Although climate change’s adverse effects are terrifying, skyrocketing utility bills can hurt more because they’re so close to home. Regardless of how much you pay for electricity, gas, propane or heating oil, you may be overpaying by hundreds of bucks.
Finding ways to cut back is a surefire way to guarantee lower bills.
Contents
Why Is It Challenging to Lower Your Energy Bills?
Lowering your power bills can be challenging when you have no control over production. If you rely entirely on the electrical grid, you’ll be at the mercy of market forces. Prices fluctuate because of demand variations, fuel costs, abundance or scarcity of primary energy sources — such as petroleum, natural gas and coal — and power plant availability.
Solar, wind, geothermal or hydropower can supply electricity to your home, making you self-sufficient and less susceptible to market influences, but home renewable energy systems aren’t feasible everywhere.
Shared renewables are a promising model for making affordable, clean electricity accessible to all. However, existing community solar projects can only generate enough gigawatts to power 600,000 American houses — a fraction of the country’s more than 120 million households. If you can’t influence electricity production, you should mind consumption more to reduce your utility bills meaningfully.
7 Creative Ideas to Save Energy at Home
Aside from upgrading to energy-efficient appliances, you should think outside the box and eliminate waste in ways you never thought were possible, like these seven.
1. Zap Phantom Loads
Turned-off appliances or electronic devices may continue to draw power in standby mode. Phantom loads refer to the energy they quietly consume. Although they may be negligible, they add up over time.
Eliminate these energy vampires where you can. Identify them by determining the devices that work at the push of a remote control button or with a digital display. They typically appear in clusters, so note where they are around the house. Computer stations, entertainment centers and kitchen counters are the usual suspects.
After identifying your phantom load clusters, buy an adequate power strip with on-off switches for each area. Hook it up to a wall outlet and plug all vampires in the cluster into it.
Switch off the devices that don’t require a constant electric current, and voila — you now have fewer or zero phantom loads.
For isolated phantom loads, use smart plugs. Plugging your energy vampires into these smart devices allows you to turn them on and off remotely or automatically using your phone. While smart plugs are constantly in standby mode, they can save you power when they draw less electricity than the vampires connected to them.
2. Furnish With Insulative Fabrics
Space heating accounts for a considerable slice of the energy-use pie. Making your rooms naturally toasty can reduce the need to fire up your furnace, boiler or heat pump as often. A neat way to do this is by decorating your home with materials that thermally insulate well.
Thick, heavy window curtain fabrics like velvet minimize heat loss. They’re helpful when treating decades-old windows whose insulating abilities have diminished sharply.
Wool carpets also provide warmth. Laying them on cold floors provides comfort underfoot, making your space feel cozier than the temperature suggests.
3. Heat Water Only When Necessary
Tank systems can be money pits. They’re subject to tremendous standby electricity losses because they continuously run to keep water warm, even when unnecessary.
Break with tradition and go tankless to use less fuel when taking hot showers. Tankless systems consume less energy to heat the same amount of water because they work on demand. A heater that never needs to maintain an internal water temperature the whole day and operates only when in use — which is only a few minutes per person — pays for itself.
4. Ventilate Rooms With Windows
Natural ventilation is free, and you can accelerate its cooling effect by understanding how air behaves and knowing which windows to open. Cross ventilation is super efficient because it capitalizes on the wind-driven force to push out stale indoor air with drafts.
It requires at least two openings — an entry point for cool breezes and an exit point for warm, moist air. A door or vent can serve as another opening in a room with only one window.
Ideally, they should be on opposite sides of the room with no obstruction in between. The shorter the distance between the inlet and the outlet, the faster the air exchange. You can feel the difference when the wind passes through an area your family uses, so proper layout also plays a role.
Large openings accommodate more wind than smaller ones. However, you can still ventilate efficiently when the inlet and outlet are of significantly different sizes. Cross ventilation can work its magic when the smaller opening is on the windward side of the room because its dimensions can boost the wind’s velocity.
Another way to ventilate your space naturally is through the stack effect. It’s a phenomenon where warm air rises while cool air goes lower. You can increase airflow within your home and improve its indoor climate by exhausting warm air using top openings and injecting fresh air using bottom openings.
5. Run Power-Hungry Machines at Night
If your utility calculates your electric bill using a time-of-use rate, using your resource-heavy appliances during off-peak hours will save you money. These hours are usually in the late evening or early morning when demand is at its lowest. Your utility company will reward you with a lower rate when you use your washing machine, dryer and dishwasher when there’s less strain on the grid.
6. Let the Dishes Pile Up
Many prefer to use a machine to wash dishes than doing it by hand to conserve water. However, a dishwasher — regardless of its efficiency rating — is only energy-saving when running with a full load. A half-empty dishwasher in operation doubles its electric usage to clean the same amount of tableware.
Fight the urge to run your dishwasher when it still has plenty of room. If you can’t wait, fill up your machine with dirty dishwasher-safe pieces of clothing. You may have to avoid settings involving hot water and heated dry to keep your non-dishware items from shrinking.
7.Sun- and Air-Dry Your Laundry
Although 81% of American homes have a clothes dryer, this appliance is more of a luxury than a necessity. Living without this household staple can save you a ton of power because it’s optional and electricity-hungry.
Alternatively, hang your newly washed laundry to dry. Let the sun and air evaporate the excess moisture in your clothes at no energy cost.
Unfortunately, many condominiums and gated communities have a dim view of clotheslines. Homeowners associations consider them eyesores. If you live in a state that doesn’t outlaw clothesline bans, you may have to fight for your right to dry and save countless dollars in the long run.
Use Your Creativity to Push the Envelope of Energy Efficiency
The possibilities for saving energy at home are endless. Let your imagination run wild and go beyond these ideas to live more sustainably.