Sunday, September 7, 2008

Energy Savings

For the past month or so, we have been doing a few things to save energy. The first was to turn off our water heater during the day. Through this process we discovered that we could leave our water heater off for about a day and a half before running out of hot water. The second was to plug our TV/VCR/Speaker System into a power strip and keep that power strip off if we weren't using any of that stuff. Finally, we have been trying to get our landlord to replace our '90 model refrigerator. It's old enough to fight a war and smoke now - quite frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't chosen to do either...we haven't succeeded on that front yet, but I still have hope.

Anyway, we got an electric bill the other day, and it was $50 lower than our "comfort level" of $70 -- pretty amazing! So, this might actually be a legit way to save some cash for our journey.

For the winter, we are going to put film over our windows to hopefully lower the cost of heating, which is pretty ri-diculous in our little apartment. Have you found "green" ways to save money this year?

2 comments:

Kayla said...

Wow, that's awesome! Good for you! We have implemented some small green changes.

1. take cloth bags to the Co-Op-you get 10 cents off your total bill per bag used
2. changed just about all of our light bulbs to low energy flourescent ones
3. doing more clothes shopping at the Good Will and other thrift shops, not only are they cheaper we are recycling someone else's wardrobe
4. using cloth napkins instead of paper ones-we have enough where they do not add extra loads of laundry

Tracy said...

Wow, that's great! Good for you!