I often wonder what my husband and I can do more or less of to be good citizens of mother earth and responsible homeowners…
Our recorded electricity consumption in our last electricity bill was much higher than usual, and I don’t really understand it because we didn’t make any changes to our routine. In general we only turn the water heaters and air-conditioning on when we need them (we don’t keep the house a/c-ed all day), and we try not to keep the lights on unnecessarily. We’ve also started turning the temperature up in our room a little bit so that we use less electricity.
Anyways, I think Earth Hour is a good initiative. In case you’ve missed the buzz, this is an attempt to get people all around the world to turn their lights off for an hour at 8:30PM next Saturday 28 March 2009. I think it’s a good idea not so much for the electricity that will be saved in that hour, but for the awareness it has created…
Our national environment agency website has a Home Electricity Audit page that allows you to do a rough calculation of how much electricity you consume in your home. I tried it, and it’s pretty good. I managed to account for over 90% of our usual electricity consumption using their calculator (well apart from this past month, which as I said was strangely high). It’ll help give you a sense of where your big cost centers are and how you could possibly cut down. I think my honey and I hubby and I need to use less of our computers… boy is that gonna be tough…
