Figuring out how to save Energy

There might be simple reason why we find it so hard to learn how to save energy – we don't really understand the stuff.

Let's start with basic home energy efficiency. Think of your average regular home as a very leaky bottle. It doesn't matter how long you try to fill it up with water, it’s never going fill up or stay filled. Your average home is that kind of leaky vessel. There are spaces under you doors, your single window panes are so thin they let your heat pass through and warm heated air from inside can just leak right out through little spaces left around the poorly-fitting frames. More importantly, the nice, warm and toasty air you have indoors behaves as all warm gases do – it tries to float upwards, rather like the hot air in a hot air balloon.

What is the highest part of your house? Usually, it's the attic. Make sure that you seal your attic off properly, and you can cut your heating bill by 20%. Make sure that you air-seal everything around your house – every leaky door and window – and you can save a further 20%. Just think about it – why do people struggle so hard to figure out how to save energy? Would you struggle hard to learn how to fill a bottle if you saw that the bottle was leaky? You’d just plug the leaks first!

Lots of people don't understand how electricity units work. But this would be an understanding that could be key to gaining insight into how to save electricity. Look at it this way – you get charged something around 12 cents on average for a kilowatt hour of electricity. What is a kilowatt hour, you ask? Well, it's simple – it's 1000 W of electricity burned for one hour. Perhaps it will be easier to put it in different terms. How about burning a 100 W light bulb for 10 hours?

It all works out to be the same thing. So if you're looking at a small 800 W air-conditioner to help cool things in the summer, you know that since it's 80% of 1000 W, it's going to cost you 80% of 1 kWh to run for an hour. That would be about 10 cents or so. This should help you mentally figure out from time to time how to save energy.

Through both summers and winters, you can save a lot on your energy bills by shutting off rooms that you don't use on a regular basis. If you don't need to live in those rooms, you don’t have to heat or cool them. The smaller the area of the house that you need to make livable, the cheaper it's going to be.

There are all kinds of sneaky little tricks just like this one that you could use. Did you know that 90% of the energy that your washing machine uses, goes to heating the water? That's why they make coldwater detergent. Use that, and your washing machine will suddenly be 90% cheaper to run. And when you do run that washing machine, make sure that you run a full load. A half load wastes energy. And in drying those, put those out in the sun whenever possible. Electric dryers, little heaters that they are, are terribly expensive to run. And here's a little trick to end on – adjust your water heater to heat water as low as you can possibly find acceptable. And then whenever you fill the bathtub or the kitchen sink with hot water, don't just unplug the drain hole when you're done. Let it just stay there for a while until it cools down. It's releasing its warmth into the air in your home. You paid for that heat, didn't you?