Cutting our electricity bill: Exciting Conclusions

Since the last time I have written on our electricity bill and our efforts in reducing it we’ve had a few developments. 

Now keep in mind with all of this.  We do not have some of the typical high energy items that many have.  We have no water heater that draws energy nor do we have electric heat.  We do have, however, an ancient waterbed.  Thankfully that will be replaced very soon.  Another item to keep in mind is this is Fairbanks, Alaska so we have to plug in our vehicles if they are parked outdoors when the temperatures go below -20.  That happens quite frequently here in the winter months so to combat that problem I have purchased an outdoor timer that will only turn on power to the vehicle plugged in for two hours prior to our possible departure time.
Also, originally as I began writing this, my husband had been at home each month, anxiously searching for a job.  That means that we have had one adult around the house for almost 24 hours a day, 6-8 of which he spent with a computer on and possibly a television on.  Great news there? He got a job so that loss of energy is now gone!

Another  important thing to keep in mind as I report all of this, our energy cost is much higher than the average in the lower 48 where the typical price is .12 per kWh. 

Now onto the fun part of all of this; the experiments!  If you remember from my previous blog Cutting Our Electricity Bill,  I was about to conduct an experiment.  I had gotten the idea from another Facebook friend that you can put your chest freezer on a timer to save a bit of money.

Turns out, she was right!  I plugged in my Belkin Conserve Insight Monitor in the beginning after programming it to our local cost of .21 per kWh.  We kept this plugged in for approximately 48 hours and the result was about $5.50 per month.  Next, we plugged in our Monitor first to the wall and then plugged in a timer that was set to a 12 hour cycle.  12 hours on, 12 hours off.  We then plugged the freezer in to that. 

Lo and behold, our cost per month dropped down to approximately $2.75 per month.  I imagine during the summer months our cost will go up a bit since it will be warmer out but our chest freezer is in our garage where it stays cool so I can’t imagine it going up massively.

We have also added a Belkin Conserve Smart AV to our entertainment center which I think is pretty darn cool!  Unlike some of our surge protectors that have a remote control that allows us to shut off the items remotely this surge protector actually just shuts everything off that is attached to the surge protector when the one item (our television) is shut off.  This ensures that all those greedy little Energy vampires are actually shut down when we do  not need them.   Slowly but surely we have been adding several of the Belkin Conserve timers to appliances that only need to be charged from time to time or to  lights that we want on for only a short time.   We use these for things like our electric toothbrushes, kindles, cordless phones, chargeable clock radios and even better, a few of the lights that my son likes to have on when he goes to sleep at night.  This allows us to simply turn on several of his lights with a push of a button and 3 hours later, when he is asleep, the lights will turn off until the next night when we turn them on again.  

This all allows us to keep in mind the expense of keeping certain lights or appliances on without adding extra work of moving appliances and other heavy items around to unplug them, which for us would be immensely time consuming. 

Now, for the really great news.  For the month of January our total usage was 985 kWh. Total cost; $212.00

For the month of February our total usage was 895.  Total cost: $193.00.  That’s a reduction of almost 100 kWh!  With some of these ideas already in place, others that we are currently starting to implement and others that we will be trying out soon I really cannot wait to see how much more we can drop our electricity bill. 

Even More Exciting Conclusions!
As of June 10th, we have now dropped our electricity usage to 405 kWhs! The only unfortunate bit? Energy cost for the Fairbanks/North Star Borough rose to approximately .25 per kWh. So if the amount per kWh had been the same as it was in April our cost now would have only been....$85, instead of $100.  While that makes me very thrilled with how well we've done, I'm sad that the costs just keep going up, working against us.  In the end, I'm just grateful that we started doing this a while ago as I could only imagine how much we would be paying for our electricity now if we hadn't.