Attempt #2 in writing this hopefully it goes through this time :D
Anyhow, so here is how I went on reducing my utilities by almost 80% and this is with starting from a lower base already vs average american house.
We live in about 2200 sq ft of house, ranch style. Built in 1958, so lots of leaky. When I first moved in with my now wife, the average usage of utilities was the following:
- Electricity 760 kWh/month
- Gas (water and heat) - 820 therms annually
We live in the Northeast and Winters are cold - according to the average our winters are about 6100 Heating Degree Days and it gets hot and humid in summer.
Here's what I did chronologically:
#1 - First move was to change all light bulbs to CFLs. This was in 2013 so LEDs were still very expensive at around 9-10$ per bulb. Since CFLs don't differ that much from power output from LEDs (maybe like 20%) it never made sense $$ wise to go for LEDs when CFLs were available at 1-2 dollars a pop. Before, the whole power output of light bulbs in the house was around 2000-3000 W... when all bulbs were changed the whole power output in the house sits around at 250-300W ... As an example, TODAY if we have the whole house with the lights on, it would use less energy than before when we had 3-5 lights on in the living room 6 hours a day or so. Cost on new lights = $70
#2 - I am frugal (hence being here...or at least as my mother tells me I am Spartan. I don't mind paying for things of good quality), therefore the dumb thermostats never echoed with me. In 2013 I bought a NEST. At the time I believe NEST was the only wifi t-stat and while I know I could probably get by with a programmable thermostat, the designs were not that appealing and I liked having the wifi access anyhow. Of course I didn't buy it new. Bought it off of ebay in 2013 for about $95. It's been now almost 6 years, and never had an issue with it. It paid itself in no time. With the Nest I started putting the heat off whenever out of the house or at night (with setbacks in the mid 50s). This itself brought big savings in orders of 30-40% in heat. Cost = $95
#3 Changing electrical suppliers - PA has a liberal market in the energy market, meaning you can choose who your supplier is from hundredds of suppliers. They website is pretty easy to navigate as well. Just input your zipcode and a lot of offers from different companies pop up. Just organize the list by Lowest Price to Highest and you're golden. You can usually get 20-35% lower prices than what the distribution company provides. These are all usually introductory offers for a limited amount of time (like 3, 6 or 12 months for example) so once that time expires just pop onto the website and go for the lowest offer again and jump to a different company. Been doing this for 4-5 years now and it takes maybe 10 minutes every 6 months. For those of you that use 1,000 or more kWh/month it's definitely worth it.
#3 While renovating and redesigning our living room to open space, we had to put a beam and with this access to attic. While up there and since we had the whole thing torn apart we decided to add insulation. Being the perfectionist that I am, I didn't want to just spray insulation on top of what we had there (4-5 inches of loose fiberglass and some spaces even lacking). Air leaks and cracks, even when insulated on top, leak a lot of air, so I wanted to seal off everything. So, we removed all Fiberglass in trash bags by using a leaf blower in reverse and using flexible air ducts to bring all loose fiberglass downstairs to a big mesh bag. This enabled me to air seal all cracks, top plates and fan cans and light boxes from the attic. We decided to put about 18" of cellulose on our attic for a total of about R65-R70.
Our local Lowe's sold each bag at 12.95 dollars which is expensive IMO - we needed about 120 bags. A local store also had bags at about 8 dollars per bag if buying 100 of them, but Lowes had the FREE machine to spray the insulation which we needed. So I played the price match game with Lowes, where they priced matched it to 7,20 per bag and I also used they 50 off of 250 coupons in order to bring the price lower. Not only that, buying Lowes gift cards at 10-15% discount from 3rd party gift card markets brought it even lower, along with cashback portals. In the end we paid for each bag about $4,90/bag !! Also, our electrical supplier had and still has lots of rebates going for insulation improvements (it's always worth checking it out. I received an extra $130 from the electrical provider, but if my heat were to be electric as well, they would cover 80% of the cost up to 450 dollars, while in my case it was only 25% of the cost up to $130.
Total cost = $400
#4 Fridge - we had an old fridge that came with the house when we bought it. I knew it was hold from the start but not as old as I ended up finding it. Great machine! Cooled things like no other fridge did and probably will outlast any of the new ones but I digress. The fridge was built in either 1983 or 1992 judging from the serial number and some Google. I would honestly think it was a 1983. However that thing used about 3 kWh/day. It never made much sense to just buy a new one just for the sake of it, but we had it in the plans to buy one that would go with out renovation. And we did exactly that recently. We bought a nice European fridge from a warehouse at a steep discount and sold the other one on Craigslist for $230 dollars. In the end, the NET cost of the new fridge was $450. Best thing though, the new fridge only uses about 0.2-0.4 kWh per day !!
So here's how much we used to spend on utilities before all this:
- Old spending $2200/year give or take
With all the improvements we are now using only 190-200 kWh/month and this includes using dryer, landscape lights (LED of course) and cooking (we cook everyday) and having computer 24/7. Heat wise, this year we have only spent 200 therms of gas during an average winter of 6000 HDDs. Better yet, we don't have aggressive setbacks anymore. We keep the house always at 60F when sleeping or away, and around 68F when at home, so in essence we even increase indoor temps and the savings were that big!
Also, during the summer, while before the house used to get hot pretty quick, we can usually get by a full day without AC unless it's a heat wave of several days or the temps at night don't drop enough where opening windows and using fan would bring the temperatures lower.
The new spending is therefore $750/year (already confirmed throguh the last 12 months). Consumption decrease almost 80% and spending almost 70%. There isn't much more we can save now. The only way, would be instead of having gas heat, change it to electricity through European multi-splits system, where we wouldn't need ducts and by being electricity we could drop the gas contract (which the customer charge is $17/month). The mini-split system would give both AC and Heat and since most of them have COP of 4 or higher it would end up being cheaper to use than NG (not by much though). But both our furnace and AC are pretty new - put in by prevous owner - installed around 2010 or so according to manufacture date of systems on their labels. Another way to save would be having a on-demand water heat but since ours is still pretty new it doesn't make sense to change as of now just to save some pennies. The same goes for windows (our windows while they are double pane they are crap) which would cost a lot just to save a couple dollars. Same for wall insulation - I'd love to insulate my walls - but when running the numbers and hassle of insulating the walls (which our house is lacking I am sure) it doesn't make sense. Our highest electric bill is about 40ish dollars in the summer and highest gas bill was 50 dollars back in Jan/February (coldest months)
https://i.redd.it/k3nw8u85bd131.png
And by these improvements instead of 3 tons of AC size, next time we need a new AC system, we can go by with only 1ton or 1.5 tons max which is crazy. And for all environmentalists out there, we are saving the planet 10 Metric tons (22,000 lbs) of CO2 emissions on a yearly basis.
So all this to say, that you dont need a lot of money to get big returns! For about $1000 (and this includes a new fridge) and a lot of DIY work and being smart on how you buy your materials, you can save a lot and increase the comfort of your home. It pays to check for rebates as well! And you don't need to have good wall insulation for the most part, most of the returns come from insulating the heck out of your attic! And you can totally use HDDs and current usage and estimate the savings before hand to see if it's worth it. I did mine and my estimates weren't that far off from what ended up being in reality.
Hopefully this post will be of help to someone.
May 30, 2019 at 11:38AM
