We finally have our home energy use where we want it!

[BailOut]

After 2 years of effort and $2k of expenditures which included things like re-caulking every window, re-insulating all door frames, insulating every wall socket and switch, replacing the broken instant hot water recirculator, flipping over to CFLs, having a whole house fan installed, jacketing the hot water heater, reprogramming the thermostat, and a whole lot of education for and self discipline from everyone in the house, we finally have our home energy consumption right where we want it!

Below is a graphic from a tool that our utility provider offers. It measures your home's profile and occupancy against others in your region with similar metrics. For reference, we pay around $0.13 per kWh of electricity and $1.24 per therm of natural gas:

[Loren]

Pretty impressive that you appear to have broken even on your expenditures over such a short period. Much more cost-effective than I would have imagined.

Reminds me that I need to replace my dinosaur of an air conditioner.

[TinyGiant]

whats a whole house fan?

[BailOut]

whats a whole house fan?

http://www.airscapefans.com/learn-about-natural-cooling.php

Aside from its expected benefits our whole house fan also tends to help equalize temperatures between our upstairs and downstairs. This is a boon as our upstairs used to consistently be 9-11F hotter than downstairs, but now the variance is only 3-4F.

[TinyGiant]

yeah we have that problem too in our house. the upstairs is wicked hot in the summer.

so where would that install? on the 2nd floor? does it suck air out ? or blow air in?

i'm intrigued since we plan to move our bedroom upstairs :)

[BailOut]

It would be installed in the ceiling of the 2nd floor, near the stairwell, so that it can draw air up from the 1st floor.

It pushes air into and through the attic space (thereby pushing the hot air out of the gables), so it sucks it in from within the house.

[Astroman]

Nice! I'm pretty lucky here, with the multiple hydro power dams our elec. rate is only $.02/kwH. I still use only CFL bulbs and instead of using the heaters installed I use 2 space heaters at the 750w setting. My winter bill is only about $30-$40/mo. It's hard to do that other stuff because I rent. My new place for example only has single pane windows which sucks, but I'll be covering them with plastic, and making sure the doors have good seals. My saving just from switching to CFL bulbs has more than paid for themselves many times over :thumbsup:

[TinyGiant]

nice I actually have a hole (access to the attic) right in the hallway that is just big enough for me to get through but not big enough to get anything else through. lol so the whole attic can't be used for storage. I was thinking of putting a bigger access to the attic in this small little utility room up there .. so that would be a nice place for it . and and both bedroom doors would be just a couple feet from that fan.

I'm book marking it :) maybe if plowing goes well this winter i'll set some dough aside for it :) I could easily wire it in upstairs myself or just ad an outlet in the attic.. it would eliminate the need for the ceiling fan in the (future) bedroom :)

[TinyGiant]

$0.0903 here

[TinyGiant]

i just did the energy wizard from my supplier and they said with all the things i checked off that we have in the house that our bill should be about 163 a month and in the summer we've had it as low as $75 (NO a/c) and in the winter it usually runs 100-110

so i guess we are at a good level :)

I'd like to replace the fridge with something newer .. ours just died and we picked up a side by side from CL for $300 it was in storage for 6 years but only used for a year before that. the owers purchased it at a house then started building a new house and it sat.

washer and dyer are older too it would be nice to reduce my water bill too .. but thats unavoidable with the screen printing shop here :( my water bill is usually 180ish per quarter

[Lafiro]

Ouch I need to do something for my house!

Last year(12 months till sept) = $3580
This year 12 months till sept = $3642
Then again its a big house I guess? Two floor, finished attic, very high ceilings for second floor, finished basement. Like 5 TV's, xbox, sling box, gamecube, 1 server, 1 high p. desktop, 2 laptops, 2 fridges, 3 sound systems, lots of cable boxes, and networking equipment.

I know Im missing a LOT of stuff in that list of stuff using electricity all day.

But this amount above is with GAS included in the prices.

But I cant exactly cut down, the house it fairly new, so everything is in working order with new everything pretty much. lol

[CTScott]

That's awesome!

I have been monitoring my energy use for the past six months. I installed a system on my main panel that lets me see the instantaneous usage on any circuit. Just with paying more attention and replacing some older appliances we have cut our usage by 25%. We still use way too much though, as both my wife and I work out of our home. Geothermal for heat/AC and solar photovoltaic are on our short list of home improvement projects.

[TinyGiant]

geothermal is awesome if i had a backhoe i'd dig my yard out completely and set something up would work nicely with that whole house fan :)

[TinyGiant]

solar price vs savings is near impossible lol

[thebarber]

congrats...we had an air circulator in our house in new brunswick, but we had electrical baseboard heating and it was an old circulator

also a nice feature is washer/dryer with programmable start times so you can run it while you sleep when the cost of electricity is low

[CTScott]

solar price vs savings is near impossible lol

Govt surplus is the way to go with solar. A buddy of mine in CA put in a 10KW system for $12K, using retired panels that were still at >85% output.

[kustom play]

we have a pool and the air set on 78 and in the summer 114+ with running the pool filter for 8 hours the higest bill we ever got was 300

since its fall now and our night here in phoenix are about 68, i only have to run the pool filter for about an hour or 2, we really never use gas heat so our winter bills have been as low as 68 bucks

it kinda ballances out to like 150 bucks a month for a 4 bedroom home with a pool

[BailOut]

I'd like to replace the fridge with something newer .. ours just died and we picked up a side by side from CL for $300 it was in storage for 6 years but only used for a year before that. the owers purchased it at a house then started building a new house and it sat.

washer and dyer are older too
I like to keep things efficient on both sides of the equation, meaning I like to see a monetary break-even point within a few short years. As such the idea of replacing a working appliance with a newer one often doesn't make sense.

We've achieved the efficiency we have even with a forced gas furnace, washer, dryer and refrigerator that are all in the lowest part of the Energy Guide spectrum. Let's use the refrigerator for my cost benefit example:

Even with our high cost for power, I learned during my audit that our refrigerator uses around $55 in electricity each year. An efficient replacement model would likely use 30% less energy, costing around $38 per year. That's a savings of around $17/year. A replacement unit would cost us around $1,200, so if I replaced our working unit the break-even point would be 70 years. :laugh:

The break-even for someone that pays less for power would be much longer. Of course, some older refrigerators use much more power than our $55/year, so the math can be different.

As you can see, replacing a broken or failing appliance with an energy efficient one is well worthwhile, but that isn't always true for replacing a working one.

[kustom play]

Govt surplus is the way to go with solar. A buddy of mine in CA put in a 10KW system for $12K, using retired panels that were still at >85% output.

out here in phoenix solar works really well

to the point where it generates more then you use and the electric company sends you a check back to buy back power

+ APS and SRP out here have HUGE rebates, covers almost 80% of the cost

[127.0.0.1]

I bought a sweater, and saved thousands. what do I win ?

[talnlnky]

2 floor townhouse - 1000sq feet, electric bill varies from $27-$40. We've lived here for 16months, last month at $40 was the highest we've ever paid. I think its because we got busy and used the dish washer a lot instead of washing by hand.

Every light is CFL (some full spectrum/happy lights).
in the summer we ran the A/C for a grand total of about 10 hrs. and in the winter we'll hardly have to use the heater. THANK YOU 40F weather.... so much better than the sub 30's (-10F to 30F) I grew up with. If only there was half as much rain in the winter, and twice as much in the summer... then this place would be almost perfect (from a climate perspective).


When I buy/make a house in the future... I plan on having the water heater be 100% solar powered. From what i've read, the water heater alone will save you a lot on the elec bill. I also would want to having a "living roof" so as to better moderate temps in both winter and summer.

[counterfiend]

Iono where we are going to be just yet. I'm hoping somewhere in the 2k range for the year for energy usage. Our highest was at 180 for a month in the middle of the summer. But we had more insulation put it (alot more) and had some leaks and sills fixed as well. Made a huge difference.

[Lafiro]

That's awesome!

I have been monitoring my energy use for the past six months. I installed a system on my main panel that lets me see the instantaneous usage on any circuit. Just with paying more attention and replacing some older appliances we have cut our usage by 25%. We still use way too much though, as both my wife and I work out of our home. Geothermal for heat/AC and solar photovoltaic are on our short list of home improvement projects.

Once again I come to you for a question lol.

What system are you using? Would like to
know what in the house is using all this electricity. I swear my sister has never had the tv off in her room even during the night ever. Since it does serve as a radio as well. My mom defends her saying that's not possible. But audio recordings at 3am any random night and constant high electric bills tell me and my dad otherwise.

Having a system like the one you described would finally solve our questions and allow us to put some lines on timers hopefully.

[CTScott]

Once again I come to you for a question lol.

What system are you using? Would like to
know what in the house is using all this electricity. I swear my sister has never had the tv off in her room even during the night ever. Since it does serve as a radio as well. My mom defends her saying that's not possible. But audio recordings at 3am any random night and constant high electric bills tell me and my dad otherwise.

Having a system like the one you described would finally solve our questions and allow us to put some lines on timers hopefully.

I started with a device from http://www.theenergydetective.com/index.html.

Their system has one set of sensors that clamp on the input wires to your electrical panel. It then transmits the data through the house wiring to their receiver unit.

[BailOut]

I started with a device from http://www.theenergydetective.com/index.html.

Their system has one set of sensors that clamp on the input wires to your electrical panel. It then transmits the data through the house wiring to their receiver unit.
That's a great tool for measuring the overall electricity usage for your home, but there's a much cheaper and easier way to get individual device measurements:

The Kill-A-Watt (http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/travelpower/7657/)

That's what I used to audit our home, then waited for each month's power bill to see how our all-in per day and per month kWh usage was measuring up.

[CTScott]

That's a great tool for measuring the overall electricity usage for your home, but there's a much cheaper and easier way to get individual device measurements:

The Kill-A-Watt (http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/travelpower/7657/)

That's what I used to audit our home, then waited for each month's power bill to see how our all-in per day and per month kWh usage was measuring up.

Agreed.

I got totally carried away with it and built my own system, based on the T.E.D. technology where I can measure the current draw on every circuit in our panels.

[Lafiro]

Agreed.

I got totally carried away with it and built my own system, based on the T.E.D. technology where I can measure the current draw on every circuit in our panels.

Please explain how you managed that please. Maybe a picture and how much all the equipment ended up costing you. Thanks

[CTScott]

Please explain how you managed that please. Maybe a picture and how much all the equipment ended up costing you. Thanks

It's all behind my breaker panel, but I used 12 sets of their clip on current sensors (pictured below) fed into a circuit board which rectifies the low voltage AC signal from the probes into DC and then feeds them into ADCs of an array of microcontrollers. Each sensor can measure the current flow of one wire, so two are required for each 220 volt circuit and one for each 110 volt circuit. By the time all was said and done I dropped about $1000 on the project.

http://www.theenergydetective.com/images/store/thumb-CT.jpg

http://www.theenergydetective.com/store/accessories/


Here are some links to some similar DIYprojects:
http://jarv.org/pwrmon.shtml


http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/01/webbased_household_power_usage_moni.html

[Lafiro]

Nice.

Kill-a-watt seems nice, but I honestly dont know what good it will do to save any power.

I rather install what you did on the main line to then see how much power is being used in total and have it on the network to view from anywhere, that would be hot!

Now I wonder if maybe one day it would be a good idea to install solar panels in the backyard? I dont know, I will research that at a later date.

[CTScott]

Nice.

Kill-a-watt seems nice, but I honestly dont know what good it will do to save any power.

I rather install what you did on the main line to then see how much power is being used in total and have it on the network to view from anywhere, that would be hot!

Now I wonder if maybe one day it would be a good idea to install solar panels in the backyard? I dont know, I will research that at a later date.

What I did turned out to be serious overkill. The TED system is really all that you need. Start with it monitoring the mains to watch your overall usage. The TED display device has a USB cable that allows you to generate reports and graphs on your PC.

Once you see the patterns, you can pick out some things, like in my case, when the electric clothes dryer was running. etc. When I first started monitoring I noticed that through the night we were using 3.5 kW. Shutting down some equipment that didn't need to be left on 24 hours per day, dropped that down to 1.4 kW.

[BailOut]

Kill-a-watt seems nice, but I honestly dont know what good it will do to save any power.
I've never heard anyone say that before. :laugh:

My electricity audit, done with nothing but a Kill-A-Watt and multimeter:
http://www.cleanmpg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4295

[Lafiro]

The reason why I said that is because the first ad I ever saw for it was to save electricity and I thought that's impossible because anything plugged in will use electricity and will draw the same whether some device is behind it or not.

But now from your post I understand the reason for it. And it's something I will myself do very soon. There are just too many things in the house plugged in and like 32circuit breakers in the box. So it would be good to know what's using the power and what can be completely disconnected when not needed.

Thanks for the explination