For some reason my power bill keeps going up and up, despite the fact that my home is small, insulated on both sides by other homes, and this winter has been extremely mild. I even switched to a smaller, more efficient hot water tank a few years ago, which should have cut that bill by a good chunk. I use compact fluorescent bulbs (CFL) where I can and supplement my heating bill with a natural gas fireplace.
At first I welcomed B.C. Hydro's move to a two-tier system where we pay a lower rate up to 1,376 kilowatts per month and a higher rate for additional energy. The lower rate was supposed to apply to an average home and I believed that my power usage was probably below average given my square footage and all those other things I just mentioned. But I'm actually maxing out at the lower-tiered rate - 5.2 cents per kilowatt/hour - before we even hit the middle of the month and more than half of my electricity is rated at the higher 8.2 cents per kWh.
It's made me think a lot about power usage recently, and right now I'm laying the groundwork for some significant changes. I came up with the idea of creating a pyramid of efficiency savings, which I will then reinvest in my home to cut my energy use even more.
I don't plan on timing every single bulb in my house to determine what my exact savings are, but according to B.C. Hydro you can save about $4.10 per year per CFL on average (14-watt bulb burning three hours per day over nine years, including the initial cost of the bulb).
Therefore, if I invest in 20 CFL bulbs for my house tomorrow for around $70 - and I haven't done the math yet - I should save $82 in energy by this time next year. I intend to use that money to purchase two programmable thermostats and a power bar (based on a sale rate I saw last fall at Costco).
Here's where the math gets theoretical. The thermostats will be placed in two upstairs rooms, which are heated by baseboard heaters that use around 1.5 kWh/hr of power or around nine to 12.5 cents of power per hour, depending which rate I'm being charged. I'll average that to around 10.5 cents, although its probably a little closer to 11.
I estimate that these baseboard heaters are on at least a third of the time from November to April to come up with a figure of - 180 days times six hours per day, times two rooms, times 10.5 cents per hour - or roughly $226 per year.
That's probably a little high for two rooms, especially in a mild winter like this one, but it also doesn't take into account the occasional cold day in October or May where we turn on the heat. Short of hooking up a voltage meter to every fixture in the house all you can really do is make estimates and for my purposes a higher estimate is better in the long run.
Now, considering B.C. Hydro estimates that you can save a third of your heating costs with programmable thermostats, at the end of the second year we'll have $82 in savings from lights and another $75 in savings from our heaters to reinvest - $157 in total.
That doesn't include the power bar, which I'll use to hook up my computer, printer, back-up hard drive, etc. to cut down on phantom power consumption. It's estimated that 10 per cent of the average power bill is phantom power, the power that your electronics draw even when they are turned off. It would be hard to measure the impact of one power bar, but I'll guess at least another $8 per year to give myself $165 to work with in year three.
That buys two additional programmable thermostats, which will take care of the other two main rooms of my house, powerbars for my television/Xbox/surround sound system, to leave me with another $70 to work with. I'll spent $30 on caulking, spray insulation and weather stripping, and put the other $40 away.
You can see where this is going. By year four I should be able to save around $240 to $280 (depending on how good my weather stripping is), or four times my initial investment of $70. I won't need to buy any more programmable thermostats, so I can put a chunk of money into something like one set of insulating blinds for my upstairs window, with the remaining cash added to the $40 in savings from the previous year to put towards a bigger purchase.
I can continue to use the money I've ostensibly saved (it won't show up anywhere unless you average several years of power bills before and after you make changes) to make my home more efficient, adding another layer of insulation for my attic for example, or purchasing better exhaust vents, a fan for the gas fireplace, more efficient room heaters, new energy efficient appliances, tankless water heaters and so on.
It's a pyramid scheme in a way and the real payoff won't come until I finish the last purchase/renovation. It could take 15 years to get there, but there's no reason I can't cut my power consumption in half - or at least to whatever B.C. Hydro figures is average for a home in this province.
