My wife and I just moved into a new apartment, and I just got our first electric bill! $36.36, but only for 19 days, so $1.913 per day, 14.58 kW/day - that would be a hefty $57+, and dangerously close to "tier 2" pricing- after the first 500 kWh, the price doubles. We can fix this!
The challenge will be to lower that for July. It is an all concrete apartment building with good insulation, but decreasing it should be possible.. So, I have listed energy use areas, what I have done, and what I could do. If anyone sees anything amiss or missing, let me know!
1. Lighting: I replaced every lightbulb with LED or CFL about halfway through the billing cycle, they were incandescent before, and the kitchen/living room had 240 watts alone on one switch running quite a while each day.. (Now only 35 watts total!) - this should help for next month. (Bathroom went from 180W to 22, bedroom from 120 to 24)
2. Laundry: We just moved and do not have a way to hang dry much of anything :( BUT We are moving the rest of our things, like a bed and our drying rack, this weekend. This should also help. (Electric dryer) - We also just moved and did a LOT of laundry. (And were given sleeping bags to use while we do not have a bed. They smelled like dog and musty, requiring 3 washing / drying combos to not smell awful. I think we ran at least 12 loads during those 19 days. Facepunch, I know. This will be very reduced in the future)
3. AC: We barely used it at all- if July gets worse this will kill our power savings. However, we used the whole apartment fan fairly often. I think I will pick up a window fan, which should cool the apartment down more overnight and therefore keep the apartment cooler throughout the day, with less fan use overall. (We are near the mountains, and the nights have been consistently cool thankfully, even when the days are in the 80's to 90's)-Should I look into building or buying a cheap used swamp cooler? (This is Colorado, and fairly dry)
4. Appliances: This is a big one- we are all electric, and cook a lot. I will try to stock the fridge and freezer more for efficiency, as it is fairly empty at the moment.
5. Computers & Tech: While job searching I have been on my laptop a LOT. This should be reduced soon, since I will be out of the house more. The modem/router get quite warm. I just bought a (used for $1) power strip, and will measure their consumption with a kill-a-watt. I may try switching them off at night, or at least programming the router to cut wifi connections after 11 PM or so. Other technology uses minimal power, two dumb-phones charged every couple of days, and a tablet used for recipes that we charge less than once a week, and a small speaker used occasionally. We have no televisions etc.
6. Transportation: We will be adding an electric draw to charge an electric bike soon, but since that replaces the need for a second car, it will be cost effective overall. (We bike already, but electric will be useful for avoiding sweat while coming in to work.)
7. Insulation? 3 of our walls are great, but the exterior wall has a large window, and a large sliding glass door- over 1/3 of the wall is glass! Maybe I could do something about this. The unfortunate thing is that to cool the house we need to be able to open them.. and ideally light the house with them in the daytime. Does anyone have any suggestions? I already use blinds to close off the unused (during the day) bedroom, and the blinds in the main room once it becomes exceedingly bright and hot or when we are out.
8. Hot water: Weirdly, our apartment complex locks the hot water heater behind a door on the balcony.. (wtf?) so of course I used a butterknife to easily unlock it. I just turned it down one notch (electric nonspecific controls), and will do another if water is still hotter than needed. Also, there is a constantly running electric resistance heater mounted to the wall in that closet?? I assume this is to prevent pipes from bursting, but wouldn't the hot water heater usually handle this? I turned that way down, but not off. (Since I am not supposed to be messing around in there anyway) - has anyone seen anything like this before? I will go in there before winter and kick it back up a ways. This seems like a fairly large power draw especially for the summer.