When I opened my Epcor bill last month, I nearly fainted. $180??? Are you kidding? We didn't really do anything differently, I certainly didn't have the AC running for the month of September, and I didn't really have the furnace on a lot either.
As I sat there staring at the bill, I do realize that electricity costs fluctuate, but for the most part, I wanted to make sure that what I was doing wasn't causing our bill to rise. I am pretty clueless when it comes to knowing what electricity costs... and even what it all does and how it all works. I had no idea how to know what used more and less electricity, and I didn't even know how to lower our usage!
I found this handy calculator that did all that funny math for me, and was very useful to my limited knowledge self! :) FortisAlberta offers this electricity cost calculator on their website.
After typing in my numbers, I was shocked... I had no idea it cost me about a dollar for every hour that my oven was used. I didn't realize that to let my printer stay on in stand-by mode all day and night, it was about $10 a month. I had no idea that using a small burner on my stove used half the electricity as a large one.
I'm sure some of you are shaking your head right now at my ignorance, but I'm also sure that there some of you who are having a "light bulb moment" (okay, bad joke...) and are also learning the same things I just did.
If I'm to save money on electricity, I need to know what things are most effective in doing that. Obviously things like the furnace fan, some lights, and other odds and ends aren't going to change. But I can use my crock pot instead of my oven, and I can set my dryer to a setting that will leave the clothes dry, but not bone dry. I can limit the amount I use my dishwasher, and make sure that the lights aren't on when they don't need to be.
Here's hoping for a smaller electricity bill next month!!
Do you have any realistic tips on how to save electricity?
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