Raise your thermostat by three degrees this summer to save around 20% on your cooling costs. If you spend $1000 each summer just for cooling, like I do, that works out to a savings of $200.
You may ask, "How do you know?" Good question — I know because I used the handy thermostat calculator offered by Energy Guide. Normally, I would link directly to the calculator, but the calculator requires you to enter your ZIP code first. So if you click the link, scroll down to the fifth calculator, enter your ZIP code, and get started. It will ask you a series of questions about your house, where your thermostats are set currently, and where you are considering setting your thermostats.
According to this calculator, if I adjust my thermostats from 72°F to 75°F this summer, I will save $200 — which works out to 20% of my annual cooling cost.
Save 20% On Your A/C By Raising Your Thermostat Three Degrees
Return On Investment For Home Energy Savings
The DOE, via the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, published a analysis of the average return on investment (ROI) of common home energy savings projects around the house back in 1990s. The project costs may be a little bit out of date but the ROI is still applicable today. Here are some sample numbers:
| Project | Project Cost | Annual Savings | Payback Period | ROI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Replace Incandescents With CFLs | $200 | $80 | 2.5 | 41% |
| Seal Up Ductwork | $250 | $95 | 2.6 | 41% |
| Install (& Use) Energy Star Thermostat | $107 | $29 | 3.7 | 30% |
| Install Energy Star Heat Pump | $692 | $126 | 5.5 | 19% |
| Increase Wall/Attic Insulation | $1784 | $111 | 16.1 | 8% |
What does this mean to an energy watcher? Well, there are lots of different ways we can save energy at home, but not all energy saving tips are equal. Some energy saving tips are actually free and simply require that you change your behavior — although the payback period for these changes is immediate, the total amount of energy saved is generally minimal.
Serious energy savings, however, generally involve serious investment. When deciding where you should spend your money to reduce energy expenditures, you need to carefully consider the payback period and your expected return on investment. Keeping track of your utility bills on our free utility bill tracking spreadsheet is a good place to start, because if you don't know what your costs were before the project, you won't be able to figure out your savings after the project.
Another key advantage in knowing the expected ROI for these projects is so that you can focus on projects with a higher ROI first. We spent about $800 insulating the ceiling over our un-finished basement last year, which might save us $50 per year on our heating and cooling bills. If I had known then what I know now, well, we might have done it anyway — but I would have had much more realistic expectations.
Or we may have proceeded on to other projects with a higher ROI, such as sealing up the ductwork — which we will be doing this summer.
Incandescent Lightbulbs Get Hot!
If you are looking for yet another excuse to replace your incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescent or LED lightbulbs, remember that incandescents convert 90% of the energy they consume into heat — which means that in the summer time, you will to pay twice, once to get the lightbulb finger-scorching hot and then again to remove that heat from the surrounding air.
How Can I Buy Green Power?
Before we figure out how to buy green power, we need to figure out what green power actually is:
The essence of green power marketing is to provide market-based choices for electricity consumers to purchase power from environmentally preferred sources. The term "green power" is used to define power generated from renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, geothermal, hydropower and various forms of biomass. Green power marketing has the potential to expand domestic markets for renewable energy technologies by fostering greater availability of renewable electric service options in retail markets. Although renewable energy development has traditionally been limited by cost considerations, customer choice allows consumer preferences for cleaner energy sources to be reflected in market transactions. In survey after survey, customers have expressed a preference and willingness to pay more, if necessary, for cleaner energy sources.
Would you be willing to spend more on your utility bills, if you knew you were:- reducing your carbon footprint,
- reducing air pollution,
- reducing water consumption, and
- supporting efforts to make American energy-independent?
Additional tax and cash incentives for home energy savings offered by state and local governments, as well as individual utility companies, can be found here.
Spam Wastes Time And Energy
Energy Watcher has reached a milestone, of sorts, recently. Since our email address is plastered all over our website, it was only a matter of time before we came to the attention of our African friends:
I am the above named person from Cote D'Ivoire I am married to late Mr ben mugan who is an Oil Consultant/Contractor with the Abidjan Cote D'Ivoire National Petrolum Corpration Ivory Coast for nine years before he died in the year 2005,We were married for eleven years without a child. He died after a brief illness that lasted for only four days.
Before his death we were both born again Christian and we worship in Glourios Chapel Church of God. Since his death I decided not to remarry or get a child outside my matrimonial home which the Bible is against. When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of ($2.1Million U.S. dollars) in a Bank , Presently, the fund is still with the Bank and Recently, my Doctor told me that i have serious sickness which is cancer problem. The one that disturbs me most is my stroke sickness but I pray to God to heal me so that I will be alive and see his work done as my late husband instructed me.
A recent study by McAfee shows that the 62 trillion spam email messages sent each year waste not only our valuable time but also vast amounts of energy. Consider that each email you send uses a trivial amount of energy to run the computer while you type the message, some additional amount to send that message across the Internet, and yet another watt or two for the recipient to retrieve that message. Here's where the law of large numbers kicks in — let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that sending an email uses one watt of electricity. (I imagine that it's actually more, but I can't find any numbers online that I can trust.)Multiple that one watt of electricity times 62 trillion spam email messages, and we are suddenly talking about a lot of electricity. At $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, the spammers are stealing power from us.
Can we break out the heavy weaponry now? Spammers must die!
Why Don't Energy Saving Light Bulbs Work Right?
Why does it seem to be so hard for us to develop a decent energy-saving light bulb? There are about 100,000,000 households in the U.S., each of which probably has 50 or more light bulbs in it. Each of those light bulbs gets replaced every five years or so on average. Every five years, then, the U.S. uses up five billion lightbulbs. At a dollar a bulb, that's a billion dollars a year. You would think that with the backing of the new administration and a prize of a billion dollars a year, some manufacturer would figure out how to make an energy saving light bulb that works right, wouldn't you?
I've been experimenting with various green lighting at my house and I'm telling you that incandescent light bulbs — old-fashioned, finger-burning, energy-wasting, basically-unchanged-for-100-years, totally-unhip incandescent light bulbs — are starting to look like the best choice available. It's not that incandescents are good — it's that all of the new alternatives have something wrong with them.
In the plus column, incandescent light bulbs:
- Turn on instantly
- Emit a warm yellow light reminiscent of the sun
- Don't make any noise
- Radiate light evenly
- Turn off instantly
- Last 2,000 or more hours
- Don't poison the environment when disposed of
- Cost less than a dollar
- Are a proven and tested technology
Let's take a look at our serious alternatives:
Compact Fluorescent Light (CFL) Bulbs
CFL bulbs are the hot tip on the green circuit these days — let's see how they compare to incandescents. In the plus column, they:- Last 10,000 or more hours
- Radiate light evenly
- Use less than 25% of the energy that an incandescent bulb uses
- Turn on eventually — some CFL bulbs take 90 seconds to "warm up"
- Emit a sickly white light that is entirely unnatural
- Emit some heat, although 1/3 to 1/2 as much as incandescents
- Make an annoying hum
- Turn off eventually
- Poison the environment when disposed of
- Cost considerably more than a dollar
- Seem to have real problems with manufacturing defects — about 20% of the CFLs we have installed in our house either did not work straight out of the box or failed within a month
Light-Emitting Diode (LED) Bulbs
LED bulbs are a promising new technology that could save us 95% on our lighting bills — if manufacturers could put together a design that works right. In the plus column, they:- Turn on instantly
- Last 30,000 or more hours
- Emit no heat
- Make no noise
- Turn off instantly
- Don't poison the environment when disposed of
- Use less than 5% of the energy that an incandescent bulb uses
- Emit a sickly white light that is entirely unnatural
- Radiate light straight up and not to the sides
- Cost considerably more than a dollar
- Are a brand-new technology
Halogen Bulbs
I'm not taking halogen lights seriously because they have all of the negatives of incandescents with the added danger of setting your house on fire.So this is where we stand — there aren't any energy saving bulbs that can truly take the place of the venerable incandescent bulb. There aren't any problems with the science — it's not as if we are waiting on some sort of fundamental breakthrough in the science of lighting. What we have here is a failure of will. (I mean, I can design a better energy-saving light bulb.)
When will manufacturers deliver an energy-saving light bulb that works right? The first one to deliver will own the lighting market.
Floor Fans Cool Rooms With Low Ceilings
If your ceilings are too low for ceiling fans, get floor fans and tilt them to point upward — you can get the same effect as a ceiling fan without having to raise the roof.
Turning on the Air Conditioner Each Year
There's a magic yet dreaded date that happens each year for energy watchers, when you finally break down and turn on the air conditioner. Every day you don't turn on the air conditioner is like money in the bank — and free money at that. Our average base electricity consumption is 750 kWh per month, month in and month out. When the air conditioner is on, however, we use an additional 2,000 kWh per month. At an average cost of $0.10 per kWh, that works out to $200 per month, or $6.66 per day, to run the air conditioner.
So we check the weather reports and hope for more cool weather as spring advances and it gets hotter and hotter. The magic date arrived this week, we turned on the air conditioning, and we are now looking at an additional $200 per month on our utility bills. In an effort to reduce that pain, we have taken some steps to ensure that our cooling bills are as low as possible.
Thermostat
First and foremost, we have set the thermostat as high as we can reasonably stand it:
This is the downstairs thermostat — the upstairs thermostat is set to 77°F. The theory we are testing is that cold air flows downhill and by setting the upstairs thermostat just a little bit cooler, we will achieve an average temperature of 78°F throughout the house.
Furnace Filters
We learned a painful and expensive lesson this winter — our furnace filters need to be checked every two months at a minimum. Checking the furnace filters shows that they are still pretty clean from when they were changed two months ago, mostly because we turned the furnace off six weeks ago.
I have laid in a stock of furnace filters and will be checking them at the beginning of each month.
Clean Up A/C Compressors
The next thing we did is cut back the bushes around the air conditioning compressors and clean off accumulated pine needles, leaves, and twigs.
A quick spritz with the hose will knock off any loose dirt and get the compressors ready for the summer.
Spot Cooling
In addition to turning, adjusting, and tightening up the ceiling fans, we have also set up pedestal fans in various rooms to ensure a steady, cooling flow of air. I also set up a portable air conditioner in my wife's room to help ensure that she stays cool at night.
My wife suffers from what I will call a mis-set thermostat. She is always a few degrees warmer than everyone else and only really sleeps well in a cool room. She actually enjoys having the thermostat set low in the wintertime because it helps her sleep. Sleeping in the summertime is another problem entirely. What we have done is set up this portable A/C unit to keep her bedroom cool.
We tried this last year and discovered several ways to waste a whole lot of energy. If you have a need like ours, let me give you some advice:
- These units are not very efficient. Ours uses one kilowatt per hour. Always look for a unit with a higher SEER. Spending more money on a more efficient unit will save you in the long run.
- Don't bother trying to keep the "cold" room cool 24 hours a day. Your insulation is probably not that good and you will just waste a lot of energy. Just run the unit when you need it. We have set up a timer to turn the unit on an hour before bed time and turn if off an hour before waking up.
- Keep a fan running in the room in addition to the A/C unit. The more air flow you have, the cooler the room will feel, and higher you can set the thermostat.
- Our upstairs thermostat is in the "cold" room. Since that room will be much colder than the 77°F that the thermostat is set at, our upstairs air conditioner won't be running at night while the portable A/C unit is running. With any luck, these two factors will cancel each other out and we won't see the same cooling bills we did last summer.
Free Utility Bill Tracking Spreadsheet Updated
What comes after "New & Improved"? We have just finished making additional improvements to our free utility bill tracking spreadsheet. This is by far the most popular item on Energy Watcher — we've tracked over 400 downloads of the spreadsheet in the past four months. How do you like it? Is there anything we can do to make it easier to use?
Would you be willing to share your data with us and the rest of the world? If so, please drop us a line at info@@energywatcher.com.
What's changed in this version?
- We are now tracking utility bills at our house in this spreadsheet, which means that anyone who wants to see our data can just download this spreadsheet. We actually had separate copies, one for download and one for our utility bills — and since keeping track of changes was getting cumbersome, we merged the two versions.
- The spreadsheet now calculates and tracks BTUs consumed per square foot. (There is a place on the first tab of the spreadsheet to enter the number of square feet in your house.) We have been tracking heating degree days (HDD) and cooling degree days (CDD) for years now — this lets us make useful comparisons between months, especially the same month on different years. Tracking BTUs per square foot now lets us make useful comparisons between houses. If your next-door neighbor is using this spreadsheet to keep track of his utility bills, you can now conveniently compare your results. And if you wanted to share your results with Energy Watcher — and our readers — we could compare our results with your results.
- The spreadsheet now keeps track of the number of people living in your house. We only track this number for reference right now but we hope to incorporate it into a meaningful formula in the future. Why? The more people who live in your house, the more energy you use, regardless of how efficient you are. If we have five people living in our home and we use an average of 4,000 BTUs per square foot per month, and you have three people living in your home and your BTUs per square foot is the same, then we are more efficient than you are.
- Click on the Introduction tab (at the bottom of the screen) and enter the number of square feet in your house in the space provided. (You may also want to enter your name.)
- Click on the Utility Bill Data tab (at the bottom of the screen) and enter your utility bill data. You can delete the existing data but if you do, be sure to save at least one row of it so you can copy that row to get the cell formulas. (There are formulas in columns D, G, J, K, and N.)
- Click on the Monthly Utility Bills and Monthly Weather Chart tabs (at the bottom of the screen) to see handy graphs of your utility bill data:
Run Ceiling Fans All Year Long And Save
Many people don't realize that ceiling fans can be adjusted to run both clockwise and counter-clockwise. (I didn't!) Ceiling fans are designed to run all year long and help with both heating and cooling.
In summer, set your ceiling fans up to turn counter-clockwise, blowing downward. The wind-chill effect helps cool anyone in the room, giving you the illusion that the thermostat is actually 3°-5°F cooler than it really is. Since it feels cooler, you can adjust your thermostat upward to compensate, more than offsetting the cost of running your ceiling fans.
In winter, set your ceiling fans up to turn clockwise, blowing gently upward. (You should not be able to detect that air is moving.) What this does is keep the warmer air up near the ceiling moving outward toward the walls, giving you the illusion that the thermostat is actually 1°-3°F warmer than it really is. Since it feels warmer, you can adjust your thermostat downward to compensate, more than offsetting the cost of running your ceiling fans.
Effective Ways to Compare Utility Bills
One of the challenges with being an energy watcher is determining how you much you are saving. It is easy enough to create a benchmark with a spreadsheet and a do-it-yourself energy audit but there are lots of variables that change from month to month, and from house to house, and even within your house, making it difficult to evaluate just how much you are saving. There are basically three things you need to keep in mind, when tracking your utility bills, in order to effectively make comparisons between utility bills — whether these are your energy bills or someone else's.
Weather
One of the things we need to keep track of is the weather. We do this by keeping track of both heating degree days (HDD) and cooling degree days (CDD). If you know the number of degree days for a month, you know pretty much what the weather was like during that month. Since the number one expense we have on our utility bills is heating and cooling, knowing what the weather was like tells you what part of your utility bills went for heating and cooling.Degree days tell us how far the average temperature on any day was from an agreed-upon midpoint. (Typically, we use 65°F as our midpoint.) If the average temperature yesterday was 60°F, then there were five HDD yesterday because we would have had to turn on the furnace to get the temperature up to 65°F. Similarly, if the average temperature tomorrow is 70°m, then we will have five CDD because we will have to turn on the air conditioner to get the average temperature down to 65°F. We add up the HDD and CDD for each day in a month to figure out generally just how hot or cold that month was. Since you can have both HDD and CDD within the same month — as we did here in Atlanta with 165 HDD and 46 CDD in April — just taking the average temperature for the month doesn't give you the whole story for that month.
Where this really comes in handy is when you compare utility bills for months with similar degree days. If you used 50 therms of natural gas in December and 60 therms in January, that doesn't tell you much about the weather in December and January. (Maybe someone left a window open?) When you find out, however, that there were 500 HDD in December and 550 HDD in January, then you know something is wrong, because you used 20% more natural gas in January but it was only 10% colder.
Occupancy
It is axiomatic that everyone who lives on Earth consumes something. Similarly, everyone who lives in your home consumes something too. There is link between the number of people living in your home and how much energy your home consumes, so keeping track of occupancy will help you evaluate your home energy savings. In general, the more people there are in a household, the higher your water and electricity bills will be. The particular people living in your home — particularly the age of those people — can also send your utility bills skyward. If you have teenagers, you have probably noticed that computers, televisions, and DVD players are rarely turned off, whether or not there is anyone present to be entertained. It is with this in mind that Energy Watcher is now tracking the number of people living in our household.Home Size & Design
Homes come in all shapes and sizes. It seems fairly obvious that larger homes require more energy to run, so how, then, can we compare the performance of our home to the performance of other homes, perhaps our next-door neighbors? One way is to compare apples and apples by converting all energy consumption into a common unit of measurement. Some homes are heated with gas, others with electricity, and others with fuel oil, so the only effective way to compare these heating bills is to convert everything into a common system of measurement, either in BTUs or in joules. Since any form of energy can be converted into BTUs, including electricity, you can use this determine the relative efficiency of any home over any period of time by dividing the total BTUs consumed during that period by the home's square footage. It is with this in mind that Energy Watch is now tracking BTUs per square foot.How does this work in practice? Well, if your home uses 3,000 BTUs per square foot per month, and your next-door neighbor's home uses 4,000 BTUs per square foot per month, you can instantly tell that your home is more efficient — and the size of each home doesn't matter. Luckily, since these homes are next to each other, the weather has no effect on the the comparison and you can compare your utility bills to those of anyone in your ZIP code.
For the record, we are using an average of 4,000 BTUs per square foot per month. Our goal is to lower this number by at least 10% by next year.
April 2009 Utility Bill
Last month was both slightly warmer and slightly cooler than April last year. Electricity prices were slightly higher and both gas and water prices were slightly lower than the same month last year. So what caused the $33 increase in our utility bills?
Water
We tend to think of water as being extremely cheap — and it was cheap a few years ago — but no longer. I used about 4,000 gallons of water pressure-washing our back deck last month, at a cost of around $10. We pay about $2 per hundred cubic feet (CCF). There are 750 gallons of water in a CCF. A one-gallon flush toilet can be flushed 750 times, and an old-fashioned three-gallon flush can be flushed 250 times, for one CCF or $2. Our typical 10-minute shower uses 50 gallons and costs 13 cents — not counting the cost of hot water.Electricity
We have five people living at home right now, most of whom seem to be watching TV or web-surfing or holding the refrigerator door open (or writing blog posts) whenever they are home and awake. I think our electricity use is up more than 25% year-over year simply because there are two more people in the house. Our two older daughters will be leaving home in June and I will be very interested to see what happens to the electric bill once they leave. We replaced most of the incandescent light bulbs a long time ago and our only real electricity vampires are the TIVO and the Internet router — which we plan on leaving on indefinitely. (Some costs are worthwhile.) So what else can we do to keep costs down?Part of keeping electricity costs low is keeping the air conditioner off, of course, we have turned on, and adjusted, on all of our ceiling fans and set up pedestal fans for spot cooling. We also open up various windows and doors when the weather cooperates, now that the pollen has settled down to a level that is merely annoying.
Natural Gas
We used just a little more natural gas last month than we did in April last year, and I am pretty sure this is due to the increased number of showers that we are taking, not due to the trivial increase in heating degree days (HDD).April 2009 Data
| Electricity, in kWh | Cost / Unit | Gas, in Therms | Cost / Unit | Water, in CCF | Cost / Unit | BTUs / Ft2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 840 | $.096 | 51 | $1.41 | 14 | $1.94 | 2,277 |
April is the cruelest month ...
Light-Colored Shingles Shrink Cooling Bills
In warm climates, light-colored shingles will save you big money on your cooling bill. Dark-colored shingles absorb the sun's rays all day long during the summer, raising the temperature in your attic as high as 160°F. Obviously, replacing your roof is a massive investment, so only consider this step if you were already going to replace your roof — as long as you have the roof off, consider roof turbines, attic exhaust fans, or solar-powered exhaust fans to help keep the attic, and therefore your home, cooler.
Reminder: Change Your Car's Oil — Summer 2009
Once again it is nearly summer, so it's time to change your car's motor oil. You should be changing your motor oil at least once every six months — and if you can't remember the last time you changed your oil, it is definitely time to do it!
By the way, do yourself a favor and get the expensive synthetic motor oil. This is one case in which you get what you pay for — the synthetic lasts longer and does wonderful things for your engine.