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Lusitano -I am beginning to think you and I grew up in the same family. Everything that you are doing, I'm doing! Luckily I started with programmable T stat & CFL lightbulbs right off the bat when I bought my house. So I'm not seeing a drop in my bills over time as my bills were pretty low by being ultra frugal from day 1 (turning heat way down when sleeping and when no one is home, turning off lights when not in use, hanging laundry instead of using dryer, etc.)
I was so lucky that Target stores in my area were selling GE brand LED bulbs for recessed lights for dirt cheap (don't know if it was a price mistake last 2 months as the price is now back to normal at $13 each). Ended up with 15+ LEDs for less than 5 bucks total with add'l sales and coupons so it was hard to resist, eventhough I'm already using all CFLs.
You are right... the wattages are similar between the CFL and LED so there won't be much savings. What I like is that LED comes on instantly with full brightness vs. having to wait and wait on the CFL. Plus, turning lights on / off a lot supposedly isn't as bad for the longevity of the LED as it is for CFL. They are rated for 20,000 + hour usage so I'm taking them with me if I move!
It depends on the generation of CFLs. The first generation indeed it took 1-2 minutes to achieve full brightness.
Mostly I have CFLs which cost me 2 dollars a piece or so. I have a few LEDs that I have caught on sale here and there, especially on dimmers where we didn't like the buzzing and flickering of CFLs.
I got a few Crees on sale for around 4 dollars which was great.
Yes, big savings this year, of course next year savings compared to this year will be near 0, but that means that we can't get much lower!
I have made a deal with my wife, where everything I can save up compared to what she used to have set up, we have ACH transfers for the difference directly to our brokerage.
This will make it easily about 200 USD extra per month on savings, which in reality is around 250 USD pre-tax or 3000 USD a year pre-tax.
We wont put it on our mortgage because its low to begin with ... a 3.2% fixed 30 year mortgage is as low as you can get especially when it was contracted the mortgage. If I had at the time signed the deed when it was first bought I would have gone variable rate - my mother has been paying about 0.5% interest rate on her mortgage since 2008-2009 and it doesn't look anywhere that rates will go up.
Now Ill just let it be 3.2% which after tax is about 2.4% a pretty good number
OP, you are to be commended no matter what anyone says. You elec use looks excellent. You will be hard pressed to get it much lower.
I have been doing reductions for years. Our house is too big, 2600 Sq ft but we were able to get down to an average of 450 KWH. My biggest saving are in heat, we heat mostly with wood and our gas bill averages $26.21 per month, Including Hot water.
Put the extra in a roth IRA and really reap the benefits.
thats really good for such a big house and probably with family.
The average american family seems to spend much more on electricity. In europe, people have kids and have dishwashers and washers and not as much is wasted.
Like I said, it was not big work to decrease the use of electricity, a programmable t-stat allied with a call to the utility company and change to CFLs were the biggest factor.
During summer, we barely will use AC im sure. At night it gets chilly here so we can take advantage of that by opening windows or something in order to cycle the air.
Fans will be used a whole lot more that is for sure.
Already did.
We put in a traditional IRA though thus far because it makes our tax bracket much lower and in the future we-ll do a back door conversion.
We didnt have enough liquidity to put 11k right now in such a short notice... I ended up using credit cards to fund the IRA since we have almost 10k on the IRS side so it was just a matter of timing. Got to fund the IRA and got some cash back along with it
As expected, the usage of our electricity bill has been going down a lot without heating as much.
We have barely used the heat this past couple weeks (total maybe 8 hours at the most).
Our usage has gone down a bit and now we are on track to use 240 kWh in one month, which will be a reduction of -20% from last months usage. We haven't changed our patterns... only we havent heated as much due to temperatures (it was 83 F outside yesterday). As stated, the blower most likely is reponsible for somewhere around 400-700 Wh so something around 50-70 kWh of usage in our electric bill these past few months.
How many light bulbs did you switch out and how much each cost. I am counting 20+ in the kitchen right now.
As far as laundry is concerned I do hand a lot of clothes to dry. I will not turn fluffy towels into scratch pads by not using the dryer! Yes, you wash some things in cold water with the respective detergent. Again - some!
What size of house are you remodelling? Are you currently working or do you have time to DYI?
We added a lot from barrier wrap to window film, UV screens, extra insulation, automatic water pumps, .... I will not start wearing polar fleece or have SO (who does not tolerate heat at night well) and our furries be miserable. With summer temps in the three digits and winter temps in the single digits it is what it is.
How many light bulbs did you switch out and how much each cost. I am counting 20+ in the kitchen right now.
As far as laundry is concerned I do hand a lot of clothes to dry. I will not turn fluffy towels into scratch pads by not using the dryer! Yes, you wash some things in cold water with the respective detergent. Again - some!
What size of house are you remodelling? Are you currently working or do you have time to DYI?
We added a lot from barrier wrap to window film, UV screens, extra insulation, automatic water pumps, .... I will not start wearing polar fleece or have SO (who does not tolerate heat at night well) and our furries be miserable. With summer temps in the three digits and winter temps in the single digits it is what it is.
Hmm... If I'm not mistaken about 20-25 light bulbs.
They cost between 2-4 dollars each depending on the models and if they were either CFL or LED. We went mostly for CFLs.
Our house is about 1250 sq feet give or take not including the basement - unfinished. The house is an older ranch style house. I think it's leaky in terms of insulation not much going on I believe. It will be something to address this spring.
To update, we are more than on track to beat the 240 kWh this month!
Something weird happened... So I cleaned my old fridge coils and also switched a few outlets in the kitchen.
That fridge probably wasnt cleaned since it was bought 20-30+ years ago! It looked like a hamster's nest yuck!
Anyhow, I had measured the electric consumption before in the fall and it said the fridge was doing about 2 kWh a day!
After I cleaned it, I measured it again and it actually runs more silent and smoother it seems so I thought it was consuming less energy. To my surprise, the first post-cleanse measurement was actually showing an increase of 33%!! I thought maybe I had done something to the airflow possibly and was expending more...
But curiously I am now seeing the whole house readings and NOW we are only consuming 6 kWh a DAY!! which would only happen before if we were on vacation and the house be totally empty!! What gives?!? This has been going on since the day I cleaned the fridge.
My reasoning is either one of these two... either the increase in consumption in the readings was due to the fact that the fridge was off for about an hour or so, hence once i turned it on, most part of the consumption was done during that initial period to bring back temperature up... or maybe one of the outlets had a bad connection and there was some wattage leaks there.
I am now taking new readings on the fridge to see if my first reasoning is correct or not. If it still shows higher consumption then I can only think it was a energy leak in some of the outlets I replaced.
But with this then, we are on track for a 170 kWh month which means our electric bill will be 29 dollars!
Quite an improvement! Should I say the average US household uses 910 kWh per month!!
Total usage 230 kWh which falls totally in the expected range when I stated around 240 kWh for this month.
It will be interesting this following month because if trend from the last 2 weeks of previous statement cycle are worth anything, it will mean that this next month will be around 180-200 kWh. And we haven't changed the fridge yet once that goes we may indeed go into the 150 kwh range!
And dont think we dont use electricity we use it normally. I run my computer 24/7, we use power tools around the house, etc
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