posted October 31, 2001 12:14 AM
Tips on energy efficiency (electrical) for this winter.. Howdy... just thought I would share some tips on how to cut some of yer electrical and heating costs this winter...
3 years ago I rewired my entire house... I changed almost every light fixture to 12volt MR16... Everything else in the house is now run off of timers. I have timed the exterior lighting with photocells which run the lights at 50% brightness until a motion sensor activates them to full. They turn themselves off automatically 6 hours after dark.
To save yourself money on heating at night, try this: get an electric blanket and put it on a timer so that it turns itself on about 1 hour before you get into your bed, and then off about 2 hours later... this warms your bed til you fall asleep... then shuts off when you dont need it (hey! yer asleep!)
... buy yourself a digital programmable thermostat for your furnace. This is a great investment. You can time it to coincide with your blanket turning on and for when you wake up etc...
A note regarding the sensors and also interior lighting. Installing dimmer switches can be a great benefit to your electric bill, not to mention the appearance of your house..... decreasing the voltage only a few percent in an incandescent light logarithmically increases it's lifespan.... Dont believe everything you read about changing to fluorescent lighting. You can achieve far greater savings by carefully choosing your incandescent lighting and judiciously dimming it here and there...
If you go to home depot you can cash in on some of their security light fixtures which have this dimming capability built in... provided you carefully check the maximum wattage the motion sensing switch can handle, you can run several outdoor lights off of one super-fancy motion/dimming equipped light fixture.... this means you dont have to buy more than 2 of these control units for the average house.
And just to let you all know how well this werks.... comparing our electric bills to the previous owners: they had the house when power was cheap.... it has since hugely increased in cost... their bill was $125 a month for electricity. Our current bill with full on computers and tons of stuff running (fish tanks, etc etc) is only $40 a month.
posted October 31, 2001 10:14 AM
now if only we could connect some sort of digital regulating device to swft's dogs to limit their heat output in the wee-hours...
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