A Look at Electricity Usage, and How You can Manage it to Save Money
What’s the best way to track your energy usage? What are the big energy users in the average home? What are the most common mistakes people make in trying to save electricity? These are just some of questions we tackled in our latest innovation webinar “Save Energy, Save Money: Harnessing Tech to Lower your Electric Bill.”
You can watch this and other webinars we’ve hosted on demand any time at vermontelectric.coop/innovation-focus In the hour-long session focused on saving energy our experts advise the following:
• Sign up for our online portal SmartHub. Information is power and the ability to track your usage is fundamental to being able to manage it and reduce it.
• Weatherize your home, even with simple weather stripping. A leaky house, no matter how you heat it, can affect energy bills including electricity.
• Reduce hot water use. When doing laundry, if you can wash clothes in cold water, do so. Take showers instead of baths and use low flow shower heads and aerators.
• Replace lights with LED bulbs. There are lots of different types available.
• Buy efficient appliances. Typically, large appliances like refrigerators or washing machines and dryers, will last decades, so investing in an energy efficient model now can pay off over time.
• Minimize electric space heaters. This time of year, you see them for sale in many places, but be aware they can really rack up high usage. • Use plug strips on entertainment devices. In particular home office equipment – copiers or printers – can have pretty high standby losses if they are on all day and overnight. A plug strip that allows you to shut off the power to them can help reduce their load when they are not in use.
• Hang clothes to dry if it’s convenient. Clothes dryers can be big energy users. There’s more in our Innovation Webinar Series. We look at how we use drones to keep our system resilient, what sources of power we plan to buy in the future, and we also offer a look behind the scenes in our control center. You can watch all of these on demand at: vermontelectric.coop/innovation-focus.