How to Gain Control of Your Home Energy Consumption

The buzzwords these days are green, renewable, sustainable, and carbon footprint. You care about all these, but sometimes your busy life keeps you from making changes. With work, kids, household upkeep, and bills, there just isn’t time to make huge changes.

Instead of thinking about all the pieces of the energy puzzle, it’s easier to think about one change at a time. But where do you start?

Start at home. Find out just how much energy your large home appliances are using. The greatest energy users in your home are heating/cooling systems, large kitchen appliances, and hot water. Get a handle on the big items will bring results faster.

Here’s something to help you find the energy hogs in your home.

The Kill A Watt Plug Meter is a good plug meter that measures watts and kWh. This handy devise allows you to see just how much electricity one appliance is using. It is an inexpensive way to start getting the big picture of how your home uses electricity.

Once you know where your greatest energy consumption is you can do something about it, one small step at a time.

In an earlier post, I shared about how to use a Kill-a-watt meter to determine home much energy your major home appliances are using. This handy electric meter told me my 1996, 18.2 cubit foot GE refrigerator cost me $137 per year to operate.

Newer, energy-efficient refrigerators cost only about $55 per year to operate. How do you know which refrigerators are energy efficient?

Look for the yellow and black Federal Trade Commission’s EnergyGuide label attached to the appliance you are interested in. This guide will tell you how much energy the appliance uses, compares energy use of similar products, and lists approximate annual operating costs.

Here’s how to read the EnergyGuide. Remember, fine print matters!

This EnergyGuide is for a 25 cubic foot LG Refrigerator-Freezer.

• The estimated yearly operating cost is $51, shown in large print mid-way down the left side of the guide.

• The simple line graph in the center indicates how this model compares to similar models. You can see that $51 dollars is the lowest and other models like this one can cost as much as $63 per year to operate.

• Below the graph in a small box is the estimated yearly electricity used by this model. In this case that is 476 kWh per year.

• Now the fine print! At the bottom of the guide the fine print says these figures are based on the 2007 national average electricity cost of 10.65 cents per kWh. I don’t know about you, but the cost per kWh is higher than that where I live.

• To find a more accurate estimate of the cost to run this refrigerator in your home, check your electric bill and find out what you pay per kWh. As an example, if you pay 12.6 cents per kWh to your electric provider, this LG refrigerator would cost you approximately $59.97 per year (476 kWh X .126 = 59.97)

• Notice the ENERGY STAR® logo in the bottom right corner. This logo assures that the appliance meets or exceeds the ENERGY STAR® level.

If this was helpful to you please leave a comment. Thanks!

Reducing energy consumption begins by knowing how much energy you consume in the first place.

Having acquired our electric power monitor, a Kill-A-Watt meter, we are learning where the high-energy consumers are in our home. First, we plugged our refrigerator into the monitor. The results were posted Tuesday, the 16th.

Next, we checked the energy use of our stand-alone freezer. Here are the results.

Over a 24-hour period, our freezer used 3.29 kilowatt-hours of energy.

That means I am paying $144 per year to keep my bulk and bargain shopping trip finds preserved until ready to use. Maybe that’s a good deal. Maybe it isn’t. Since the freezer is 28 years old, I am guessing it isn’t.

I’ll be checking new energy star rated freezers soon and compare.

Have you ever wondered if you should replace that old refrigerator for a more energy efficient model? Now you can find out which of your home appliances are worth keeping and which should be replaced.

We bought this handy gadget, an electricity usage monitor, which monitors the electric consumption of appliances in your home. There are several electric consumption monitors on the market.

We bought our Kill-A-Watt meter at Amazon.com. This nifty little meter is easy to use.Plug the meter into the electrical socket and then plug the appliance into the monitor. It measures your appliances energy consumption in kilowatt-hours. The Kill-A-Watt EZ even calculates operating costs.

To get a feel for how the meter works, we first tried it out with a floor lamp we use often. With the lamp plugged into the meter, we turned the lamp on for one hour. After an hour, we went to have a look. The meter recorded how long the lamp had been using electricity as well as how many kilowatt-hours it used during that time.

Our lamp used 0.29 kWh in one hour. It cost $0.03 per hour to use the lamp.

Next, we will find out if my old GE refrigerator is an energy hog.

Here are the technical details for the Kill-A-Watt EZ

• Shows the operating costs of your household appliances
• Accurate within 0.2%
• Calculates cost and forecasts by week, month and year
• Displays eight critical units of measure on the large LCD display
• Built-in battery backup

Try the Kill-A-Watt EZ meter for yourself!