Simple Ways to Save Money on Electricity from The Good Human

We are big fans of following others who promote earth-friendly living.  While not everybody is looking to deconstruct their home, people are looking for ideas on how to "green" their home.  Here is a great story about how one persons simple ideas helped several others save money as well as reduce the amount of their electricity usage from The Good Human....

A few weeks ago I saved a new friend of mine at least $600 a year. (And no, not from telling her to switch to that annoying insurance company!) I was talking to the people who work here in the leasing office of where I live, and we somehow got on the discussion of monthly utility bills. When it came time for me to tell them how much my electric bill was each month, I almost didn’t want to do it because it was a fraction of what theirs was. For the last few months, my average electric bill has been only about $25, which came as a shock them. The woman in the office has a monthly bill of between $120-$150! Then, of course, they were all interested in how I kept my bills so low each month, which is when I let loose with my “$600 in annual savings” sentence:

Everything that is powered by electricity in my house & uses vampire standby power is on power strips, and they all get turned off when not in use.

Well, not everything – the DVR is left plugged in and juiced so it can record TV shows. But other than that, my TV, DVD player, computer, computer monitor, microwave, and coffee maker are all either switched off via a power strip or unplugged entirely when they aren’t being used. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that all my light bulbs are CFL’s, or that I don’t use any electricity-powered clocks, but you get the general idea – and so did she. Amazed at how low my bill is, she said she was going to try an experiment for a few weeks and report back. I stopped in the other day to say hi and heard the results.

She had saved about $50 on her bill over the past 25 days or so compared to all previous months.

She was ecstatic! That’s $600 a year in savings for doing something so easy and uncomplicated that everyone should be doing it, and she didn’t even change every single thing in her house yet. She is going to report back to me once she does and finishes her next complete month with the changes in place.

See, little things do make a difference… and in this case it was only a single sentence.

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