So you want to start greening your house and your lifestyle, but you have idea where to start. That’s what I’m here for! To begin, we are going to get out your last Dominion Power statement and take note of how much you have been paying each month. Since the numbers go up and down depending on the season, take the last 12 months worth of KW, add them together and then divide by twelve to get your monthly usage average. This is the number we are going to work on.
According to Dominion, the breakdown for how the average user spends their kw’s goes something like this:
Space heating 31%
Space cooling 12%
Water heating 12%
Lighting 11%
Computers
& Electronics 9%
Appliances 9%
Refrigeration 8%
Other 8%
Using these categories and your calculated monthly average, you can determine what you spend for each of the categories. For example, if your monthly usage average is 682 kw, and you want to know how much you spend on lighting which is 11% of your usage then 682 x .11 = 75 kw. If we then multiply this by $.10 which is roughly what we pay in this area per kw, we get that we spend $7.50 per month to light our house if we use the approximate percentages above.
Now it’s time to make some changes. Let’s start with the really easy stuff that also happens to give you one of the biggest bangs for your buck. Since we spend $7.50 per month for lighting, or $90.00 per year, let’s consider how we can lower that figure. Changing over our light bulbs to compact fluorescents or LED’s will lower what we pay for lighting by 50 to 75%. That could be as much as $45 per year! Since light bulbs can get pricey, do I really need to change out them all? Anything that you have on for more than 4 hours a day is a great candidate to change out. Go through your house and change all those bulbs immediately since doing so will pay for itself in savings immediately. All the rest of them can wait until they burn out.
Check back next week when I will go over the numbers for another money saving improvement to your home.
