EnergyMiser101

Save Heating Oil With an Electric Radiator

     We just got a 170-gallon heating-oil delivery, and at the $4 a gallon we’re paying in New Jersey the bill came to a whopping $680 dollars! If you heat with oil, you’re sure to feel our pain.

     But what to do? We’ve insulated. We have storm windows. We’ve added weather-stripping. We have a programmable thermostat. We have a fairly new and efficient furnace. Oh, and we keep the thermostat at a chilly 65 degrees during the day. There’s not much left to try to keep us from the agony of a heating bill that may top $2,900 this winter.

     So we’re thinking outside of the box, or, outside of the furnace. The cost of oil has risen much faster than the cost of electricity—so much so that we’re taking a gamble that supplementing our heat with electric radiators will save us money this winter. A quick calculation shows that we might save up to $750, and who wouldn’t want to do that?

How Much Energy Does Your HDTV Use?

A  reader, concerned about a potential rise in her electricity bill, wrote to me the other day with some questions about her new, larger TV and its energy usage. The distractions of snow days and the long Presidents Day weekend delayed my response, but what I found out was interesting. A larger TV screen will cost you more money, but not that much more.

Sandra said that she bought a 32-inch Insignia high definition television that has an Energy Star rating of 150 watts to replace her 5-year-old 20-inch Magnavox Energy Star tube TV. She didn't know the wattage of her old set, but she wondered how much this larger, newer TV would affect her electricity bill.

Beat the Cold With an Electric Radiator

      It got down to 14 degrees in northern New Jersey over the weekend, and the wind was howling through the trees—not a recipe for a toasty warm house when we keep the thermostat at 62 degrees. But upstairs in the spare bedroom where our main computer is located I was snug because of the new oil-filled electric space heater we bought for less than $60 at Home Depot.

      Also, it didn't cost an arm and a leg to use the heater. Used sparingly, the heater cost us about 5.5 cents for each hour it was in use. Used injudiciously, that cost can go much higher!

      I love the winter, but the cold makes it really difficult to work at a keyboard. The relative inactivity makes my body feel like it's an icicle in short order. The choice before me was to keep the whole house at a higher temperature, a waste when our daughter is in school and my husband is at the office, or to seek out a supplemental heat source.

      We did some not-very-scientific research about ways to heat a room. One choice was an electric resistance heater. You turn it on and some heating elements begin to glow similar to the way an electric stove works. I didn't like the idea because it seemed that as soon as you turned the unit off, it stopped generating heat.

What's It Like Living With Geothermal Heat?

   Heat exchanger in garage.

     Now that the heating season has come to a close in the Northeast, I've been eager to get an update from my neighbor who had a geothermal heating/cooling system installed last fall.

     This past week we got together for a walk and a cup of coffee, and, after discussing kids' schoolwork and social lives, our talk turned geothermal. I had a lot of questions, but what it mostly came down to is this: Are you happy with your decision to invest in geothermal energy? The answer was definitely yes, but with a few caveats.

     Just a refresher (see earlier EM story): My neighbors needed to replace their old oil-burning furnace. Rather than invest the $9,000 in a new heater, they decided to make a radical shift to geothermal heat.

     The cost was about $33,000, but a 30 percent government tax credit brought the total closer to $23,000. Remember, for that amount of money they're also getting a complete central air-conditioning system for the summer. That alone would have cost as much as $20,000.

Try a New Front-Loading Washing Machine

      If you need a new washing machine, buy a front loader. It's more money up front, but in the long run you'll be doing the environment, your pocketbook, and your clothes a favor.

     Our fourteen-year-old washing machine was on life support for a while. I'm not sure what finally threw it over the edge. Maybe it was my eleven-year-old daughter's obsession with cleaning every item of clothing she wears, even if she only has it on for fifteen minutes. Maybe it was just old age.

     Anyway, last Tuesday I ended up wringing out a load of bath towels because halfway through the wash cycle our machine took its final breath.

How to Pick the Right Fluorescent Light Color

     A friend of mine told me years ago that she didn't like those new compact fluorescent lamps because they made faces look, well, greenish.

     I have to admit that she was right. Not only that, but the light from the fluorescents was kind of harsh, making our faces look like the Incredible Hulk, just what we all DON'T need, right?

     Since then, things have come a long way in the world of compact fluorescents, and the quality of light is getting better all the time. Still, you might have to go through some trial and error before you find a light that makes you, and the things around you, look the way you want. Here are some helpful hints to make a good choice.

Switch to Compact Fluorescents and Save Money

     There's probably no quicker way to cut your electrical usage than to start replacing your standard incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent lights.

     I was shocked when I counted 45 light bulbs in and around our house and garage. Of those, about  20, do the heavy lifting of providing lighting on a constant basis. The rest, such as basement lights, are turned on only occasionally.

     Assuming those consistently-used lights are left on an average of five hours a day, we'd spend $27 a month to power those bulbs. With fluorescents, we'd shell out only about $6!  See my appliance usage table here.

     But before you run out to the home center to buy a pack of fluorescents, there are lots of things you should know to make a smarter purchasing decision.

How Much Does It Cost to Dry My Clothes?

   Presidents Day weekend was a time for household activities. It's kind of humdrum because last weekend we treated ourselves to seeing The Importance of Being Earnest at the Paper Mill Playhouse, and the weekend before was an even bigger treat of spending two nights at a cozy inn in Vermont to celebrate my birthday.

    So, with the whirring of the clothes dryer crowding out thoughts of Oscar Wilde, and of candle-lit dining rooms in the mountains, I started to settle back to the practical. Just how much, I wondered, does it cost to burn natural gas and churn through electricity to get our family clothes dry.  The quick answer is about 25 cents for a 40-minute load. To see how we figured it out, read on. . . .

How Much Electricity Do Christmas Lights Use?

     As I brought our Christmas lights and ornaments down from the attic today in preparation for decorating the tree, I couldn't help but wonder how much electricity I was going to use on holiday lighting this season.

     Well, unless you're Clark Griswold in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and you have your whole house so heavily festooned with lights that you threaten the power supply of the Chicago metropolitan area, you're not going to spend all that much.

     We took our our handy Kill-a-Watt electricity measuring device and came up with a few calculations for my table of electrical costs that you can use to determine how much you'll be spending this season.

Watts Around the House

     We’ve been working hard to keep our electric bill under control by making sure we turn off the lights when we’re not in a room, or by shutting off the television and other appliances when they’re not needed. But have you ever wondered just what all those electrical gadgets are costing to operate?

     Our curiosity got so great that I gave my husband a handy little device that measures how much electricity an appliance uses and even computes the cost of use over a day, week, month or year. The one I bought is the Kill a Watt by P3 International Corporation.  It’s an oblong grey box that you plug into an electrical outlet. There’s another outlet on its face, and that’s where you plug in the appliance. A readout tells you the voltage, wattage and cost.

Labor Department Confirms Electric Bill Pain

   The pain you felt when you opened your  electric bill this month was substantiated by Bureau of Labor Statistics data, which were released today for the month of June.  This Department of Labor Web site is very thorough, and if you have the patience to wade through it, you can tailor a search of  the average cost of almost anything from housing  to food to health care in your region, or the entire US and you can compare this year  with previous years.                

   As for energy, the rise in cost from May to June for the New York, Northern New Jersey and Long Island region was the largest monthly gain in at least ten years (probably longer, but that's as far back as I did my search). The Department of Labor Statistics data are expressed as consumer price indexes (CPI) and those indexes are measures of the change in the cost of a fixed basket of products from year to year.  

A Tale of Two Light Bulbs--What Does It Cost?

    I got up one night about a month ago and, looking out our bathroom window, I saw that our neighbor directly behind our house had illuminated his entire back yard with two powerful floodlights. Well, I thought, that's odd. Why have these lights on so late?

    We're not living in a high-crime area, and there haven't been any reports of burglaries, so why the lights were on was a mystery. The next morning, I looked out and saw the lights were still on. And that's the way it went for more than a month, two lights on, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

    That got me thinking: What does it cost to leave the lights on? I decided to do a little research.

High Oil Prices Will Boost My Electric Bill, Right?

    The price of crude oil on the futures market jumped to a record over $145 a barrel this week, and that got me thinking about electricity. If the price of oil is going up so dramatically, surely that will affect the price of power. What's going to happen to my electric bill?               
    The answer is yes, your bill is going to go up, but not for the reason you might expect.