So now that you have (hopefully) used part one to conduct the audit, part two will help you use the information you have discovered to reduce your electricity consumption and start saving money!
Simple First Changes
As far as reducing your greenhouse gas emissions, the first and biggest thing you can do is to talk to your electricity provider and, where it is possible, change your supply to “green” power, sourced from renewable energy suppliers. This won’t save you much money (in fact it may cost you a bit more) but if reducing your carbon emission is your aim this will be a great first step!
To save money and reduce your carbon footprint with no outlay at all, all you need to do is modify your behaviour a bit – on the way out of a room, turn out the light and when not in use turn off all of your electrical equipment at the wall. When I was a teenager I was a real bugger for leaving the light on in my room, which caused my father to yell at me a lot (he was paying the bills!). Some 20 years later he took great pleasure in making sarcastic comments when I was yelling at my kids to turn out the lights in their rooms! (Don’t you DARE say anything about Karma!)
Then the Bigger Stuff
Anything that heats or cools is going to use larger amounts of electricity –
Heating water – it takes a bit of investment but if your current hot water system is electric, changing to solar will give you the biggest return on investment of just about any other single action you can make. Our experience with solar hot water can be found here. Solar hot water with gas boost is the most efficient.
You can waste a lot of water waiting for the hot water to run hot after you turn on the hot tap and if you have a lot of small hot water requirements even more is wasted each time. For these small jobs heating water in a solar oven or other solar cooker then transferring the hot water to a vacuum flask with a spout (eg. airpot) is a good thing to do. The water will keep hot and be available without needing to keep running the cold water out of the hot tap. In a similar way if you drink lots of hot beverages, boiling a full kettle or jug once, then transferring the boiled water to a vacuum flask will allow you to make hot drinks throughout the day without continually boiling the jug.
Some other ways of reducing the usage of hot water and the energy used to keep it hot inlcudes keeping showers to 3 minutes, washing your hands & clothes in cold water and running your washing machine and dish washer only when full. If you have an electric hot water system and want to reduce your energy usage, turn down the thermostat to 60°C for storage heaters 50°C for instantaneous ones. The stored water needs to be kept at 60°C so bugs don’t grow in it. If you are going away for any length of time you can also turn your thermostat down or turn the water heater completely off, but check your owner’s manual first to ensure doing that won’t cause a problem.
Cooking Range – There are a whole lot of different ways you can reduce the amount of energy to cook your food – the easiest ways are learning to cook with the lid on and using your current cooking gear more efficiently. If you cook with gas, a wok is a good investment and they are cheap and readily available, particularly the traditional one made from sheet mild steel readily available from Asian grocery supply shops. If you are a bit handy, making a stored heat cooker (also called fireless or haybox cookers) will give you a slow cooker that doesn’t need electricity and a making a rocket stove will enable you to reduce your energy spend by cooking your food on twigs gathered for free. There are also solar cookers of varying degrees of complexity that you can build as well; we use our solar oven to bake bread all year around.
Air Conditioner – We generally only use our air conditioner for those REALLY hot western Sydney summer days to prevent Linda becoming a puddle of goop on the floor (and me too). Insulation plays its part but we also use exterior “blinds” to keep the sun off the back and polystyrene inserts in the western windows to block the sun. Not going berserk and running your air conditioner all the time and 20°C above or below the outside temperature will also save you heaps of energy, and cash.
Space heater – We have a couple of wood heaters (slow combustion – one in the lounge, which we can also cook on and one in the bedroom) which we use to burn a percentage of wood which comes from trimmings from out trees, use found waste wood or bought in when we have to. They usually get used on the weekend but during the week we find it easier to use our body heat to heat just our immediate area by using our wearable blankets, in fact it is winter here now and I am wearing mine as I type this!
With space heating and cooling the most important thing is insulate, insulate, insulate! The roof is a good place to start, and if you are up on piers underfloor insulation can be installed by placing batts between the bearers and then stapling chicken wire over the top to keep them in place. Technically this is an easy fix, but somewhat exhausting to carry out, which is why Sons-in-law were invented.
Insulating the walls, particularly on retrofit, is considerably more problematic. The most effective way to insulate you walls if your home is already built is to rip off the gyprock or plasterboard from your outside walls, put the batts in place and then replaster the walls – tiring or expensive, take your pick – which is why we haven’t done it. If you have dark brick like we have an option is to render with a light coloured render to reflect the heat although this presumes you like the look of rendered houses – we don’t.
One way I thought of was to block up the bottom of the outside walls and pour polystyrene beads down between the outer brick wall and the inner plasterboard one. Unfortunately, when I talked to the guys who know this stuff they said I would need to rewire the house first. It seems that the existing wiring in our houses is designed to be in the air so heat can escape and if you insulate them a fire could result. The only way is to upgrade your wiring to a size the is designed to be in an insulated environment first so bang went my “easy fix”.
Even if the walls are insulated there are whacking great holes thought the walls called “windows” that let the heat in our out, depending on what it is that we don’t want to happen. There are a whole stack of retrofit options for windows that range from bloody expensive like replacing all your windows with double glazed down to much more modest retrofit possibilities. Rather than restate them all here, have a look at this article about retrofitting windows to conserve energy.
Refrigeration
In the old days (back BEFORE I was born) evaporating water was used to keep food cool, usually in the form of a Coolgardie safe, but there have been recent developments out of Africa that use one pot inside another, called a pot-in-pot cooler. Details of both are available here.
One of the more innovative ways that I have heard of keeping your food cool (which I admit I haven’t tried) is if you maintain a separate fridge and freezer is to freeze ice bricks or ice cream containers full of water, freeze and place in the top of fridge. This works in a similar way to the old ice chests, where you bought ice and put it in the top of an insulated cupboard and the cold air from the ice flowed down over the food to keep it cold. In the modern version you would need to make sure the ice was sitting in a container to prevent the ice waterlogging everything as it melted; the original ice chests were provided with a drainage system.
If you want to go hard core, it has been said that refrigeration is mostly needed for meat and dairy (although the above mentioned pot-in-pot cooler helps keep the veggies fresher) so you just might be able to turn off your fridge entirely if you went vegan.
Appliances
As mentioned above, the first thing to do is get used to turning off your appliances at the wall when they are not in use, but your energy audit will help you indentify the energy hogs in this regard and they will be the ones to pay most attention to. Turning off the appliances costs nothing to do and can save you lots of energy and money, you just need to keep at it until it becomes a habit.
While I don’t recommend that you go out buy a whole stack of new energy efficient appliances, as things wear out, replace them with the most energy efficient appliance that you can (eg replacing your old, dud CRT TV a smaller LED TV rather than humungous plasma TV) Fortunately the government has made it easy for us by requiring manufacturers to put power consumption labels on the big stuff at least.
Also, instead of buying or replacing electrical gadgets with more electrical gadgets, consider using hand powered gadgets instead. This is especially true in the kitchen where a whisk or hand beater can replace the electrical kind and all sorts of food processing gadgets can be replaced by a knife. Using hand instead of power tools in the garage can also be very satisfying, even if it takes a bit longer.
The thing that has amazed me is the huge amount of stand-alone solar powered stuff coming onto the market - torches, radios, phone chargers, all sorts of stuff. When it comes time to replace an appliance have a look around to see if there is a solar equivalent.
Lighting
Also as mentioned above, getting into the habit of turning off all lights when leaving a room will go a long way to reducing your power consumption due to lighting, and replacing all incandescent & halogen with fluorescent bulbs or LEDs is such an obvious thing to do i won’t even mention it.......oops! There are a few other things you can do, like buying a few solar lamps that you charge up during the day in the sun which you can use at night for effect spot lighting for reading, sewing or whatever. Beeswax candles are good, particularly for mood lighting, but as with any open flame you have to be careful and a few fires have been started around here this winter by unattended candles. It is also possible to make a lamp which burns waste vegetable oil and for much of human history this was one of the only forms of artificial lighting available, but I’d hate to try and read by the light of one.
Where to from here?
OK, for the sake of the argument let’s say that you have read through these two articles and the audit form; where do you go from here?
Well, as an old mate of mine would say, seek to learn. Do the audit, collect your data and work out where the big, expensive items are and where the “low hanging fruit” are also, in other words where you can get some quick wins. Put a plant together that takes into account all that you have found out and what you want to do, you don’t have to write the plan down but I find it helps me if I do. Change your behaviour where that will result in energy and money wins for you, it does require effort and can be difficult to remember at first but keep it up, it is a no cost strategy that can save you substantial amounts of money.
Once the behaviour modification has started pick a bigger, more expensive project that will give equally big returns (like solar hot water) and start saving, once you have enough cash go for it! At the same time pick a smaller, cheaper project like making window quilts, a fireless cooker or pot-in-pot cooler then make it a family project and get making. When you involve the family they will feel part of the energy reduction efforts and you will have lots of fun making stuff with them that can further reduce your energy consumption. What have you got to lose?
