Five simple things you should try to reduce your energy costs

If you've already switched your lights to compact fluorescent lights, bought a new ENERGY STAR furnace, or taken other steps to reduce your family energy costs, you may think you have used up your energy saving opportunities. A look at the dozens of websites that provide energy saving advice will typically yield the same set of simplistic tips - some of which, I believe, necessarily reduce your consumption in the end. In this article I will put forward five easy ideas for lowering your energy consumption, that you probably won't find on your typical government website or energy savings website.

1. Measure your energy consumption

Any serious effort to reduce energy costs needs to start from understanding use. If you don't know how much energy you are paying for, and where or when you're using it, efforts to cut use may be unproductive. You want to focus your efforts on actions that are the most productive in terms of the economies they lead to. You should also measure the result of your energy cutting actions, to determine whether they had the desired savings.

I've heard some neighbors boast that they've converted their tungsten light bulbs to compact fluorescent lights, but on further investigation it seems they merely switched lights in infrequently visited rooms. A CFL placed in a furnace room might only be on 6 hours a year. The energy savings from that switch amount to a mere 5 cents per year, which means the price of the CFL will never be recovered in energy use.

If you factor in both the power consumed over the lifetime of a CFL and the energy consumed to manufacture a CFL, there are probably no energy savings to upgrading light bulbs in seldom used areas. By measuring or estimating the annual energy usage of each appliance, light, or other energy-consuming item in your home, you can determine which areas will yield the most savings by moving to a more energy efficient alternative.

For plug-in electrical devices it is simple to measure their energy usage with a household power monitor such as the Belkin Power Cost Monitor. Using such a meter, and some straightforward math, I was able to figure out the total electricity usage, in kilowatt hours, of dozens of appliances and lights in my home. The calculations helped me understand that some devices that drew very little electricity were actually major electricity users (since they were connected 24x7 even though they were really only typically required for a short time each day), while some big appliances had little impact because we didn't use them much. This process helped us reduce our home electricity costs by over 25% in just a few weeks.

After you measure and determine the ways to accomplish your savings, be sure to measure total household energy consumption periodically afterward to determine if your savings are making a difference. In one study, researchers found that merely supplying homeowners with a regular update on their electricity consumption resulted in electricity reductions averaging over 10%.

2. Live more simply

This might sound silly, but the easiest way to save electricity is not to use it. Try not to turn on lights, for example. When our youngest was in Preschool we hired a nanny who had grown up in the Caribbean. I often came home from work to find her and my son sitting in a room with the lights out. She told me that in Saint Lucia it would be considered wasteful to turn a light on when it's light out. Since then I've tried to get by on daylight alone whenever I can, although on a cloudy January day you sometimes do need a little help from the odd light bulb!

Other ways you could do less are doing less laundry, using your car less, using your furnace or AC less. You might not have to wash that sweatshirt or pair of jeans you wore for an evening out, just because you wore it once. And you can dry clothes on a line or indoors on a drying rack rather than use a dryer. As for using a car, you may live in a suburb where going on foot to the supermarket, schools, work is impossible, but I live in a fairly urban neighborhood where I can walk or take public transit to all of these places, and yet many of my neighbors still travel by car everywhere. Even if you live far from public transportation, you can often cut back on driving by planning trips beforehand and by combining several errands into one drive. Even phoning ahead to check that a shop is open can save a pointless drive to a store that turns out to be closed.

Driving less not only reduces the costs of gas and wear and tear and insurance, but increases your health by keeping you more physically active. I always laugh, when I leave my day job at 5pm to bike home, to see a bunch of coworkers in the office sports center cranking away on exercise bicycles. When they're done that they'll hop in their SUVs and drive home (to homes closer to the office than mine). If they just biked to work as I do, they would get the same workout without polluting or spending their money on fuel.

You can reduce your heating and cooling costs easily by doing less: dropping the thermostat in winter (and adding slippers and a sweater to what you're wearing) and raising the thermostat in hot weather (and dressing down).

We manage our cold Canadian winters with the thermostat set to 67F when we're up and about, and turned down to 61F at night, and down to 58F when we're at work and don't need the heat.

In hot weather you can probably handle warmer indoor temperatures just by getting used to a higher thermostat setting on your air conditioning system. We found this out when staying for a year in the tropics without AC; within a couple of months of moving there we became quite used to temperatures of 88-92F inside. Unfortunately, many offices are kept considerably colder than that in hot weather, which makes the adjustment to a warm house more challenging, but it is doable.

Doing less will usually save you more energy than you can save by buying more energy saving appliances, or home energy improvements. Many upgrades have no effect on consumption because people tend to use a more efficient appliance more often since it is less expensive to run. If instead of upgrading you just try to not use the item as much, you will certainly save energy.

The Jevons paradox is a term used to describe this phenomenon. The basic concept of the Jevons paradox is that any increase in efficiency (whether in energy use, money use, or other) is usually met by an equal and offsetting increase in usage. When the first washing machines became available, the result wasn't less time spent washing laundry - people spent just as much time washing clothes, they just started washing more clothes in the same amount of time. In my grandparents' youth people wore the same clothes over and over without washing them, but many people today throw their clothes in the laundry basket if it's been worn just once.

We see this paradox happening with many modern household appliances. Refrigerator technology has made leaps and bounds of progress on energy efficiency in the last decade; it takes far less electricity to refrigerate a given air volume now than it did in 1980. But gains in efficiency have been eliminated by an equivalent increase in refrigerator volume. My aunt, who lives on her own, recently bought a refrigerator that looks big enough for the Brady Bunch. It's an ENERGY STAR rated refrigerator, because it uses less energy than the minimum required standard for a refrigerator of its size. But although she thinks she is saving energy, she will actually be spending more money keeping her food cool than she did with the old fridge. (Even worse, there will probably be even more waste, as the increased size of home refrigerators in the USA has been matched by a steady increase in food waste. A bigger fridge often just results in more room to lose leftovers or last week's lettuce.)

"Energy efficient" televisions are another trap to watch out for. The new ENERGY STAR standard for televisions establishes energy use limits per square inch of screen surface area. That means that a 62 inch screen can get an ENERGY STAR rating, while a 20 inch screen that is less efficient per square inch, may not, and yet the 62 inch screen could be using nearly nine times more energy as the 20 inch television.

You should avoid the trap of purchasing an energy saving product that permits you to keep using the same amount of power in exchange for using it more. It's a zero sum game. Look for energy saving appliances where the increased efficiency doesn't just result in your using the appliance more often. For example, when upgrading your fridge, get an ENERGY STAR refrigerator that's the same size as your current one (or better yet, even smaller). That will ensure you'll actually save energy, instead of just using the same amount of energy and creating more work for yourself!

3. Avail yourself of free cooling and heating sources

We survive hot Toronto summers, where the mercury often hits 95F, without any air conditioning at all, just by drawing cool night air into the house through window mounted fans, then closing the house up during the day to trap that cooler air inside. It's not quite as comfortable as central air, but we pay only $10 a year to operate the fans. With a central AC system you'll spend about $200 a year just to cover the sticker price of the system spread over the unit's expected lifetime, plus annual maintenance costs; then another $200 to $1,800 to operate the AC through the hot weather, depending on how hot it gets out of doors and how cold you keep the temperature indoors.

In winter the sun is a free heating source. If you live in a cool climate and have the proper type of low-emissivity windows for your area, those windows should let sunlight into your house but trap the heat from that sunlight indoors so most of it helps warm you. Keep curtains open on south facing windows in daylight hours to help the house warm up. Then shut the window coverings at night to prevent heat from escaping.

4. Buy better window coverings

Homes lose a great deal of energy through their windows. Even the most efficient windows are far less effective at stopping heat movement than your average insulated wall. By mounting energy efficient shades, curtains, or other window coverings on all your windows you can significantly lower heating and cooling expenses, without having to spend a fortune upgrading your windows.

The most efficient window coverings reduce airflow around the window glazing, to interrupt the convection currents that usually occur. As air comes into contact with the cold glass in winter, the air cools, and falls down, pulling more heated air down from above. This convection current hastens the cooling process and the loss of heat outside. A similar process occurs in hot weather, as heat coming through the glazing from outdoors warms the indoor air, pushing it upward and pulling more cooled air up from below. If you install window coverings that block this airflow - for instance, blinds that tightly cover the window area, or curtains that have a header shutting out airflow from above and that touch the floor or rest on the sill, you will slow down or halt this energy losing airflow.

The best window coverings should provide some degree of insulation too. You can sew your own roman shades with a small amount of insulation, or you can buy multi-layered honeycomb shades that provide insulation between the glass and the indoors. Both these alternatives are energy saving options as well as being attractive.

5. Eat local, minimally processed food

If you're really keen on cutting your energy use for environmental reasons, you should strive to eat local foods that are minimally processed and low on the food chain (minimizing dairy and especially meat). A lot of energy feeds into meat production and processed food production

, and it takes energy to ship food over long distances. While switching to foods with lower energy inputs won't reduce your home energy bills, it will help reduce your ecological footprint and make you healthier!

Bear in mind that it's not always true that only buying local foods will reduce your ecological impact. For example, an apple produced at a local farm in the fall, and kept in CO2 storage at the farm until the spring, involves a lot of energy to cool the storage facility. It may be that a fresher apple picked in April and shipped by boat from halfway around the planet has a lower energy input than the October apple bought in the spring (and it may be crisper too!). But sticking to fresh local fruits and vegetables definitely makes a difference when they are available.

Buying minimally processed foods will also help, not only because a lot of processed foods require a large energy input over and above their unprocessed source ingredients, but because the processing can remove much of the nutrition of the unprocessed ingredients, although usually the impact of this is reduced health benefits, not one that relates to energy consumption.

Finally, eating low on the food chain - reducing your consumption of meat and fish - will reduce your energy costs. It takes about 40 times as much grain to produce a pound of beef protein as a pound of grain protein. And it takes about 3 pounds of oil to produce one pound of ocean-caught seafood. So consider this the next time you chew a T-bone or a red snapper steak: you're eating fossil fuels. This is true for farmed as well as wild-caught fish, because most fish farming involves feeding fish pellets harvested from the ocean to the farmed fish.

So there you go - five simple and unorthodox ways you can cut your energy use. Measure your consumption, try to cut use by doing less, take advantage of free sources of heating and cooling, cut your heating and cooling losses through better window coverings, and work towards a more responsible diet. It's clear that none of these changes will save you a huge amount of money, but if each of us takes these steps, as well as the run of the mill energy saving ideas we've all been told for years, the planet will be a better place for all of us. by Robin Green

Robin Green runs an energy saving homes site that helps you with saving electricity. The Killawatt is one energy saving device he has used to reduce his family's energy consumption by over 35%.