A Single Step — initial comments
In case you missed the comments on my first message, I’d like to point out that Carl made some helpful suggestions. And Josh passed along an idea that, well, left a smile on my face but hmm, perhaps I’ll leave to others to try out and report back on (or not).
Carl points out that sometimes just being aware of your use of electricity helps you economize in easy ways. He recommends a couple of devices to help — a Kill-o-watt meter and a Smart Meter. Â (At first blush, the Smart Meter sounds expensive, but it sounds like it could pay for itself within the first year of use.)
He also suggests using sun and air, rather than a dryer, to finish off the laundry cycle (how about considering that technique for just one load a week to get started?) and an easy way to fully turn off appliances that draw some energy even when turned to “off”.
Finally, he mentions a new web site, GoLoco, which helps people arrange carpools and sensibly split the costs.
Thank you, Carl — these are a lot of great suggestions! Has anyone tried these ideas? And if so, how do they work? Are they easy? hard? worthwhile? not?
on April 25th, 2007 at 1:51 am
The $150 price for a Smart Meter is a bit steep, even though studies suggest that they do pay for themselves within a few years. (Some utilities have set up programs that allow you to pay for the bill with a small (e.g., $5) surcharge to your monthly bill for several years– this is offset by money you save.) Nevertheless, I haven’t bought one yet.
But why pay full price? NSTAR is about to start rolling out a pilot program for their customers to make available $150 meters from BlueLine (http://www.bluelineinnovations.com/powercostmonitor.php) for a cost to NSTAR customers of either $19.95 or $29.95 (cost is being finalized). The program should start within the next few weeks or months. When it does, I’ll post information on how to join the pilot. (I was asked not to for now, until things solidify a bit.) This is a pretty good deal!
Kill-o-watts pay for themselves fairly quickly. I highly recommend one.
Regarding using the dryer less, drying just a portion of a load on a drying rack will cause the dryer to finish a bit faster, and save a bit of energy. Dryers are such large electricity hogs that every bit helps.
on April 25th, 2007 at 2:11 am
Carl — wow. It sounds quite worthwhile to wait for the Smart Meter. Thanks for the preview.
As for dryers, I’m sadly not much of an outdoor line-drying person, but I often use the “partial load on a drying rack” technique. (Just today, I was thinking about buying a larger drying rack for outdoors OR somehow mounting some lines on the back of our rather empty garage.)
We also have a long rod above the laundry machines, and I’ve been taking shirts out when they’re still a little damp to let them finish drying by air. Also, it seems important when using a dryer to remove clothes promptly and not to keep the dryer running after the clothes are dry.
Thanks for your helpful comments.
on April 25th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
We’ve had big success drying our clothes without using our dryer any more.
Sometime last year we decided to try hanging more clothes on indoor drying racks. We were already doing this with a few things such as sweaters and things that are more delicate, so we figured why not do this with some other things to save energy. At first we were skeptical, thinking that this would take too much additional time and the clothes wouldn’t be soft enough like they are from the dryer. We started with certain types of clothes and it wasn’t too bad. Then we tried other types and still it was working fine. It didn’t take long for us to realize that this was possible to do with everything.
Now we’ve been doing this for months and we’re so used to it that it is actually weird to even turn on the dryer. After a load of wash is done, we put anything that normally hangs in our closets right back in our closets and just separate the clothes so they have plenty of air around them to dry and leave the doors open. This saves us a few steps of transferring to the dryer, waiting for that to run and them emptying that. It also provides some extra moisture in the air in the winter months. Other stuff goes on the racks in the laundry area. I’ve even found that if I just think a bit as I’m hanging I can do a rough sort of where on the racks I hang them, so that when picking them up later similar items are already together for putting them away. The dryer certainly doesn’t do that.
We do have a fairly new, energy efficient front loader washing machine which leaves the clothes well on their way to being dry and we have 2 decent sized dryer racks. The clothes did seem a little rough feeling in the beginning, but we were pretty amazed at how quickly the materials that we wear soften up after only a few minutes and we got used to that. As for time spent, I actually think it’s the same and even less time for some items, lik the closet ones. The biggest downfall we’ve seen is if the laundry builds up you can’t just do a huge laundry catch up day, given that there is limited space to dry the clothes. This is actually a blessing in disguise since it forces us to keep up with the laundry and we need that extra encouragment.
Oh…I almost forgot…we are sure that our electric bill has taken a hit because of this!
on April 26th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Andrea — thank you for your report. I’m impressed that you’ve taken this step and I’m extra surprised at how easy it was for you. I also liked your mention of the energy-efficient washer — yet another reason to consider one when we need to replace our 17-year old laundry machines. Thank you!
on May 3rd, 2007 at 9:59 pm
Carl, Liz
Recently I developed a webpage to log my power measurements from my Kill-O-Watt meter. This site is set up to allow others to enter their on this page. Hopefully this will become a major database where people can lookup the power consumption of appliances prior to purchasing.
http://www.busanich.com/modules.php?name=phpnuke_html_mod
If you noticed the URL doesn’t match that is because I eventualy plan on buying the .com solarsite.