How much electricity did you use in the past few months?

We are pretty darned low but, things have started to creep up again. We are CFL or tube flourescent every where but two places. The first is a single incandescent bulb in one of the bathrooms and the other is a photo-celled mercury vapor outside. I started going CFL several years ago then had a couple of bursts of replacement activity; I could tell the difference in the bill after the bursts. I have a couple of photo-celled night lights in an effort to reduce the need to turn on lights and then to remember to turn them back off again; one in a bathroom with a light and the others in hallways. A number of the flourescents are left on 7/24 whether we are home or not; and at least with friends and family it does work in that they are never sure if we are home, asleep, or available for company. Still, I think we have gotten complacent about turning lights off when we leave a room; my guess is that electricity rates have climbed enough that if we adjusted this behavior over night at a meter reading time we could notice a difference in the bill.

Wer have one fridge, one small but older freezer, one stove with oven, a mircrowave, a low-end coffee pot, and a crockpot. We have a dish washer but, most of the dishes are done by hand for an energy cost savings. Several years ago now, I had a gas heater installed but found that I used more electricity due to the furnace venting fans and air circulating fans with my gas furnace than I did when we had baseboard heating; ok, we used it sparingly and only heated the bedrooms on demand/right before use. This year I got a couple of additional, oil filled, finned, electric heaters and they have been adequate; not exceptionally warm but adequate. I've noticed that we are using one or another of them more and more often but still, the electgric bill is less than it was this time last year; ok, I've been using costs more so than kW to determine our usage which works adequately for us because our unit costs keep going up.

For a variety of reasons, we started using a the laundry mat several years ago. In general, the bean counters that compare then report the cost differences between in-home versus laundry mat clothes washing and drying say that the costs are comparable. By now, we have clothing groupings that fit in double loads at the laundry mat which is the most cost effective in terms of laundry mat quarter usage. A couple of years ago when beginning to shop for a washer and dryer in terms of cost, features including hot water capability, available accurrate energy usage information with an eye on operational costs, and available accurrate water usage with an eye on operational costs - I came to the realization that I also had a septic tank, drain field, and a lot of vegetaion to consider. My back yard has a nice little ecosystem going on and that the cost of disrupting the septic tank action which seems to be pretty happy without all that washer water led us to decide to continue our laundry mat usage.

In choosing our coffee and crock pot, we decided that we did not need an on-board clock nor automatic turn-on feature. I don't think that either uses electricity when they are turned off; they are pretty simple appliances. But, over the past ten years or so, we have started to accumulate an assortment of electronics, add-ons, and more. Just this Christmas, I added a couple of battery chargers because even though there are no associated film nor processing and limited printing costs with digital cameras, they go through a horrendous number of batteries! These types of things make sense and cents as they are added to the mix and the household circuits. But, I've not particularly re-configured them into the existing surge suppressor systems which have become a warren's nest of traversing wires. At one time, we did get as far as installing a coordinated system for turning off whole systems using surge suppressors but, I'm not sure we all used them as (I) intended. Certainly, this is something we will be addressing as we get better at turning off the lights and heaters.

This year we will also be addressing the older, smaller freezer. I like it and use it, but do we really save money through its use? We are starting to consider its use, placement, and replacement. One of the things that I like are the number of shelves with freezer coils. Many similar freezers with better enegy rating have no shelves with freezer coils which means that their functionablity is less too; I use the freezer to freeze food not just keep frozen food frozen. Of course, this discussion has opened up the subject of just how much would I like to freeze? If we move to putting up more of our own food, and in particular localish grown produce, then we should have a bigger freezer. And, placement becomes more prominent than simply moving it to a more convient location.

How did you do it? That's cheap for two ref. Do you disconnect it?