This Is How We Cut Our Electric Bill In Half

You may remember a while back when we first moved into our condo.  When we moved in, we continued to use our electricity like we did when we were in Seattle (where either rates are much cheaper or we had more money and didn't pay as much attention to our bills...I think it was the latter) and a month later we got a HUGE electric bill which sent me into bill shock.  We immediately took a bunch of steps to lower our electric bill and as you can see from the photo above, we were successful.  Here's how we did it:

• We started tracking our daily electricity usage by reading the meter each day and recording it.
• We used these readings to track what things tended to make the meter speed up (mostly using the dryer and a lot of hot water).
• We changed our habits...a lot.
• Now I wash our clothes in cold water instead of hot so the water heater doesn't have to continuously heat up water.
• I also wash full loads of wash instead of a whole bunch of small loads because there are one or two particular items I want to wash.
• I try to take shorter showers (this works about half the time).
• I only dry clothes for about 30 minutes then let them sit in the dryer over night and the warmth and super low humidity tends to dry them the rest of the way.
• I can't wait until we move and I can dry my clothes outside so we won't have to use the dryer at all!
• Instead of heating the whole house we use a small space heater to heat the one room we are in.
• Now that it is getting warmer here, we only use the air conditioning when absolutely necessary (such as turning it on in the early evening when we get home to cool down the house then shutting it off and opening the doors to allow cooler evening breezes to cool off the house).
• We use ceiling fans...a lot.  They really help to keep the house cool.
• We only turn the light on in the room we are using and are careful to turn off any lights we aren't using.
• We unplug any electrical appliances we aren't using.
• We are gone most of the day (hubby playing poker and me at the library using free internet and free air conditioning).  This means no electrical usage at all while we are gone each day.
• We have very few electrical appliances in our house.  I use my blender quite a bit but for all other cooking I use elbow grease instead of a range of electrical appliances.
• We do use a convection toaster oven quite a bit which saves a lot of electricity over using the regular oven.

That's about all.  We don't really use a lot of electricity anyway as we are only home in the evenings but just by paying more attention we were able to slash our electricity bill in half!