Our energy bills are simply too high, however lowering them does not need hard currency on green power gadgets or sacrificing your sanity. With a couple of easy tricks and minor adjustments to the manner you use your appliances, you'll be able to drive your energy costs down.
Air Conditioning and heat
For the lucky ones that reside in places where there's sunny weather all year round, air-con usage accounts for most of your bill. If you live in colder regions , heat is perhaps what costs you the most. Either way, you can use the thermostat more efficiently with some easy tricks.
1) Keep Your Vents Open and Clean
If you have central air-con and/or heat, check the vents in your home. Some could also be closed. It might not typically occur to you that any vent would be closed as a you would not usually close them. One simply assumes they're open. After opening them all up, the cooling system no longer struggled to keep the home cool or kept running once reaching its target temperature. Some believe that closing vents can scale back energy consumption by preventing the need to chill or heat a particular a specific. that's a myth: closing vents will actually raise your energy costs.
Your vents additionally use air filters to keep dirt, dust, and other unwanted particles from blowing throughout your home. Those filters should get replaced or at least cleaned monthly or they're going to prevent ideal air flow. You can buy a bulk pack at your local hardware store for a couple of dollars. Just make sure to measure the size of your vents before you go.
2) Better air circulation in Your Home
Trapping the correct temperature in your home typically needs more than just flow. Unless you live in a a really small space, even central air and heat systems will have issues maintaining every room at constant, steady temperature. If you bear in mind that heat rises, you already know how to mend this problem.
Probably you have some standing fans in your home. Fans need much less power than air-con sytems.Fans do not cool or heat the air, but they do move it around.Once air in your home circulates properly, it's easier to keep it at an even temperature which means that less work for your heating/cooling system. Position the fans so that they move the air in the direction you would like it to go.
If you are lucky enough to own a ceiling fan, running it in the correct direction makes this easier. Once it's hot, the fan should spin counter-clockwise to push the warm air up and out. When the weather turns cold, it should spin clockwise to trap heat within. All of them have clockwise-counterclockwise switches.
3)Laundry Machines
Cutting costs on laundry takes little or no effort. merely stop using heat whenever possible, pack the proper quantity of clothes into the machines, tackle the task at nighttime and don't be shy to use the half load button
4) Reduce Heat
According to LG Electronics, who amongst other things also make make washers and driers, "heating the water in the cycle drum accounts for about 90% of the energy your washing machine uses." While most of us know that washing our clothes on the cold water cycle should reduce energy costs, the amount is higher expected. Remember, cold water won't cause colors to run so easily and additionally you don't have to separate light and dark clothing. Using a cold wash reduces the amount of work you and you machine's drum heating system has to do.In essence.A hot cycle should be used for underwear (which should be washed separately).
If you're tumble drying there's no way you can save as it's a very energy munching device. If you have the space, air drying your clothed will do just as good a job.
5) Do your laundry and dishes off peak hours
Get into contact with your power company and as them at which hours they have off peak electricity discounts. In most countries it's 8PM.
6) Dishwashers
Same philosophy as the washing machine. It's all a question of usage and heat. Pack your dishwashers as efficienlty as possible. If you can disable the jet drying feature, do it. Adopt a bit of elbow grease and dry (or wipe depending on how long you leave them inside) the dishes yourself.
7) Other Aplliances and electronics
Most appliances and electronics don't have a high power cost. Here's the ones however you have to watch out for
* Modern Gaming Systems (PS/Xbox/Nntendo etc)
* Electric Kettles
* Desktop Computers
* Television sets (Especially Plasma Display)
Except for electric kettles, a job which can be replaced by boiling water on a stove, reducing energy consumption with your other gadgets and gizmos actually requires you having to turn them off (or at least a standby mode). When you have stacks of devices and appliances, shutting them off regularly gets to be a nuisance. So the easiest solution is to put them all on a power strip and turn off the complete strip.
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