This Blog will be used to post energy, time, and money savings tips for our family.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
light bulbs
We watched a demo of a regular light bulb and a florescent bulb hooked up to electric meters. The regular bulb's meter was racing around while the florescent was hardly moving. Today we bought new florescent bulbs for the bathroom lights.
Here's some ideas we've had for your consideration, some of which came up during the 19 days without electricity because of that ice storm. -Get rid of cordless phones and go back to cheapie land lines with cords, then the electricity is supplied via the telephone line and you're not charged for it. -Make sure your freezers and fridges are full so that the thermal mass keeps the machine from kicking on as often. Even just freezing water bottles will work. -If you have a deep freeze which is separate from your refridgerator, ask yourself how important it really is. Do the items in there all require electricity to cook? If your electricity went out for several days would you loose hundreds of dollars worth of food? If you're storing up for a potential hardship then a freezer's not really a good strategy anyway. Better to stock dry goods. - If you have a wood stove and you like to drink coffee and/or tea, keep your kettle on top of the stove all day and night. It will slowly humidify the house and be ready for pouring into your french press - which doesn't require electricity either. - If you have a fire place of any kind, buy some cast iron and some extra aluminum foil and start baking and roasting a few things right in the fire. Potatoes are a good thing to start with. I've baked cakes, roasted veggies, baked potatoes, and cook beans right inside the wood stove. It takes much longer, but no electricity is used. - Candles are nice, oil lamps seem to give me a sore throat.
1 comment:
Here's some ideas we've had for your consideration, some of which came up during the 19 days without electricity because of that ice storm.
-Get rid of cordless phones and go back to cheapie land lines with cords, then the electricity is supplied via the telephone line and you're not charged for it.
-Make sure your freezers and fridges are full so that the thermal mass keeps the machine from kicking on as often. Even just freezing water bottles will work.
-If you have a deep freeze which is separate from your refridgerator, ask yourself how important it really is. Do the items in there all require electricity to cook? If your electricity went out for several days would you loose hundreds of dollars worth of food? If you're storing up for a potential hardship then a freezer's not really a good strategy anyway. Better to stock dry goods.
- If you have a wood stove and you like to drink coffee and/or tea, keep your kettle on top of the stove all day and night. It will slowly humidify the house and be ready for pouring into your french press - which doesn't require electricity either.
- If you have a fire place of any kind, buy some cast iron and some extra aluminum foil and start baking and roasting a few things right in the fire. Potatoes are a good thing to start with. I've baked cakes, roasted veggies, baked potatoes, and cook beans right inside the wood stove. It takes much longer, but no electricity is used.
- Candles are nice, oil lamps seem to give me a sore throat.
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