What are your New Years’ Resolutions? Watch less TV? Read more? Join (and go to) the gym? Spend more time with family? Eat healthier. How about…save for a big vacation? Reduce your monthly costs by 10%? How many of you have financial goals and resolutions for 2013?
Like you, we have resolutions. We resolve to help our customers reduce monthly utility costs whenever possible. We resolve to make our customers “smart shoppers” when it comes to selecting delivery providers for things like fuel oil and propane, or heat pumps and water heaters. That’s why we have this blog and the consultative approach we use to working with our customers to select the right product or service for their home comfort needs.
But it’s hard to reduce utility costs when you don’t know how much the things you are using are actually costing you! Put another way, you can’t reduce what you can’t measure!
Use this formula, published by the U.S. Department of Energy (https://energy.gov/energysaver/articles/estimating-appliance-and-home-electronic-energy-use) to first estimate an appliance’s energy use:
(Wattage × Hours Used Per Day) ÷ 1000 = Daily Kilowatt-hour (kWh) consumption
1 kilowatt (kW) = 1,000 Watts
Multiply this by the number of days you use the appliance during the year for the annual consumption in kWh per year.
Estimating Annual Cost to Run an Appliance
Multiply the annual consumption in kWh per year (that you calculated above) by your local utility’s rate per kWh consumed to calculate the annual cost to run an appliance.
Example:
Window fan:
(200 Watts × 4 hours/day × 120 days/year) ÷ 1000
= 96 kWh × 11 cents/kWh
= $10.56/year
Other examples can be found on our Energy Saving Tips page on our web site: Energy Saving Tips
A Home Energy Audit can tell you even more about where you are using – and losing – valuable energy resources. Did you know that up to 60% of your annual utility costs are going toward heating and cooling operations? That is a major investment and there may be ways in which you can reduce this annual cost. Sometimes, new equipment that is higher in efficiency than systems currently in place are required. But often, minor changes can help reduce costs allowing for a noticeable change in monthly energy costs. A no-obligation energy audit will help you make smart decisions.
We hope your New Years’ Resolutions are worthwhile and lasting. And if saving for something big happens to be on your list, call H.B. McClure for creative ways to cut costs without cutting comfort.