“Our Utility Costs are too high!”
That’s what I said back in 2005, when I took a hard look at our finances and knew something had to change if we were to save any money that year. We had lived in our home for 4 years, and it was new when we purchased it, so I originally thought that it was surely very energy efficient. Well that was partly true, but we weren’t that energy efficient. And it wasn’t long until I found out that plenty could still be done to save on our electricity costs, and our heating and air conditioning costs too. We set out to save 10% and exceeded that target.
If you are like me, when you walk through the door after work, you want to spend some time with family, have dinner, perhaps relax a bit and settle into whatever evening routines you normally do with your kids, significant other or pets. Energy conservation and consumption planning isn’t foremost on your mind when you arrive home. But bills do tend to cross our minds at least once or twice a month. Especially when there is too much month left at the end of the money!
I had spent very little time thinking about how much we actually spent on utility bills. Then one Winter Saturday, after our dog Runner had just finished running around the house with his favorite toy, I saw him lie down in the sun coming in through a window. I knew both he and our cats always would pick the same places around the house at various times to nap in the sun, depending on the time of day. I began wondering just how much heat came in through the windows. As a Physicist, I thought, “well I should be able to figure that out”. After a little time spent with some books open, and a little more time on the Internet, I figured out it was about 800 watts for any south-facing window! Now that’s a large amount of heat, and we had six windows facing south in our house.
After that realization my mind began to churn through the implications of this revelation. We had at least a 4800 watt heating unit that was free on sunny days and was running all year. But we weren’t always taking advantage of it by opening the blinds on nice sunny winter days. To make matters worse, I realized that during the summer, these large “window-solar-heaters” would be heating the house while we were spending money on air conditioning trying to cool the house!
Now that I had the beginnings of an idea, and some hope that I could do something about my heating and air-conditioning costs, I began spending some serious time thinking about how far I could go towards reducing my utility costs. I did a complete and thorough accounting of just how much energy we were using in the winter months to heat the house, and in the summer months to cool the house. I accounted for every appliance in and around the house that used electricity too.
After accounting for how much we consumed, I realized that not only had our consumption or usage steadily increased, but the cost for electricity in NJ had also increased, and also the costs for natural gas. To add insult to injury, the “fees in the fine print” had also gone up too! So now I was really motivated to do something. But what to do and where to begin?
I knew from basic physics that energy cannot be created or destroyed except in rare instances. So tracking the energy we were paying for was a key place to start. I reviewed our prior 12 months of natural gas bills and electricity bills. I knew I could not do anything about the increase in utility costs for the most part. But I could take a look at our usage from previous years and see how much more energy we were using. After doing that I found that we had had an increase in energy consumption of roughly 20% over a few years. I also analyzed the consumption information, looked at all our appliances both gas and electric, and created a seasonal model of energy use for our home. The seasonal use model of electricity told me that we didn’t use much during the winter, and our biggest energy consumption was natural gas for heating the house.
So the first question I had was then why had our electricity and natural gas consumption increased? My second question was where could I gain some savings in both heat loss during the winter and heat intrusion during the summer months. After that I would tackle the electricity consumption.
Step 1 – where we were losing heat
Since it was already winter, it was relatively easy to simply walk around the house looking for cold air intruding. I found a smorgasbord of places around the house that were quite cold to the touch.
The list of cold areas I found included:
sliding glass doors, with rubber seals that leaked in cold air
the basement door to the garage, which needed better seals
a garage door, with torn rubber seals at the bottom and sides
high-hat lights in upper floor ceilings, which were very cold
a front door, having bottom seals that had cracks in them
hot water pipes, which were not insulated in the basement
a couple of windows, which no longer shut completely
the attic stairs trap door, which had cold air streaming out of it.
the clothes dryer, in particular the vent to the outside which had a missing spring on the trap door outside
the fireplace glass doors, which looked nice, but were clearly cold from air leaks in the flue and the doors themselves
Most of these areas needed better sealing and insulation around them or adjustment and alignment of mating surfaces. The sealing and insulation did not cost all that much, and I left the list of affected areas out so that I could check on them each fall as winter approached. I also spent some time in the attic, seeking out areas that felt “warm” to the touch. These were areas where heat from the rooms below was leaking into the attic. Re-seating the attic insulation in most cases solved the problem, but there were a few areas where further efforts in sealing were required.
Step 2 – letting nature help
Watching the pets during a sunny winter day was also great help. Our two cats would nap in the sun and stay in an area as long as it was warm. I watched them move around the house over the course of the winter’s weekend, and you could see where the sun would warm the floor and which shades needed to be opened during winter days. I also noticed that they would sleep on the darker rugs after the sun had already moved away, indicating they were still warm. This was simple to understand, dark objects heated in the sunlight would retain more heat and re-radiate it back into the house even after the sunshine had moved on to another part of the house. This type of heating is called Passive Solar Heating. So where I could agreement from the rest of the family, a dark rug was used in a few key areas for winter. In home designs, people often place natural stone or slate floors in these areas, which become a large thermal mass to absorb the sun’s rays.
We determined as a family to look at the forecast each day and fully open the blinds on the south facing windows for fall winter and spring, except on the most dreary days.
Step 3 – consume less heat
Since we used the most natural gas in the winter, the two places that burned more of it were the home heating units, and the dryer. We decided to tackle the home heating right away, as our seasonal consumption model indicated that was clearly the largest energy consumption. After some interviewing of all who lived in the house, and using some Voice of the Customer (VOC) techniques, it was determined that the upstairs bedrooms spaces really only needed to be warm when we woke up, and could be left cool throughout most of the day except for weekends. On weekends, the heat could be turned on later in the morning when family members where not generally rushing off to work or school.
We made some adjustments to the setback thermostat programs in the upstairs and downstairs zones. We adjusted the times to heat each zone to fewer hours each workday, and we lowered the temperatures during the non-occupied hours as well. We targeted a 30% reduction in the number of hours the temperature was actually set to the warmer value. We also dropped the non-occupied temperature down to 61 Fahrenheit.
Step 4 – go further with alternative energy
We knew that saving and conserving was only half of the plan to lowering our heating costs. Using less fossil fuel would be nice as a next step. Since wood is plentiful in our area, and the cost per face cord was only $155, we next investigated replacing our fireplace with a wood burning stove. Needless to say, it made perfect sense, as firewood is a renewable resource and it was not going up at the rates that natural gas was projected to increase. Although it’s outside the scope of this article, write to me if you want the details on how this reduced our heating bills by an even greater amount than our conservation efforts!
Next up, the electric bill!
We felt that we had made some real progress with our heating bills, but larger still were the electricity costs, especially during the warmer summer months when the air conditioning units were running most often. We followed the same general approach, first accounting in detail for how much electricity we were consuming over the prior 12 months. Once again we listed how much energy we consumed and determined that over the 4 years we had lived there, that our energy consumption had increased. More disturbing than the consumption increase was the upward trend in electricity rates.
Step 1 – where we were using/wasting electricity
Now with electricity, consumption spots were a little easier to find. We went around the house, and I noted the amperage listing on each large item that was plugged into a wall outlet or wired directly to the house current. To make a fair comparison, I also made note of the frequency of use or the likely average hours “on” in a typical summer month. In engineering terms these usage times are called “duty cycles”. When I was finished, I had a list of the consumption sources to manage or improve that looked like this:
Air conditioning – 100 kwh daily
Well Pump & Filtration – 19 kwh daily
Refrigerator 1 – 7 kwh daily
Refrigerator 2 – 5 kwh daily
Dishwasher – 3.6 kwh daily
Washing Machine – 0.5 kwh daily
Electric Oven –
Microwave Oven –
Hot Tub – 3 kwh daily
Pond Pump – 2 kwh daily
Light Bulbs & fans – 2 kwh daily
These totaled to just over 140 kwh daily during the summer months.
A good source of information to help with these calculations can be found at:
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity
Clearly the air conditioning and well pump were the largest contributors, but opportunities existed in other areas too. Looking at the consumption costs, it seemed that cold air and clean water were two very expensive commodities in our home! So I went around the house identifying once again any places where these two might be wasted.
Step 2 – letting nature help
For all the south facing windows, we found a set of cloth backed horizontal blinds that had a white reflective outer layer facing the window, and a dark inner layer. These were custom and cost about $300. We then agreed as a family to keep them closed throughout the summer months. We also kept the doors closed to the room that had the most south facing windows, as it was the largest room in the house. While it got slightly warmer in that room, we weren’t spending much time there during the day and were not spending additional money cooling it either.
Step 3 – consume less electricity
For the air conditioning, I remembered that the bathrooms were always quite cold in the summer, so we closed down the air vents a bit in those rooms. We also revisited the cooling programs on our setback thermostats from our Voice of the Customer (VOC) work, and made some modifications once again to both the times the house would be cooled and the amount of difference in temperatures allowed when the house was unoccupied during the work/school week. We also noted that the basement was always cool in the summer. So we checked the air ducts for leaks and found a few of those that could be closed up. This was something we had missed in the heating conservation efforts. The knowledge here encouraged us to look elsewhere for leaks, and we found a few more in the ducts up in the attic as well. We also instituted a policy to keep the basement door closed, so that the cold air in the house would not as quickly sink down to the basement. We were targeting at least 5% savings on the AC consumption, but realized about 7%.
We also took a hard look at our needs and realized we did not need the second refrigerator in the basement, which was also much older and less efficient. We saved at least 5 kwh daily in the summer months and all year round by eliminating this refrigerator.
We found that the pond pump was in need of replacement, and we knew the original one was oversized for our pond, so we substituted one with 33% less electricity consumption.
Step 4 – go further with alternative energy
Although it is outside of the scope of this article, we investigated and ultimately installed a large 10kw solar energy array across 3 of our roofs. This was a tremendous undertaking and it is not a simple matter. However, the benefits were enormous, stretching our 25% reduction in electricity consumption through conservation priinciples to over 60% reduction in total electricity consumption ! There were greater savings too, as the unused portion of the electricity generated via the solar power was returned to the grid. The unused solar power generates energy credits in New Jersey, called Solar Renewable Energy Credits or SRECs for short. These SRECs can be sold on the open energy markets for hundreds of dollars each. The SRECS we generate and sell pays for all our other utilities right now. While the market for these will have fluctuations up and down, they are selling for a high price right now.
Summary
With some diligent efforts, we set out to save 10% on our home heating and electricity costs. We saved over 15% in total energy consumption, through conservation efforts, consumption control and a little bit of personal behavior changes in the household. We detailed our consumption of energy in each area, let nature help where possible, and reduced our consumption a fair amount. Our conservation efforts led us to explore alternative energy choices including wind, solar, geo-thermal and wood burning stoves. By investing into alternative energy, specifically in a wood burning stove and a solar array, we live at our home in New Jersey with zero utility costs. And New Jersey has some of the highest utility costs in the United States. If we can do it, so can you!
For newcomers to the energy and utility savings efforts, this article should have helped get you started. At the very least, I hope that I have gotten you motivated to look further into it based on my personal journey into conservation. By saving on your utility costs, you not only put more money in your pocket, you do in fact help the planet and by extension your fellow man (or woman). Over 50% of electricity in the USA is generated by burning coal, a fossil fuel and a limited resource. Most homes in the USA are heated by burning oil or natural gas, both fossil fuels. Remember that burning fossil fuels consumes oxygen, and we need that to breath! Good luck on your journey into conservation and if you need help, please let me know.
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