Tuesday, September 29, 2009

How To Save Money On Your Electric Bill

I've been on this light bulb switch out kick. We've mostly used incandescent bulbs, but I have been buying and switching out those bulbs, with those fluorescent bulbs. I would say about 60% or more of the bulbs in our house are now those newer bulbs.

In our bathroom, I switched out the 6 regular bulbs with the new ones and went from using 360 watts of energy to under 60 watts with the new bulbs! Man, that's a reduction!

This Saturday, Crystal asked me to clean out the tube to the dryer vent. I usually do that about every year or so, but this time when Ipulled it out to clean it, I noticed some small holes in the tube. Since there was some holes, I went to Home Depot and was going to buy a new tube, but noticed that a new tube, and vent were not that expensive (13 bucks), so I bought a whole new rig.

The old exhaust louver that went to the outside was metal, pointed downward, and had a flap that opened when the dryer came on. The old tube was much longer. The new tube is short and it has a 3 blade louver that opens and directly blows outward, not downward.

Here's what happened- I asked Crystal yesterday if the dryer was working better since the upgrade and she said that the time it took her to dry a load of laundry was cut in half. CUT IN HALF! Wowsa, that's a reduction. Seeing how the average dryer uses probably 5000 watts of power, that means 5000 less watts of usage per load, per week.

Here's the nugget- I didn't set out for a reduction in my electric bill, or dryer usage. I just wanted to make sure that I was doing the right thing. I noticed that there was some things that needed to be replaced, so I replaced them. I noticed we had more tube than we needed, and got a shorter one. In the midst of that, the natural by-product was an unexpected blessing of less power usage, that translated into savings!

Sometimes, when we decide to upgrade something in our lives, or get rid of something that appears to be unneeded that can deliver a great blessing to us.

Is there an area of your life you need to clean up? An area that needs replacing? Do you need to 'clean it out' or 'replace it altogether'. Sometimes its hard to do, but when you do it, you will be blessed by it.

Cleaning things up, and getting rid of things you don't need always translate into a blessing.

Blessings
matt

1 comment:

  1. Yes, and check out www.Freecycle.org - Ellen

    ReplyDelete