I sat down to pay bills this morning and, while I'm out on the power company's website, I like to pull down our latest usage numbers and see how we're doing. With all of our efforts toward swapping out our light bulbs for LEDs and using smart outlet strips like this one, we should be seeing it pay off.
Those numbers above are comparing the month of September from 2013 and 2014. A 31% decrease from this time last year is not bad, but the weather has been pretty temperate as we're enjoying a prolonged Indian summer. But an average of 60 kWh is still way too high. What's interesting is that I also pulled the daily usage numbers for this month and the average is just over 25. The difference?
We turned off the air conditioner in late September. Using the air conditioner more than doubles our usage!
The average monthly usage for folks in Missouri is 1060 kWh per month, or just over 35 kWh per day. So we're not doing too bad. But we've still got more bulbs to swap out for LEDs and more stuff to unplug, so I bet we can get our average usage under the roughly 45 kWh that our solar array is going to generate every day. We'll get credits for what we don't use, so maybe that will help pay for the air conditioner that I'm just not willing to give up on those hot summer days!
Have you come up with some creative ways to save power? I'd love to hear about them!
It's been a number of weeks since you posted! Is everything okay? I didn't find that those light bulbs actually helped decrease our usage. Nor do they last as long as claimed. Pretty disappointing considering how much more expensive they are.
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