The Four R’s

[ This is a guest post from Larry Halpern, one of the speakers at the Community Solution conference last month. Just for a little background, Larry reduced his year-over-year electricity consumption from 700+ kWh in a month down to 36 kWh. Larry just had his fridge carted away because he's no longer using it. ]

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I said I’d post about some of the electricity conservation methods we’ve been using. To present them at a conference, I codified them with four Rs: Recognize, Remove, Replace, Reduce.

RECOGNIZE: It was using that much?

Identifying what our guzzlers are. Some of them were hard wired and couldn’t be tested with a kill a watt so we just used daily meter reading and process of elimination. The kill a watt tells how much something uses but we also needed to know how much we were using it.

REMOVE: Do we really need it?

If we don’t need something we may leave it in the house but remove it from use. We turned off our central AC after one month when we saw the bill. We turned off our mercury vapor lamp after finding out it was using over 2 kwh per day even in summer. We turned off our frig last winter, last Friday we finally had it hauled away. It’s nice to have the extra space even though our house isn’t tiny. I’ll probably put up shelves. We’re still working out a system for posted notes and bills.

REPLACE: Is there another way to do this?

Substituting for a guzzler with something that does the same thing with less electricity. We got a solar cooker this summer. We just found out about rocket stoves from e4, we’ll try building one in the spring. If we get a wood stove set up for indoor cooking we may be able to totally replace the electric stove and oven. We’ve thought about replacing the food processor but we really don’t use it that much. We recently replaced our CFL reading lamps with an LED lamp which uses less than one watt. We’re still working on our manual clothes washing and drying system to replace electric washing and drying.

REDUCE: Do we need to use it all the time?

Using things selectively instead of habitually. When we got below 5 kwh per day always-ons and phantom loads seemed a lot more significant. We put all the blinking 12 o’clock devices on power strips and unplugged the damp chasers, garage opener, clocks and modems. We still use our vacuum cleaner but sweep what we can with the broom. We write down phone numbers in a notebook, I write more music by hand, but I’ll have to admit I still like using the computer.

I may try to do an “electricity budget” for next next spring and summer. i think we could still cut half of our current usage. Right now it’s going up though, probably below last winter but certainly more than we’ve been. We’ve got an electric blower on our heater and we haven’t gotten our wood stove in yet. Lights are on longer. I’ve read about an overhead LED lamp but haven’t actually seen it.

I’ll do an electricity conservation workshop next week. It should help me see what methods work best for other people. Let me know if any of this is helpful, or have any other ideas.

Thanks!

Larry

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