Thursday, January 20, 2011

A Month of Saving Day 12

Well, today we are looking at energy savings. As I typed that sentence, I realized I left the light on in the dining room after breakfast and had to get up and go turn it off (great start!!!). Yesterday, I received our REMC bill and on it, it said to check out their Energy Advisor on their website, http://www.nremc.com/. Once there, I was able to click on an Energy Savings tool where I put in our home information (most of which it already recognized). I could even put in the dates of when our furnace and appliances were purchased and then it calculated where we could save money in our home. Now, I realize we will have to potentially spend some money to upgrade the specific areas, but it just might be worth it in the long run. One area that it said we could save over $300 per year was in upgrading our water heater. When we purchased our home, our water heater was over 16 years old. It has just not made it on the upgrade list up to this point, but it might be something we need to consider. The other area of major savings for our home is in light usage. There are simple things that we can do to save energy in this area... turn the lights off when not in use, turn off the closet lights (night lights) in the kids' rooms during the day, unplug appliances or lights when they are not in use or not used at all. In our kitchen/dining room, we could potentially have 7 lights turned on at one time (one of which is a chandelier, not to mention all the appliances). There are times when I walk in the kitchen and at least half of them are on and no one is in sight. We are going to try to save some energy at our house and see how it goes!!! It will be interesting to see the difference in our meter reading next month!

I think the website said you could also have an Energy Advisor come to your house and do a more complete inspection... I am sure that would not be complimentary!!!

Happy saving!!

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