My efforts at frugal living

[Elron Aven]

49. What I did...

My electric bill runs about $35-$40.

When the gas hot water heater died, I installed a tankless electric. Its impact on the power bill has been negligible. This saved over $11/mo when I fired the gas company. They wanted $11+/mo just to read the meter and send a bill. Now that $11+/mo is gone. The tankless electric unit will have paid for itself this Feb.

The $11+/mo went into buying a lot of electrical parts/wire so I could make the lighting in my crib have much finer granularity. I installed a couple of dozen HALO's all over, and wired them with multiple switches so say 1, 2, or 3 of a group of 3 could be turned on selectively rather than having to turn on all 3 at the same time like most electricians would do in a typical house. If you only need a bit of light, you can only turn on one in a group.

With more fixtures, and finer granularity, you can tune lighting needs to a particular task. I got the HALO's cheap, like $10 for a case of 6 (with trims) when Home Depot was changing product lines and just wanted to blow them out. I bought as many cases as they cad on the floor.

Along with the new lights, each room now has a ceiling fan. On low speed they only draw 9W. I've been 4 years now in south FL without turning on the A/C and I don't really miss it other than for a couple of the hottest weeks in the summer.

A CRT tube TV died (90W) and I replaced it with a small flat panel that only draws 32W. Read the electrical spec panel on the back of TV's, some of them are real heaters and will add a lot to the A/C load in an air conditioned house. Without the A/C on, I noticed the room with the 32W flat panel was staying cooler during the summer. A 50-60W heat load delta is noticeable.

Car is an old 98' 5-speed Jetta TDI, which get in the 50 MPG range.