Energy Usage Progress

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!

Time to Call the Professionals

 

As you all know, I'm on a quest to squeeze out every penny of energy savings that I possibly can.  J.'s brother and wife had a professional energy audit done last year and, after implementing the recommendations, they significantly warmed up their finished basement and lowered their heating and cooling bills. At the time, I poo-pooed it, thinking that there was no way an energy audit of our holier-than-swiss-cheese old house.  (In my subconscious, I may actually have been afraid that they would recommend we bulldoze and start over!)

After doing some research, however, I discovered an Energy Star program offered by our local utilities (KCPL and MGE) where they will reimburse you up to $1200 for energy improvements.  That includes $400 for an audit by a certified energy auditor (which is the going rate) and then up to $800 if you implement just one of the auditor's recommendations.  The amount you can receive back depends on the improvements you made.  For example:

• Additional attic insulation up to R-49 is eligible for 2 cents x the R-value x sq footage
• Additional wall insulation up to R-19 is eligible for 3 cents x R-value x sq footage
• Air sealing is eligible for $10 for each % you lower air leakage up to 40%
• New windows\doors are eligible for $100 each

We just had our energy audit done and it was extremely informative.  They perform a "blower test" where they open one outside door to your house and then seal it off with a big airtight tarp-looking-thing that has a huge fan at the bottom.  The fan sucks all the air out of your house, and this helps indicate where air is leaking IN.  The auditor asked me to come up to our attic and, as I hit the bottom of the stairs, I could feel the cold air rushing past me.  We obviously have an insulation problem up there.  According to him, basements are the "leakiest", followed by attics.  They measure the blower door test in percentages and he explained that his brand new home measures at 40%, meaning that when his furnace or AC is on, he's heating or cooling 40% of that air every hour. Here's ours:

Um, yeah.....

He left me with 5 things that we need to look at and told me the good news is that they're all easy and they're all covered under the rebate.

1. Insulate the crawl space and walls in our addition (already planned!)
2. Insulate the rim joist in the basement
3. Increase the attic insulation to R-49 with blown-in insulation
4. Weatherstrip the doors in the attic and caulk\weatherstrip windows and doors all over the house, including caulking around the ceiling vent in the bathroom.  That's not something I probably would have thought of, but he noted it was VERY leaky!
5. Replace the remaining lightbulbs with CFLs or LEDS (already planned!)

If we do these things, the auditor said he's certain that we could lower our bills by at least 25%.  Here's a snapshot from the report that he gave us showing current energy costs and what we could save.

That's not bad, considering much of what we need to do is easy and will be paid for with the rebate and several of the things on the list were already on our to-do list.

The best part of this?  I paid no money out of pocket for this.  The auditor helps you do the rebate form, and then the rebate goes directly to him.  You keep the savings!

If you're in the Kansas City area and are interested in having an energy audit, I can highly recommend the contractor that did our test.  Email me at crankypuppy@gmail.com and I'll get you the information.  The only thing I ask is that you let him know we referred you, as he does pay a small referral fee.  :-)  

Hey, every little bit helps...

 


I've shared this post as part of this week's HomeAcre blog hop.  Go check it out!

Wait 5 Minutes

The saying around here is "If you don't like the weather in Missouri, wait 5 minutes."  It's not a favorite for no reason, trust me.  We'd had some spectacular 70 degree days today and Monday (today hit 79!) where the normal highs are in the 50's.  J. and I have been slowly cleaning out our basement and you could literally feel the temperature change as we were dragging things out to the trash trailer.  On our last trip out, the temp was down to 53 and it was starting to rain some random drops.  Time to go in!  A little over an hour later and it was sleeting. 

 

Crazy Missouri weather.

 

The reason we're cleaning out the basement (the whole house, really) is that I hired an energy auditor and he's coming next Monday.  Our utility companies (both gas and electric) have rebates that will fully pay for the audit ($400) and up to $800 of work that is recommended by that audit (caulking, new windows\doors, insulation, weatherstripping, etc.)  You just have to implement 1 of their recommendations (not all) to get the  money. 

 

The reason we're getting ready to gut our laundry room is because it's sitting over an uninsulated crawl space and the walls aren't insulated either.  You can literally feel the cold air coming up through the floor in the winter.  It also runs up through the walls up into the 2nd floor home office as well.  We have GOT to get that fixed to be more energy efficient.  Having that rebate money will help a lot on the costs.

 

In other news, we found an electrician that will help us with the solar panel project.  We have to have a licensed electrician sign off on it before the utility company will even come inspect it.  He's charging us $500 for the signoff and 8 hours to review our plans, answer any questions we have, and do any work we need him to do.  I think that's a pretty good deal and we can get a federal tax credit of 30% of that cost back on this year's taxes.

 

We have a lot to do but, for now, we're waiting.

 

Waiting for the energy auditor to arrive on Monday.

 

Waiting for the application to be approved by the utility. (They have 28 more days!)

 

Waiting for the solar panels to arrive.  (They should be here this week!)

 

Waiting for Spring to officially arrive so we can start the garden.

 

Did I mention that I am the most I.M.P.A.T.I.E.N.T person on the planet?

 

 

 

Our Goal: Keep $800,000 Away from The Power Company

Welcome to the third post in the series related to our solar energy project.

 Click here to start at the beginning!

WARNING: Math ahead!

 

I'm an energy hog and I'm not proud of it.  Let me tell you how I came to this realization recently and how what I found out might be of use to you. 

You can't talk about implementing solar without first looking at your energy usage.  What I'm going to talk about in this post applies to everyone, though, and not just folks like us that are interested in going solar. 

I'll admit to being that person...the one that grumbles about their high energy bills and then grudgingly writes the check to the power company.  When they raise their rates every year as our provider, Kansas City Power and Light (KCPL), has over the last few years, this puppy goes from cranky to downright surly.  On average utility rates increase 6% to 8% every year - KCPL has raised theirs 7.3%. In 2009, the increase was 16.4%.  So it's safe to assume that we can only see increases coming in the future.  The kicker is that our energy rate is really darn low (10.7 cents per watt) compared to the rest of the country.  Hawaii is over 34 cents per watt!

One nice thing that KCPL provides on their website is a history of your energy usage and I was absolutely mortified to find that our average energy usage over the least year was:

• Around 45 kWH (kilowatt hours) per day.  The average American household uses around 30 so we are definitely energy  hogs!
• A total of 21,904 kWH used last year. The average American household uses anywhere from 10,000 to 14,000!
• At a cost of $2,551.34
• We're about 33% over average! 

Where is all that power going!?  It's not like we leave all lights blazing 24 hours a day + 5 blenders on non-stop + 6 loads of laundry a day.   It's just the two of us here.  So I am now on a mission to figure it out and try to get us down to average usage which would result in just shy of $1,000 savings per year.  If you couldn't use an extra grand per year, then you might be tempted to stop reading.  But wait....

I'm 43 so, if we use the average life expectancy for women, I have about 30 years left.  (Ummm...typing that made me anxious.  Doesn't seem like a lot of time left, does it?!)

Now let's leave the solar stuff out of the equation and say we save $1,000 per year just by lowering our energy usage.  That means we would have an additional $30,000 in our pocket over the remainder of my life.  If we let it sit in the bank!  Using Dave Ramsey's investment calculator, if we invested that money in the stock market at the average rate of return of  11.69%, those energy savings would grow to $255,884.37!  That's just with cutting our energy usage by 33%.  If we do this project and go completely solar so that we're paying nothing for electricity every month, that savings turns into $800,000 over my lifetime.

You think that's awesome?  Check this out...if I added that money consistently to my existing retirement account rather than paying it to KCPL, I'd be this much richer:

$3,594,665!

Still with me?  Now the question is how to get our usage down. 

As a first step, I'm going to start looking at what are called PHANTOM LOADS.  I'm talking about all those ghostly appliances that stay plugged into our outlets and are sucking up power even when we think they're not. 

• See that clock on your coffee pot?  Sucking power.
• Think your sleeping laptop isn't using power when it's plugged in?  Sucking power.
• You turn your TV off when you're not watching, but what about your cable box? Sucking power!

The Kill-A-What in action

How do I know this?  I put this whizz-bang gadget called a Kill-A-What on my Christmas list last year.  Santa didn't disappoint, and I've been measuring energy usage on our appliances ever since.  I've found some surprising things.  Like my 24" Energy Star monitor still uses 0.12 kWH even when it's in sleep mode.  So does my laptop *if* it's plugged in (which it always is). 

Amazon sells the Kill-A-Watt P4460 for $26.00, so it's affordable and will easily pay for itself in energy savings.   The first thing I did was to go around the house from room to room and make a list of everything that is plugged in.  Don't forget your kitchen appliances!  And especially don't forget those freezers and refrigerators.   Then pick what you want to test.  Unplug the appliance, plug the Kill-A-What into the outlet, and plug the appliance into the single outlet in the front of the Kill-A-What.  If you program in your electrical rate, it will show you both the kWH the device is using as well as the cost.  Typically, I let these run over a couple of days because some devices cycle their use on and off.

I'm still testing but I hope to come up with a spreadsheet that shows all the "phantom loads" and how unplugging all this stuff could help us meet our goal.  Each one may seem small but when you add them all up together, I think it could be significant. 

After that, we need to look at the big ticket stuff: furnace, freezers, appliances, hot water heater, etc.

What do you think?  Think a 33% reduction is doable?  If you've got ideas for getting energy usage down, I am all ears!

UPDATE:  Click here to go to the next post in our solar series where we're talking about a cool tool to help you figure out what vampire appliances are sucking your energy.

I'm sharing this with this week's Farm Girl Friday, DIY Linky and Homestead Barn Hop hops. Go check them out!