Reduce Your Electric Bill With These Simple Straightforward Tips!

Here are a variety of tips to reduce your electric bill. Remember, nothing will happen unless you take action!

First, the energy hogs: COOLING and HEATING your home.

Insulation is key for avoiding a big energy loss out the window. When there is no one at home the thermostat should be adjusted to take into consideration that the temperature in the home is less crucial to comfort.

Furnace filters have to be clean for maximum efficiency.

Kitchen and bathroom exhaust fans should be turned off, whenever you are finished with them.

Close the fireplace damper tightly to avoid the loss of up to 20% of the air out the chimney every hour.

The water heater is another huge energy waster. Insulating the pipes is a worthwhile investment. There are tank-less water heaters on the market now. What they do is to heat the water "on demand," in other words they provide an unlimited supply of hot water whenever it would be required. There is no holding tank to waste all that energy.

Taking a shower instead of a bath will save about 4-5 gallons of water.

Using a dishwasher for a full load of dishes actually saves another 4-5 gallons of water, compared to washing them by hand.

Fix leaking faucets! A one drip a second loss equals 2,300 gallons a year!

Do the laundry using cold water; it will save a huge amount of electricity. Just use the soap designed for cold-water washing. Do several loads in a row, (for the dryer) because a warm dryer uses less power.

Around the house there are a lot of little things that you can do to reduce your electric bill.

Use a microwave oven instead of a conventional one. They draw less than half the electricity, and cook food in a quarter of the time of regular ovens. If you do use a conventional oven, turn it off 20 minutes before removing the food so that the residual heat will not be wasted, and it will keep cooking even with the oven turned off. Resist the temptation to open the oven door to check on food, because each time you do that 25 percent of the heat is lost each time.

One should replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent ones whenever possible. These are huge energy savers.

Learn to read the meter, because you will see the immediate effect of your saving efforts and it will be a great motivator! Those meters are read from right to left, it seems backwards but that's the way they do it.

Some structural modifications can be done to save power, such a attic insulation, and the color of the roof.

The refrigerator and freezer coils should be cleaned once in a while.

Replace old appliances with efficient power saver types.

There are many ways to reduce your electric bill if you look around your home. In the long run, even small changes and improvements will add up to substantial savings. The entire community will benefit if there is cooperation with the neighbors in this matter.