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General Discussion => Share Your Badassity => Topic started by: jwood83 on March 30, 2015, 05:03:47 PM

Title: First Month Electric Bill Savings After Lifestyle/Bulb Changes
Post by: jwood83 on March 30, 2015, 05:03:47 PM
It's sad that I have been waiting for this billing cycle to conclude so I could compare our savings from prior months, but I finally checked today on our online account, and was very surprised. Temperatures in February and March were roughly the same throughout the month, so with all our bulb changes, and being aware of leaving lights and other energy sucking vampires on, we saved $68! The charts even showed the day we began from now, and the decrease in energy consumption is very drastic.

I imagine we will see a strong increase when it gets hotter (we live in the deep south), so I don't think this will be a constant, but it should definitely be much lower than our bill was last year per month. Another fact to mention is we actually used less electricity the same time last year, but I was out of town working for two weeks in CT, and my wife had a full time job (meaning we were both using the home about half the time as we are are now). Since we're both at home a lot now (my wife works from home and we have a two year old), we only used a tick more than last year at the same time when we were barely here.

Really pumped about this! We still have a long way to go before we're in MMM territory, but it's a great start. Hopefully the weather will stay mild until June so we can avoid using the AC until then. Most of our fixtures in the home have multiple light sockets, but we only used one CFL per fixture (since they're covered by a globe, it doesn't look strange and the light output seems to be the same). Also, our final day of DishTV is on April 1st, so I'm wondering if getting rid of those 3 boxes that are constantly running will decrease our consumption a tick as well.

It's not much, but that extra $68 this month I'll be saving is going to be a nice payment towards our CC's instead of going to the power company!
Title: Re: First Month Electric Bill Savings After Lifestyle/Bulb Changes
Post by: StacheinTX on March 30, 2015, 06:54:46 PM
I know the feeling of excitement when your effort to save on utilities pay off. I replaced all our bulbs with LED bulbs and after keeping lights off when not necessary my bill was cut by 25%. Congratulations on your success and keep working at it!
Title: Re: First Month Electric Bill Savings After Lifestyle/Bulb Changes
Post by: forummm on March 30, 2015, 08:04:37 PM
$68 bucks mostly for changing lightbulbs! Wowsers! That's a lot of savings. It probably paid for all the lights if they were CFLs. Now the next years are all free!