Household

Things we have been doing:

• Electrical
  • average consumption for the house: 1022kWh/year 2017-2018.
  • we’ve had 6-solar panels on the roof for about 6-years. This allows us to be net generators for about 5 months a year.
    • This year, we’ll consider if we can add a few more panels.
  • we replaced a very old refrigerator with a smaller fridge (22.5cu.ft.?) over a year ago and it’s helped.
  • we are fairly diligent about turning off lights in empty rooms but need to do better this year.
  • LED lights seem to be a good thing. We have them in most rooms we use frequently.
  • need to reduce on-time of computers for several reasons!
  • we are fortunate we can line-dry clothes almost always
  • we run our dishwasher about once a week.
• Natural gas
  • we need to change things here. Consumption was 231 therms or about the equivalent of 7000 kWh/year, (2017-2018)
  • Water heater
    • while our “conscientious” showering schedule means we don’t use much hot water, the pilot light is certainly on all the time and the heater fires up occasionally.
    • Target for 2019: solar water heating
    • alternate to come online in 2019: on-demand electric water heater to replace gas water heater.
  • Stove
    • pilot lights are on always. For the winter, since we don’t have much house heating, we’ll leave these on to trickle some heat into the front of the house.
    • explore turning off the pilots. On this stove (old), there are some aspects of the oven and broiler pilots which might be tricky to leave off.
    • working on boiling only the water we need.
    • plan: the solar thermal system we are designing will include a pre-heated source of drinkable hot water to use for cooking.
  • House heating
    • we still only have one free-standing gas heater in the house so are fairly minimal here.
      • the heater is off from March through October in most years.
      • We run the heater for maybe 2 hours a day average.
      • trying to dress warmly.
    • plan: use solar water heating system to run a few radiators in the house to help reduce the need to run the gas heater in the col.d months.

 

 

Some standard ways most people can reduce footprint of your household:

• Things you can do today:
  • Turn off lights you are not using
  • Turn heating and cooling off except when absolutely necessary.
    • dress in ways to comfortably tolerate uncomfortable temperatures
  • dry your laundry on clothesline rather than using electric or gas dryer
• Planning ahead
  • If building or modifying a house, deploy high-efficiency and low-impact solutions for heating and cooling
• more coming soon