Energy Consumption
The first step towards an Xtreme Energy Makeover of your house is to identify energy consumption patterns. A utility bill is your home's "report card", providing valuable information not only on how much you owe the utility company, but on your energy consumption patterns - how much you use in the summer for cooling or in the winter for heating. In addition to looking at these patterns, looking at your bill over a couple years lets you see what is going on with your energy consumption – is your energy increasing or decreasing or staying the same.
Utility Bills
Utility bills can be very complex and confusing with a number of different charges applied and rates varying during different times of the year.
Getting your electric consumption information in a spreadsheet or a graph is a good way to look at your consumption. There are two ways to do this, 1) is to enter the information from your utility bill into a spreadsheet every month, or 2) sign up to view and pay your account electronically and you can view up to two years of past billing history from the utility company’s website and possible download it into a spreadsheet.
Energy Consumption
There are two ways to look at energy consumption information from your utility bills. One is to look at the hard numbers and the other is graphically. Electrical and natural gas consumption graphs provide an immediate visual look at trends in your consumption. The following graphs for the Xtreme Energy Makeover home compare the energy used before the project started in 2006 and after the project was completed in March of 2008. Billing history for 2007 is not used for comparison purposes as it was the period of construction activities and does not provide a view of “normal” energy consumption patterns for this household for that year.
Electrical Consumption
The graph of electrical consumption provides a clear picture of consumption patterns in the Xtreme Energy Makeover home. As one can see the monthly electrical use was lower in 2008 than 2006 and dropped drastically in March when the retrofit was finished.
The following graph shows the breakdown of the utility bill by tiers. As you may or may not know you are charge different rates when your usage amounts increase. This is called a “tiered rate” system. The highest peaks in 2006 correspond to air conditioning usage in the summer when the cost of electricity going over the baseline (black shaded areas) is much higher. In 2006 the Xtreme Energy Makeover home used almost 3,000 kWhs in the top two tiers, which cost an average of $0.25 per kWh, twice the base rate!
As you can see, the post retrofit electrical consumption did not go above the baseline amounts so the cost of electricity was at the lowest rate available.
Natural Gas Consumption
The graph of the natural gas consumption between 2006 and 2008 shows that the Xtreme Energy Makeover home used less natural gas in 2008 as compared to 2006. The monthly natural gas consumption for February shows an increase in consumption. There are a number of reasons that this increase may have happened, one being weather conditions, but often the utility company does not read meters every month but has to bill at some value. As this amount is exactly the same as the billed amount in 2007 for the same month it is likely that this is the cause of the “higher” use for that month.
Energy Costs
The following chart demonstrates the monthly costs for natural gas and electricity at the Xtreme Energy Makeover house. Green is the cost for natural gas and red the cost for electricity. Electricity makes up the greatest cost at this residence. The graph also shows the significant decrease in energy costs in 2008 after the retrofit was finished.
Phantom Loads
Find all the little power transformers you have scattered around the house. At night turn off all your lights, if you see little lights and clocks glowing, those are more phantom loads. You can control them by unplugging them or putting all those transformers and appliances on power strips and turning them off when they aren't used.