Over the last month we managed to bring down our electricity use quite a lot. Mostly we’ve just been better about turning things off and minimizing use of the heaters when they aren’t really needed. We still use more than I’d like but we only have a few more options to reduce usage in the apartment. We can’t replace the appliances with more energy-efficient models. That’ll have to wait until we’re in our own place. Even so our average use went down to 26.31 kWh/day from 32.53 kWh/day. I think we can reduce that further since we still did have some use of the heaters. The average temperature was a bit warmer 47 degrees vs. 43 degrees the previous period. Puget Sound Energy provides a variety of tools to graph and analyze energy usage which are useful.
We’ll continue to try to improve our power savings. We’ve also talked about ‘power-out’ evenings when we simply won’t use things like the television and read instead. It’s amazing to think about the difference between the average home running 20-40 kWh/day to an off-grid home running 4-6kWh/day. That’s a big difference but home design, efficient appliances, non-electric cooking, etc. can all make it work.
