Save on Electric Bill, Save money on Electricity, Reduce power bill

If you want to save money on your electric bill you have to know some math. Its easy and knowing a few things about how your billed will help you know what to unplug, or put on switches, or timers.

Your utility will send you a bill. Take the KWH they say you used in a month. Lets use 1000 KWH as our practice one. Look at your bill, it will be some amount of dollars. Lets use $150 on practice one.

$150 divided by 1000KWh = 0.15 cents per KWH. This is what you are paying your Electric company per KWH!
Knowing this you can now determine the bill you want to pay! Lets say $50, Your KWH would have to drop to 333 for a $50 dollar bill, thus we need to cut out 650 KWH from our bill, or 2/3 of the usage.

350 KWH will be our goal, in a typical 30 day billion cycle this means we can use about 12 KWH a day!

So we know if we unplug everything and don't turn on our appliances our bill will be about $10 for the line charge. This is the bottom of the scale, as cheap as you can get. Run nothing, Pay $10 a month.

Here is some more insight, Your refrigerator uses about 100 Watts, when its running, It will run about 1/2 of the time in a day. So how much does it cost you to own a refrigerator per month?

100W times 24 hrs times 30 days time 0.5 = 36000 Watts divided by 1000 = 36 KWH
36 KWH times 0.15 = $5.40 a month of your bill is your refrigerator. Now if you have 2 or 3 of them, or a deep freezer, there is about $16 a month of your bill. If it is a old freezer or fridge, it will be double that or $12-$20 a month each.

You have to toss old fridges, they cost you a lot of money per month. Consolidate into one fridge.
Your working to give away your money to the electric company.
I loaded up jugs of water and put them in freezer and refrigerator, 2 in freezer in back, 3 in fridge in back. This cut my run time down to 1/3 of the time from 1/2, thus lowering my refrigeration cost to about $3 a month.

That is a big power sucker, Refrigerators run 24/7/365. If you want to save money, start there.
Next, everything you have plugged in wall is using power right now, except Lamps.
So lamps have a mechanical on off switch, no power when off.
Everything else is costing you money even when off.

So here is how I deal with everything else. Each room has a wall switch that when you enter the room and hit the switch, the power in that room comes on, I plug a power strip into the wall outlet with the switch by the door on wall to operate it. Normal for USA housing. Every electrical item in that room is plugged into the power strip. When someone enters the room they turn on wall switch and entire room powers up! When they leave room, Same, hit switch and entire room powers off. If you need anything 24 hours on, plug it in to a regular outlet that is not on wall switch, such as alarm clocks. When people are not in that room $0 dollars will be wasted.
Buy battery operated clocks so you can let the VCR and dvd players lose time without caring.

Our bedroom has only the alarm clock on 24 hr power, same in 3 other kids rooms. Everything else is power stripped to the wall switch when you enter room. This will cut your bill by 30%.
Its convenient and no one really notices its happening. When they leave the room, they hit the light switch and you save money. A typical bedroom with Tv and other electronics, will use about $6-$10 per room of electricity a month. This will drop it to about $3 each room.

Do same in living room. The living room is costing you about $15 a month, by turning everything off with the wall switch and power strip you can reduce this to about $5. Big tv's are always using power. DVR recorders need to be left plugged into 24 hour power, but dvd and vcr and tvs and stereos do not.
Cable boxes do not need left plugged in unless they control a DVR. They get turned off too otherwise.
Anything you cant put on a wall switch and is not a lamp or clock, use a timer. They work great for things that need to run, but not all day, such as air cleaners and outside lights.

We went from 800 KWH per month when I started doing this to 320 KWH per month as of our last bill.
60% reduction in use.

Wash only FULL loads of laundry in cold water, wasted energy otherwise.
Turn off the dish drying function of your dishwasher cycle, let your dishes dry naturally.
Turn off high heat on dishwasher. Dishes will be clean still.
All light bulbs in entire house need to be CFL lights of less than 15watts per light. This includes bathroom.

Following these tips lets look at the bill now!

line charge $10
3 bedrooms $10
living room $8
kitchen $7
Laundry $10
Basement $5
================
total $50