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Reducing Your Home Energy Use With Simple Maintenance

By Solar energy | September 24, 2008

Simple Maintenance Can Reducing Your Home Energy Use

My husband and I are on a quest. We want to make use of all this Texas sunshine and harness it to replace some of our electric energy. Eventually, we’d love to go completely solar. But our budget dictates we go there in stages.

Phase 1 of our journey determines how much energy we use. Answer: way too much! The average home uses 20 kWh per day. Our home used 59.5 kWh last month.

One of the tips to reduce energy use is to vacuum the coils of your refrigerator. When they get dusty the refrigerator works too hard. If you have never done this little maintenance tip before, here’s a video that shows you what to do.

This weekend we pulled out the vacuum and the fridge and cleaned those coils. If you’ve never done this little chore, you may be surprised to see how dusty those coils can get.

An empty refrigerator works harder than a full one. That doesn’t mean overcrowding is good. For us it meant consolidating the contents of our stand-alone freezer and our refrigerator. In our 3-acre gardening phase of life, keeping a full freezer made good economic sense. Keeping that freezer going today may prove to be an unnecessary expense.

My plan is to utilize my refrigerator’s freezer compartment and unplugged the stand-alone freezer. If I need the larger freezer space when the holidays and/or company arrive, it will be available to use then. In the mean time, we’ll see how this affects the next electric bill.

I’ll keep you posted.

Leave a comment and share your energy saving tips.

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Topics: home energy bills, Reducing energy use, Solar Home Energy Project | No Comments »

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