Entries Tagged 'Energy efficiency' ↓

Did you do the last Tip of the Week – reducing your heating energy use by installing and properly programming a programmable thermostat?

Many water heaters come preset at 140° F, but for most purposes 120° F is perfectly adequate. Lowering your water heater thermostat to 120°F will reduce the risk of being scalded by water coming out of the tap, as well as reducing your energy costs by 3-5%.

To save your 3-5%, start by turning your water heater down to 120°. If you don’t like it and want hotter showers, or if your household goes through a large amount of hot water over a short period of time and you run out of hot water, turn the water heater up a tiny bit and use it that way for a few days. Continue until it’s at a comfortable temperature.

Setting your water heater temperature
• Go take a look at the temperature knob on your water heater. If your temperature dial has actual numbers, you’ve got it easy – just turn the knob to 120°.
• Unfortunately for most of us, our water heaters don’t have numbers on the temperature dial. We need to look in the owner’s manual to decipher the cryptic symbols on the temperature dial. I keep all my manuals together in a file folder, but the previous owners didn’t leave the manuals for us. Google to the rescue! I just googled my water heater’s brand and model number, and was able to download a pdf of the manual. In case you’re having trouble tracking down your manual, the most common temperature dial configurations are as follows:
• Some dials go from ‘warm’ to ‘hot’, with a ‘▲’ usually indicating 120°.
• Other dials go from ‘warm’ to ‘hot’ with a longer tick mark which usually indicates 130°F, rather than 120°. So helpful. Especially when you only can find this out by looking in your owner’s manual.

My water heater is set at about 122°F, and we don’t have to mix any cold with the hot for showers – it’s perfect, and there’s no chance of scalding.

• Cost: free!
• Time: less than 10 minutes
• Annual Savings: 3-5% off your energy bills
• Payback time: instantaneous

Did you do the last Tip of the Week – reducing your Wii’s energy use by changing one setting?

My programmable thermostat.

I know this is one of the ‘old standard’ tips, but anyone who hasn’t done it yet should seriously consider installing a programmable thermostat, particularly if you live in an area with either high heating or cooling loads. My house had a programmable thermostat when I moved in and I have no doubt that it has saved me money, even though I don’t have prior bills to compare to. As the graph of my natural gas usage shows, the vast majority goes toward heating. Thus, by automatically turning down the heat at night in the winter, I’m saving around 10% off my natural gas bill.

However, to actually save you this much, it has to be programmed properly. It also has to be programmed so that you are still comfortable in your house – if you aren’t, you might end up setting it as if it was a standard thermostat, which would kind of defeat the purpose. The basic idea is to let the house temperature settle at a lower (in winter) or higher (in summer) temperature than you’re comfortable at when you’re out of the house or asleep – i.e. when it won’t bother you. It’s possible to do this with a regular thermostat, but not only do you have to remember to change it, the house temperature won’t be back to where you like it when you first wake up or get home.

In winter, I’ve set my thermostat to start warming the house up again a little while before I wake up (which has the added benefit of making the bathroom floor nice and warm in the morning), and allow the temperature to drop as low as 50° at night starting half an hour before bed. The temperature doesn’t drop that quickly, and as I’m getting in bed it isn’t too warm for all the blankets I’ll need in the middle of the night. Since I work from home, I don’t allow the temperature to drop again during the day, but if everyone in the house works elsewhere you could save even more by doing this. Most thermostats have separate programming at least for weekdays and weekends (some let you set every day separately), and you can always make a temporary temperature change that lasts until the thermostat’s next programmed time to change the temperature setting.

Since I don’t have central air conditioning, I simply switch the thermostat to ‘off’ in the summer. If it’s a really cold day I’ll turn it on manually, but there’s hardly ever need for that. If you have central air a programmable thermostat can save you quite a bit on your summer electricity bill too.

Here’s a fairly good general video on how to program a programmable thermostat. As always, if you can’t figure it out, don’t give up – dig out the manual and read it. If you can’t find the manual, look at your thermostat to find the brand and model number and Google “How to program X thermostat” – you’ll probably find instructions. The 5 minutes it takes to learn how to program your thermostat would save the average American $180 per year!

• Programming your thermostat properly
• Cost: free
• Time: less than 5 minutes
• Annual Savings: 10% off your heating and cooling bills
• Payback time: instantaneous
• Buying, installing and programming a new programmable thermostat
• Cost: about $30 – $150, depending on features
• Time: 15 – 30 minutes installing
• Annual Savings: 10% off your heating and cooling bills
• Payback time: 2 – 10 months, if your current energy use is about average

Did you do the last Tip of the Week – preventing your entertainment center from using electricity while it is ‘off’?

If you’re like us, you don’t need your Wii to be checking it’s mail when you’re not using it (it also checks for news, weather, and posts to the Wii message board). In fact, I find that bright blue light incredibly annoying. I just found out that you can change a single setting and not only stop the annoying blue light, but save 76 kWh per year! At least it’s not a PS3 – now that’s a power hog.

Changing the internet connection setting on your Wii
• From the main ‘Wii Channel’ menu, use the Wii-mote to select the ‘Wii’ button in the bottom left corner.
• From the main Wii Menu and System Settings screen, select the ‘Wii Settings’ option (wrench).

• Use the arrow button on the right of the TV screen to go to ‘Wii System Settings 2′ and select ‘WiiConnect24′ at the bottom.
• If ‘WiiConnect24′ is on, your Wii will connect to the internet and retrieve messages, news, and weather. If ‘Standby Connection’ is also on, your Wii will retrieve this information whether or not your Wii is on. This is what you want to turn off (unless you actually want a blue flashing light demanding you turn on your Wii and look at your mail). Select ‘Standby Connection’ and then ‘Off’. Be sure to press ‘Confirm’ at the bottom of the screen.

Now it’s time to sit back and enjoy the thought that those 5 minutes equated to an ‘hourly wage‘ of $120 tax-free. Unless you’re a CEO of a multinational corporation, that’s a lot better than you make at your job.

• Cost: free
• Time: less than 5 minutes
• Annual Savings: $10 or 76 kWh
• Payback time: instantaneous

Hat tip to Shaun for realizing it was possible to reduce the Wii’s energy usage without powering it on and off all the time.

Earth Hour is tonight, at 8:30pm local time.

On Earth Hour hundreds of millions of people, organizations, corporations and governments around the world will come together to make a bold statement about their concern for climate change by doing something quite simple—turning off their lights for one hour. In the U.S. where we are already feeling the impacts of climate change, Earth Hour sends a clear message that Americans care about this issue and want to turn the lights out on dirty air, dangerous dependency on foreign oil and costly climate change impacts, and make the switch to cleaner air, a strong economic future and a more secure nation.

Participation is easy. By flipping off your lights on March 27th at 8:30 p.m. local time you will be making the switch to a cleaner, more secure nation and prosperous America.
- EarthHour.org

Not sure what to do for a whole hour with no lights? Check out this list of ideas from previous years.

I’m starting a new series of posts, Tip of the Week. Each post will focus on a one-time task that will reduce your energy and/or resource usage in the future.


Our entertainment center: a TV,
receiver, subwoofer, DVD player,
Wii, and old gaming consoles In terms of phantom load (small amounts of energy that are being used even when an appliance is switched off), one of the big usual suspects is the entertainment center, in our case comprising a TV, amp/reciever, subwoofer, DVD player, and many old console gaming systems. I measured their usage recently using a Kill-a-Watt: 17.29 watts total when not in use, which is most of the time for us (the following calculations are based on entertainment center usage of about 2 hours per day). This adds up to 139 kWh per year – just under $19 per year, and 2.7% of our annual electricity usage while they’re not being used.

Although $19 isn’t a lot of money, at a cost of only $21 it’s worth it to buy a Smart Strip for the entertainment center. A Smart Strip is a power strip that automatically shuts off your peripherals when the ‘control’ is turned off. In this case the TV is plugged into the ‘control’ outlet, so everything else shuts down completely (as if the power strip had been switched off) when the TV is turned off. Smart Strips also have a couple ‘always on’ outlets for things that you don’t want to be turning on and off with the control. We have a Wii which isn’t included in the calculation of kWh consumed when the entertainment center is not being used because Shaun doesn’t think it should be powering on and off often – so it is plugged into one of the ‘always on’ outlets.

• Cost: $21.12
• Time: 5 minutes to purchase online, 3 minutes to swap the Smart Strip with the old power strip
• Annual Savings: $18.89 or 139 kWh
• Payback time: 1.1 years

I recently found the Minnesota Energy Challenge website – you sign up and join ‘teams’ for your city, neighborhood, employer, etc. I’m part of three teams: Minneapolis (automatically entered), Home-based business, and Windom Park neighborhood. The website has a big list of actions to choose from, in categories such as “Free,” “Renters,” “Biggest Bang for the Buck,” and “Youth.” You click to say you’ve done an action, and the estimated savings counts towards your total annual CO2 savings.

Some actions are continuous, like turn off the lights or wash in cold water and line dry clothes, while others are one-time: turn down your hot water heater, install a programmable thermostat and get a rebate when you replace inefficient appliances. There’s also some useful information in the description of each action, like links to the Windsource program for purchasing renewable energy credits and some basics of composting. I admit, I found many the actions to be a little basic for my situation, but I’m already doing many of the easy-to-implement energy and CO2 saving actions. However, if you’re just getting started or want to see where you stand compared to the average Minnesotan, this is a great site. And this post counts for the spreading the word action.

Image by Flickr user
“Sage doing the best I can’s” On my walks to the store over the last month or so, I’ve noticed a lot of icicles hanging off house roofs. Not mine, though. Along with those huge masses of icicles was usually a long berm of ice in the gutters a few inches high. I had been wondering, did leaf-clogged gutters contribute to the icicles (my housemates cleaned our gutters in late fall), or was it more likely to be poor ceiling insulation allowing house heat to leak into the attic and melt the snow on the roof faster (we added blown-in attic insulation a year ago)? Or a combination of both?
Diagram of an ice dam Today I ran across a recent post at MN Energy Challenge that answered my question – it’s the lack of insulation. Those things that I described as ‘berms of ice in the gutters’ – those are actually ice dams. I’d heard the term before and knew they were connected with leaky roofs, but never quite realized what an ice dam would look like (kind of like my reading “hors d’oeuvres” and saying “orderves” as a teenager and not connecting them).

No icicles on our house – proof that our attic insulation is effective.