January 2012 Archives

(context: we live in a ~560-square-foot one-bedroom apartment with a gas stove and radiators. we don't have a television, microwave, or electric coffee maker, and we use our building's shared washer and dryer.)

after spending a significant portion of my workdays reading about home energy displays, i wanted to know how much energy my own home was using. my utility's online billing system made it easy to collect my monthly electricity usage data (thanks, nstar), which is plotted above.

what stands out the most is the huge increase in the summer months of 2010 (we paid $70 july 2010, compared to our usual $30), but what's more exciting to me is the decrease in the last eight months.

i started my internship on march 15, 2011. the initial drop in april might be partly from me not being at home using my laptop during the day, but more importantly, the reading i did at work about trying to get people to use less energy motivated me to want to save energy at home. one easy change i made was turning our refrigerator temperature up (from 9, 'coldest', to 5, 'normal'). it still keeps our food fresh, but it uses less electricity.

what helped a lot was learning about the kill-a-watt. i borrowed one from our local library and went around our apartment testing everything that plugs in. i learned that my iphone charger does not use any discernible power when it's left plugged into the wall. our toaster also wasn't using any standby power, so i stopped unplugging it when it wasn't being used.

however, i did identify some big power hogs. we had a water boiler that we used for coffee and tea that turned out to account for nearly one-third of our monthly electricity use, so tyler agreed to start boiling water on the stove. the kill-a-watt also inspired tyler to get rid of one of his two stereos. (luckily for me, tyler is a very conscientious apartment partner -- apartner?) and finally, i got a remote control power strip that we've been using to turn off the stereo we did keep when it's not in use because according to the kill-a-watt, it draws the same amount of power when it's just sitting there as when it's actually playing music.

this summer we replaced our ancient dorm-hand-me-down air conditioner with a brand new one and we were a lot more judicious about its use. we bought an electric fan to help with that.

now we pay about $15 to 20 a month for electricity and that's with a higher rate per kilowatt hour to support wind energy (4.791 cents extra per kilowatt hour). i am extremely proud of our energy savings, which is why i wrote this blog post. :)

01 - boston, ma
02, 04, 10, 12 - cambridge, ma
03 - somerville, ma
05 - myles standish state forest (~plymouth, ma)
06 - minuteman bikeway(~arlington, ma)
07 - lake pend oreille, id
08 - portland, me
09 - plymouth, nh
11 - charlottesville, va