Thanks for the Kudos. I feel like my state (Maine) should probably win the award for the thriftiest (and hardiest) state in the US.
I read somewhere that while our price per kWh is the highest in the country (the price of living in a state where the population is sparse and spread out compared to more spacious western states where population is clustered in small areas - never-mind all the trees that fall on power lines here), our actual consumption per household is the lowest. Where I live we're at $0.1445 per kWh plus a base of around $9 and change.
It's funny. A lot of things I read about on this blog are just second nature to us Mainers. When I leave the state I feel like it's a bonanza in the Goodwills and Salvation Armys. For a native here to give something away it almost has to be beyond redemption...and before anyone makes a comment about Portland and the southern part of Maine (aka Northern Massachusetts), we live in the other Maine.
Don't focus on your dollar amount of your bill since this varies so much. It's all about the kWh. If you're a two-person family in a modest-sized house (no more than 1200 sq. ft. by my definition), there's no excuse for averaging more than 5kWh per day (excluding heating & hot water systems, since where you live makes a big difference on these). I've found that luxury appliances fuck you twice. Once when you buy them, and again when you use them. I know some people up here who still have functional GE monitor top fridges - these things can be 80 years old and still use less electricity than 99% of the fridges on the market today. If you think about it, it makes sense - these things have the (hot) compressor on top of the unit and heat rises. Common sense went away and then the US went to form over function for appliances after that - in an era of (still) cheap energy, little concern is paid by the designers of most appliances, so you will have to do an enormous amount of research on appliances to get savings. The government is no help either, since the numbers that go into energy-star ratings are self-reported (good old deregulation, eh?). For fridges (which should be your largest source of energy use, in my opinion), you should stick to the smallest basic model you can find. Amazing that the $400-$500 models use the least energy AND are the least sought after. That's a bonanza for cheapskates. People like me go a step further and find someone's used $400-500 fridge. I could go on and on with this topic, but once you nail your energy use down, you can move onto other more fruitful pursuits. It's more fun to figure it out yourself.
