We Deserve a Medal

For energy efficiency. Some time after we agreed to purchase our new house, I asked Rick and Nancy what their typical electricity bill was. I was prepared to hear that it was a little more than Andover. After all, the house was bigger. When Rick told me that they typically spent about $150/month I nearly fell off my chair. In Andover our typical bill was about $75/month. I thought, “hmm, I should have asked these questions before we signed the contract. I can only imagine all the other utility bills, oil, propane, etc.”

Karlo insisted that the only reason that Rick & Nancy’s bill was so high was because they were extremely wasteful when it came to electricity. Every time we visited them they had all kinds of lights on that they weren’t using. They even left some lights on when they traveled down to Virginia for several weeks at a time. I just hoped that Karlo was right.

When we got our first bill from Northeast Utilities I was pleasantly surprised. The bill was only $86. Not bad considering Andover was usually in the 70’s and Rick & Nancy’s was over $150. But we just got our next bill and to my shock, it was only $66. Holy smokes. We should get an energy efficiency award for that. I can’t believe it. Karlo noted that the first month we moved in, he was running power tools constantly. His miter saw ran just about every night for a few weeks.

Karlo likes to blame our big fish tank in Andover for sucking too much energy, but I’m not buying that. I was trying to imagine how we can be doing so well here in Eastford, especially since we had high efficiency light bulbs in just about every socket in Andover, compared to the dozens upon dozens of halogens all over our current house. I am attributing our low bill to the following:

• High efficiency drier. I used to run our old drier 2.5 hours for every load. Now the clothes are dry in less than 50 minutes every time. This must help a lot.
• No more cooking with electricity. Now we cook with propane so that must be a big savings too.
• We have a much smaller and more efficient fish tank.
• I no longer work from home on Mondays running my desktop and laptop all day long.
• And we are anal about only having lights on when we are not using them.

Let me also mention that in Eastford our hot water heater is run by electricity (in Andover it was not) and we have two ceiling fans that run 24/7 non-stop. But even with these two additional draws, we are still beating our old bill.