Hi, Bruce here again. Our power bill for winter, the biggest of the four seasons, arrived this week. At first glance it seemed disappointing because our daily consumption, at 14.71 units/day, had hardly dropped from last winter. However, I realised that last year we spent four weeks in the UK for Hilary’s dad’s 80th birthday, whereas this year, only Hilary and Becky did the annual family visit.
I continued weekly monitoring the electricity use during the four weeks on my own, and used 237 kWh of electricity over that time. About 2 kWh per day is needed for the fridge, fish tank, etc, even if the house is vacant, so the use that could be attributed to my activities came to about 181 kWh. For a fair comparison between the two winters, I simply subtracted that figure from this year’s account, and ended up with a daily usage of 12.7 kWh, a reduction of 14.0% compared with last year. This is consistent with savings over the previous three accounts of 15%, 15% and 14%.
Cutting back on power use has not been hard. It’s mainly about eliminating waste; for example by turning off standby lights, using long-life bulbs and, of course, having a solar hot water system. The fact that we don’t have energy hungry items such as dishwashers, air-conditioners, clothes dryer or a plasma TV, helps to keep our power usage low.
It will be interesting to see what additional efficiencies we can introduce for our second carbon-neutral year.
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