With temperatures clearly falling and long sleeves and pants making a reappearance from the back of our wardrobes, this past week marked a turning point for the South. When I turn on the electric heater in my house in the winter, I often observe an almost doubling of my monthly electric cost.
If you are not careful, the cost of electricity might consume a sizable chunk of your monthly budget. Gas and heating oil-using households also don’t fare much better. According to Money magazine, the average home uses more than $320 per month for heating oil and more than $160 for gas.
However, there are strategies to control power prices, reduce your heating expenses, and reduce your electric bill this winter. Here are seven quick and easy methods to keep drafts out of your house in winter while saving money on your electricity bill.
Add Weather Stripping To Your Doors
If a piece of paper can fit between the door’s frame and the door itself or beneath the frame, the space is too large and you are wasting valuable warm air to the outdoors.
Like our parents constantly grumbled about when we were kids, you are effectively attempting to heat the entire neighborhood. Installing door sweeps and weather stripping to stop the draft and keep your warm air inside is one option to address this issue.
Insulate Your Attic
This winter, you may save your power costs by using an attic tent.
The area where you access your attic is one of the main spots where you lose the war against hot air escaping from your house. The drop-down stairs and tiny doors are terrible energy wasters.
Installing an attic tent that snugly fits over the hatch and allows you to zip and unzip it to access your attic when necessary is one of the greatest solutions to reduce your electricity costs and solve the issue.
Free Home Energy Audits
To assist you in determining where some of your heat is fleeing your home and increasing your power bill, several electrical providers offer home energy audits. Some power providers provide the audit online, while others will even visit your home to do a thorough version of it. Many states provide incentives for large home improvements, which can help you avoid paying nearly 75% or more of the cost of the modifications.
Replace Your Most Used Light Bulbs With CFLs
You hear this straightforward advice from frugality gurus all the time. But using compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) to replace just the bulbs in your home’s two or three most frequently used lights can save your electricity costs by $40 per bulb over the length of its lifespan.
CFLs may last up to six times longer than a normal light bulb while using 75% less energy. Despite the price of these bulbs, not every light in your home needs to be changed. How often do you, for instance, turn on the lights in your formal living room? By adding these cutting-edge lights, you may reduce your electricity costs.
Purchase An Programmable Thermostat
Have you ever questioned why you keep your house at a high temperature when you are away from home or at work? If you placed an automated programmable thermostat in your house, you could program it to raise the temperature in the winter just before you arrived home from work and lower it just before you left in the morning. Of course, you can adjust it such that it does the reverse in the summer to reduce your energy costs.
Use devices to keep an eye on your energy usage.
You may locate wasted power with the use of an electricity usage monitor.
Do you know how much energy your computer consumes when it is in standby mode? Have you ever considered the true cost to you when your kids keep the lights on in their rooms while they are away at school?
With tools like the “Kill A Watt” Electricity Consumption Monitor that plugs into your electrical box or even tiny devices that connect directly into your walls and appliances, you can determine the cost of all your energy usage.
Electricity use monitors like this one are available on Amazon for as low as $25. When you are aware of the actual cost of running or leaving anything on, you are less likely to leave it running in the background or while you are gone.
Use cold water to wash your clothes
Your energy use is largely attributed to heating water. You may save more than 40 cents each load by switching from hot to cold water while washing your clothing. You may actually save money on your power bill over the course of a year if you wash as many clothes as my family of four does.
Reduce the temperature of your water heater.
Your annual power cost might be reduced by up to $300 if you use a water heater with the Energy Star rating. Another simple approach to save your power expenditures is to lower the temperature on your water heater. The thermostats on most hot water heaters are set at 140 degrees. The majority of experts advise lowering the temperature of your water heater’s thermostat to 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
Check The Area Around Your Dryer Vent
The only item in the brand-new house my wife and I purchased was a huge hole in the wall where the dryer vent exited the wall and went into the backyard. It was simple to stop the hot air from the house from leaking into the yard with our dryer by wrapping an inexpensive collar over the entrance and the pipe.
Smooth Out Your Monthly Electric Bill
Once an electrical company has built up a twelve-month history of consumption data on you and your family, they often give you the option to smooth out your bill. The fact that each monthly payment will be the same will help you budget your money better even if this won’t save you money per se.
While there are certain months when you will pay more for power than you really use, you will still pay the same amount for electricity throughout the summer and winter, when your use is at its highest. This program most likely exists at your organization, although it could go by a different name. It might be wise to look into this possibility.
