditioning unit all the time to achieve a comfortable temperature? It could be that you do not have enough insulation in your attic. Improper amounts of insulation means that the hot or cool air is entering and exiting your home, causing your heating or air conditioning system to work harder. This is a waster of energy. Adding insulation will keep the cold or hot air in your home.
 

8. Hang-Dry Laundry

Gas and electric dryers use a lot of energy to dry your clothes. There are many inexpensive drying racks on the market that can hold an entire medium sized load. Alternatively, consider cutting back on your dryer usage. You can do this by drying the clothes on a lower temperature setting or drying them until they are half dry and then hanging them to dry.
 

9. Stovetop

On gas burners, the hottest part of the flame is right at the tip. If your flame has a larger diameter than the pot you are heating, you are wasting a lot of the heat produced by the flame. If the flame isn’t under the pot, it’s not working to heat it. Avoid producing unnecessary heat by using a burner that is the same size as the pot or pan.
 

10. Home-Energy Audit

A home-energy audit assesses how much energy your home consumes. It also evaluates what you can do to make your home more energy efficient. Many local utility companies offer low-cost audits. Contact your local utility company to see if they offer this service.

Marcy Tate is a blogger at Networx. She is also a featured author at Electricians Networks.

Sure, we turn on lights earlier due to shorter days.

But there are other factors, and I am beginning to figure out what they are:

• More loads of laundry in the dryer: fewer shorts, more layers
• The gas burner uses circulator pumps to move water around the house’s heating system
• We use the gas oven more, meaning the “glow bar” I found a while back runs
• Humidifiers — the ones that create steam are basically boiling water all day!
• Fish tank heater — the house is cooler, but fishies like 80°F in all seasons (no fishie sweaters I know of)
• More TV and video games for the kids; less playing outside
• Christmas tree
• Probably a few sneaky ones I have not found yet…

Of course I was able to isolate these items just because we have an energy monitor (TED 5000, in our case) — it’s easy to see the readings jump when things come on, like the heat.

We can affect some of these (the cool mist humidifiers are far less costly). Some are just not ones I want to give up on, although the fishie sweaters seem plausible.

And one other item is worth noting: this year we put a lot of effort and a little money into making our house keep in the heat: insulation, and especially air sealing with foam and caulking — it’s pretty clear it’s going to make a big difference. And the less the heat is on, the less those circulator pumps run. These are the kinds of unexpected additive effects you sometimes get in making changes.

Three Great Things

The expected usage gives you a nice target, and the comparison to others provides a helpful benchmark.

But the new “Always On” measure provides two very helpful bits of information.

First, the darker bar helps isolate the spikes above. For example, the most obvious repeating spike above is the refrigerator — it cycles on about once per hour and runs for perhaps 25 minutes each time, running at a bit over 200W — it’s easy to see that pattern.

It’s also easy to get a rough estimate of the fridge’s individual contribution to my whole household use doing some simple math For example, it’s running about half of the time, using about 200W when running. This is the same as 100W all the time. If I know my electricity rate (I do, it’s 19.2 cents per kWh) I can do some math: 100W = 0.100 kW * 365 days * 24 hours * $0.192: this fridge costs about $45/year $170 in electrical costs (thanks to Ash for pointing out my math error!).

Second, the baseline is as clear as day: a bit less than 300W, which represents 7.1kWh/11kWh, or about 65% of my total electrical consumption. And that fridge, adds 100W to my overall baseline usage of around 300W.

Hmm, that means my fridge uses about 876 kWh per year. So let’s look at the EnergyStar site for comparable units (our current one is 22 cu ft), and we can see that the most efficient refrigerators sold today use 403 kWh per year — less than 1/2 of my 11 year old model. Wow! On the other hand, a fridge costs about $1,000, so I guess we’ll hold off until it stops working consider whether a 6-year payback makes sense for us.

Both of these data are things I can actually do something with. I would like to reduce my baseline/Always On number. Maybe I’ll follow my own advice and add a light timer to the TiVo, or even Internet connection and turn them off between 1 and 6 in the morning.

Similarly, the 6pm to midnight lump is just when we’re all home, at night with lights, dishwasher, TV and the like turned on. This just puts our usage in perspective.

The Third Good Thing

The Energy Detective (TED 5000) was the first device partner; a new UK company sells a similar and simpler looking device that also works with Google PowerMeter, called “Alert Me”. What is especially interesting is that they have a deal with a natural gas company — the device just knows how to read meters. While providing less detail than the TED, there is more to our energy picture than electricity. I am anxiously awaiting this product for sale in the US.

Progress is happening!

Here’s her email,

I am trying to do my next round of tightening up and have read all the stuff about turning off your “always on” appliances, but after much googling couldn’t find the answer to my real question: if I turn off my cable box, will my dvr stop recording?

So then I remembered—aha, my cousin Tom’s website.

And spent a little more time surfing around there, which was incredibly informative and pleasant BUT I still couldn’t find the answer.

So then I thought I’d take the lazy way out and just ask you.

Will it?

Your very very pale green cousin

alison

To which I promptly and thoughtfully replied

Yes, it will stop recording.

However, consider the following tip: if you have nothing to record between, say midnight to 4pm, you can do this:

1) Plug everything (TV, Cable Box, DVD Player, whatever) into a power strip
2) Plug the power strip into a light timer
3) Set the light timer to turn off at midnight and on at 4pm
4) plug the light timer into the wall

Then, not only will you miss little or nothing, you will get rid of the power of the cable box and the standby power of the TV and whatever else, and have the whole system off for two-thirds of the day.

Light timers and power strips can be bought at drug stores, grocery stores, hardware stores or online.

Your friendly neighborhood energy conservation cousin,

Tom

Perhaps you have noticed: I am a little obsessive with my measurement of energy usage. Despite being an energy saving zealot, we still use our electric clothes dryer — perhaps as a rationalization, I had claimed that all those other people saying that we should use our dryer less had it all wrong. I said that this caused people to lose focus of the smaller items, especially the ones contributing to your “baseline” usage.

As I have pointed out, but said more nicely in a great article on PlotWatt’s blog, 100 watts, on all the time, costs about $100 per year for most people (more for us in the Northeast). Over the course of measuring electricity usage with several power monitors, I have reduced our baseline usage from about 700W to around 200W, which saves me a good deal more than $500/year in electricity bills. Finding the little energy vampires like my old Dell laptop which wouldn’t sleep on its own, to the old cable box (replaced with TiVo), to the 2 buttons on my “off” receiver, to the computer server in our hall closet — all eliminated, and all reduced our baseline. Success.

So was the dryer really that important? I have to say, it seems so now. Here is a series of screen captures from (actual) data from my TED 5000 now hooked up to Google PowerMeter, which I can see from my iGoogle home page.

What do you see?

Sunday — 13 kWh

Monday — 13 kWh

Tuesday — 12 kWh

Today — 20 kWh

So what happened today? The laundry. You can also see a similar spike on the first picture on the Saturday — 20 kWh. Guess what happened then? Yep, laundry. So if we keep this up, we’re using an extra 7 kWh on two laundry days a week. So about 13% of our current electrical usage is from the dryer.

On the bright side, our usage compares generally to a 2 bedroom apartment (we have a three bedroom house, 2 kids, the works).

I installed the update last night, with some significant anticipation … what would I get?

Looks like I’ll need to be impatient a little longer.

The good news is that enabling PowerMeter via the TED is as simple as can be. It took about a minute once I had the firmware update (even that was quick).

The bad news is that there’s not that much of an incremental improvement over what you can already get on the TED. You can see your data in 15-minute increments as a “gadget” on iGoogle, your Google account home page. You can also see how your usage compares to others. While there’s a “Share” option on the widget, it doesn’t seem to work, so I am not sure what it’s supposed to do. And, you can see your usage data anywhere on the Internet, not just at home.

But my bigger disappointment is that this data, for now, seems to be private. An engineer at Google told me that they have big plans, and I believe that they’ll come through. I want:

• to be able to publish my widget on my blog,
• to be able to join up with others and compare our usages,
• to be able to get at my data from a Google API so I can show the data however I like.
• Oh, and a climate change bill would be nice, too.

Not yet.

In some ways, this is a huge step, and unexpected in some ways. We’ve been told to imaging a world of smart meters and all that we’ll get from that … through the utility companies? Instead, there’s a new channel for helping tackle by far the lowest hanging fruit of the climate change problem: conservation — if any company was going to get this working in a smart, extensible way, it would be Google.

So today’s step is small. And also huge. Thanks, Google, and Energy Inc.

Update: Tuesday Sept 6^th — TED Firmware page reports that Google PowerMeter software will be available this Friday afternoon.

Who cares? Well, I know that real-time energy monitoring devices make a huge difference in behavior, or at least they can.

And I know utilities are going to get to that smart grid “real soon now” (just as soon as they stop hand-typing my electricity bill). Look, there’s a reason that The Electric Company is the worst property in the game Monopoly®.

But seriously, allowing real people to get themselves hooked in to a larger network of data that Google can collect, analyze and do their usual greatness with should offer a few early-adopter types the chance to show the true power of data aggregation again, this time with electrical power.

The Google Power Meter blog says the functionality is enabled in the latest TED 5000 firmware, so I downloaded it … but I cannot see anything different. I already had the 1.0.214 gateway firmware installed, and now have Footprints 1.0.103 installed (the latest as of 11pm EDT, 10/5/09). But I see nothing. The TED 5000 site says little (although there’s now a screenshot of PowerMeter). The Google Power Meter site says little, and the newsgroup has nothing new posted.

Am I just being impatient? Yes! I want my TED 5000 household electrical use data to be on the web so everyone knows that I don’t line dry my clothes (and they know when, too.) Well, also I want to be an über-energy-geek.

More to come. Soon, I hope!

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:

What the...?

Between 3 and 4pm, we use between 300W and 500W. Carter starts watching CSI a little before 5 and Theresa start cooking (spinach lasagna, yum!) at around 5 — lights in the kitchen go on, turn on the stove and kitchen lights, fridge is on, the ice-maker went on (we had a Gin and Tonic for a cocktail) and started making the lasagna. Then, around 5:20 we turned on the oven, and finished everything else up. Lights out, fridge closed, and back to baseline plus the TV.

But that’s not what happened.

Now just to be clear, my family had this completely figured out yesterday when we baked a chicken. Again, I was surprised to see the TED reading so high. They all said “it’s the oven”!

I laughed. In my view, it wasn’t exactly a derisive laugh at all. Perhaps there was a paternalistic scorn (but hey, I am the father, so get to be paternalistic). They say “dismissive”. I say “laughing with you”. Whatever.

The point is: the stove uses gas. Sure, it’s got a clock and a digital display. They’re on all the time anyway. Ha!

Back to today, as I am walking around the house obsessively checking for things being turned on. I couldn’t figure it out. I thought the story here was that this real-time electrical display device, the TED 5000, had created in me what will eventually be diagnosed as a new psychological disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Excessive Consumption Detection Disorder (OCECDD). As I was writing, I was staring at the chart above (yes, obsessively). I asked, tentatively and without giving away anything, “So, Theresa, when did you turn on the oven?” — and she said “Around 5:30, I guess.”

And then I realized: it must me the gas oven using the electricity. Then, the stove timer went off — lasagna was done. I heard the beep when the oven went off (6:39pm). TV and my computer off (6:44pm). And through this, the TED meter dropped to around 500 Watts … and stayed there. It was the oven indeed.

Dinner was good. I was stunned. (Not that dinner was good, still obsessed with the recent finding regarding our gas stove.)

I did the dishes, and as I cleaned, I surreptitiously turned on the oven again. And yes, the TED jumped by over 300 Watts. Did I mention that it’s a gas stove? The label on the side says the oven uses 16,000 BTU/hr. Over to the handy, dandy Watt Converter to find that the oven burners, when on, use 4686 Watts (less than the dryer, to be sure). But it doesn’t mention that when the burner is on, the oven also uses 300 Watts of electricity, as well.

But why?

Carter found the answer, by Googling “Why does our gas oven use 300 Watts?” Google knew, and so did fieldlines.com. Our oven uses an electric glow bar igniter. When the gas burner is on, so is the electric current — enough to create a glowing light that ensures that if the gas flame blows out (perhaps due to a hurricane or tornado?) the gas flow will be re-lit by the igniter. Yeah, for a little less than 10% of the energy to cook the damned food, we have a little 300W glow bar on to make sure if the flame goes out, it will go on again.

We could light our whole house for 300 Watts. The New York Times wrote a story today about how we use so much electricity with our computers and TVs (quoting my friend Peter Troast, who, in addition to being a “home owner” is also the CEO of EnergyCircle.com, which they managed not to mention in the story) — why doesn’t the Times do an expose on glow bar igniters?

I want to know. What part of “Energy Star” decided that it was necessary and OK to have a 300 Watt thing running for hours at a time, doing nothing. NOTHING.

OK, so I guess I will not be diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Excessive Consumption Detection Disorder. No way! I think I’ll get “energy sleuth of the year” award for figuring this one out. I am a hero. My family are heroes (and I’m not saying that just so they’ll get over me laughing derisively at them when they suggested a gas stove could be responsible for using 300 Watts). And the evil, bad, wasteful people at Kenmore (actually Maytag, who re-branded the oven we have as Kenmore) should be ashamed.

It just goes to show: it’s not just the folks that showed up at town-hall meetings to yell at their Senator who are crazy. So are the people at Kenmore who decided it was fine to run a 300W electrical element whenever the gas stove is on.

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.

Here’s a section of the bill. Cool, isn’t it?

The Interesting Part of Our October, 2009 Electricity Bill

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.

Read the Electric Bill

I started measuring my electricity use by actually looking at my monthly bill. By seeing how things changed from month to month, I was able to get an idea of how all of the changes we made helped. This is a very low-tech way of savings that costs nothing, and can be very effective — we reduced our usage by about 30%-40% using this approach.

Before this, to be honest, I just looked at one number: the amount I had to write a check for. Actually, I often didn’t even do this, because our utility offers electronic payment and also “level billing” — every month was the same, adjusting a little from year to year. I was completely unaware of the relationship between turning something on and it’s consumption of electricity.

One of the first things I did when I started writing this blog in 2005 was to figure out how to read the bill. The number that matters is killowatt-hours (kWh), and if your bill has it, average kWh per day, which evens out for billing cycles that are longer or shorter. And it turns out that our bill also has the numbers from the previous 13 months. Who knew?

As I began to read the bills, I made changes — I could see the net effect of those changes in next month’s bill … kind of. Our usage tends to vary seasonally. We used more in the winter months when it gets darker earlier, and of course the aquarium heater is on more of the time to keep our fishies a warm and toasty 80°. And we used more in the summer when it was hot and we ran the air conditioner. These seasonal changes are hard to separate from more general changes you might make (e.g. changing to CFL bulbs, making sure your computer sleeps when not in use, and so on. This is why it’s nice to compare usage to the same period the prior year.

We started seeing reductions every month as new things to change occurred to us. But the electric bill rolls up a month of actions into a single number, so it’s a little bit removed from any specific change. There was no financial investment to use this method, but we saved a pretty significant amount every month after a half a year of making a little change here and there.

Use a Kill-A-Watt

Kill-a-Watt Meter

I had my TV, DVD player, cable box, stereo and TiVo player all plugged into a power strip, so I unplugged the power strip, plugged the Kill-A-Watt into the wall, then plugged the power strip into the Kill-A-Watt. After I figured out how to use the display, I was shocked: even with the TV off, this setup was using hundreds of watts — something like 325W, if I recall — and that’s with everything “off”. Well, the cable box was on, and the TiVo wants to be on all the time. But everything else was off. Or was it.

In a matter of minutes, I found the culprits, just by plugging in one device at a time. It turns out that the Motorola cable box was a complete hog, running something like 150W — for what? And the other secret sucker was my stereo, which was turned “off” — but it turns out that it has the ability to play music in multiple rooms. If you have the tiny little black-on-black buttons pressed in, a tiny little light on the front lit, telling me (apparently) that it needed to use 50W or so for each button. Doh!

Those two little buttons were costing me about $200/year in electricity.

Inspired by this success, I went around and found all sorts of little surprises. Our terrible wireless phones had old-style “vampire” transformers that were hot to the touch, and were sucking 12W each full-time. The speakers on our computers were always on, and it turns out the computer didn’t go into standby mode properly, and on and on.

The Kill-A-Watt helped me find all these seemingly innocent devices, and over time, I came up with ways to not have things on when they weren’t needed.

But not everything plugs in, and some are hard to get at. And the Kill-A-Watt is a cool thing to use from time to time, but, well, you have to use it.

We did use it, and by now, our electricity bill was regularly running at about 40% less than the prior year. That’s a lot, given that we were paying around $200/month in bills before. We were very proud of our accomplishments, and felt like we had done just about everything there was to be done. Ah, but that turned out not to be so!

PowerCost Monitor Real-Time Display (or TED 1001)

Not Really the Cent-o-meter

Having the meter right in our kitchen was an eye opener. It’s just there, and like the clock or thermometer, you just glance at it from time to time, and get to know what’s normal for your house. Ours would settle down to about 500W to 600W when we had all settled down for bed, and that seemed find to me — the real surprise was just how much things like the electric dryer actually use — a load would run for about an hour, and used 6500 Watts. Man, that really could add up. We also realized that the kids did know how to use the “on” button on the electric heaters we had in the basement … but not the off button! These would also use a lot.

And so we did a little thinking. I cleaned the dryer vent. We tried some different settings on the dryer. The biggest change happened when we had to replace our washing machine and got one of the energy-efficient models — yes, the washer itself used a bit less electricity, but it has a spin-dry mode that gets the clothes far, far, dryer than our old washer, so now the dryer ran only about one-half as long. And we found ways to make sure the kids remembered to turn off the heat when they were done in the basement.

Just by having the reading in my face, we saw how we actually used this service that was formerly almost invisible. But I wasn’t done — our what was it that used 500 or 600 watts all the time? Time for a little more detective work.

One of the changes was to get rid of the computer “server” we had in our closet that was supposed to do great things like let us play music from cool players installed anywhere in the house, and be a central file server for our several computers, and other geeky stuff like that. I found an alternate solution, and chopped off 108W. I found out that most Windows computers will not go into standby or hibernate automatically, even after you fix them so they do … for a while. We eventually just got used to doing it manually. And power-strips — even when the computer is off, all those stupid wall-wart transformers are at the ready, sucking a little power, here and there.

By watching, looking, and changing where possibly, our baseline use is now running at about 200 Watts, 300 when the aquarium heater is on. I am pretty sure I know what is using those watts, and I have decided for now, that they are worth the cost.

The real-time monitor is an incredible thing. I guess you have to be a little motivated — for me, it’s just a fun thing to see how low we can go. And I continue to be surprised that there continue to be small ways to conserve, even after doing this obsessively seriously now for more than four years.

TED 5000

There was one thing missing in the PowerCost Monitor — it mostly just shows you what you’re using now. But I am a computer guy, and a database guy, and I like to see how things change over time. The new TED 5000 provides this level of detail, recording, and remembering measurements from every few seconds for a long time. And its excellent software, which runs right in a web browser on your home network, gives you a picture that’s pretty incredible.

By looking at the graphs, you can easily see patterns that are associated with a particular device. I have my eye on our refrigerator — even at night when the doors are closed, it goes on quite frequently and runs for a pretty long time — it seems to be on about 20 minutes and off about 20 minutes; when on, it uses from 100 to 200 Watts; I assume it’s on longer during the day when its doors are getting opened and closed. This seems excessive to me.

Which Is Right For You

We are now saving something like $120/month on our electricity bill — using power at our old rate, we would have paid around $200/month, now it’s about $80/month. I have invested some money in CFL bulbs, Smart Power Strips, new appliances, and a decent amount of my time. I have also paid for the Kill-A-Watt and PowerCost Monitor (the TED was a gift from a like-minded friend). But the cost of all of these things together have long since paid themselves back.

All four of these approaches require only two things:

1. A little effort and commitment to become aware
2. A little effort and commitment, and sometimes a little expense, to make changes to conserve

So start with the first: read your electricity bill, and compare it to last month … every month. Challenge yourself, or better yet, challenge your family! It’s not hard, it doesn’t require great sacrifice, and it’s what we all need to be doing to help deal with climate change.