Big drop in electricity use
My September electric bill arrived online this morning. The meter reading was on the 27th. I’ve come close to cutting this month’s use in half over last month. With a total due of $20.33, I’m liking this more and more. I wonder if the electric company will send someone around to check my meter, one of these days, to make sure it’s working properly.
Under the category of WANT vs NEED, I’ve been drooling over this PowerCost Monitor for the last few months. I know that it would help me cut more electricity use, but, at this point, I don’t think it would benefit enough to pay for itself any time soon.
This summer, one of the electric utilities in Massachusetts (NStar) offered this gadget to its customers for a cool $29.95. My utility (National Grid) has handed out 300 of them for a pilot project. Maybe they’ll offer it up, at a slashed price, to all their customers sometime in the next year. I’d grab one in a second if they did.
That’s a good question, Pablo. Let me think on how to answer it for a while. The simple answer is that, yes, I am living well during this experiment. But I’m not sure it’s that simple and it’s something I don’t believe that I’ve done a very good job of qualifying, quantifying, or explaining.
Posted by Kate on 09/30/07 at 01:15 PM
Kate,
You will like this link. I thought of you the whole time I was reading it.
http://www.news-leader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071001/NEWS01/710010357
What a terrific article, Pablo. A kindred spirit. I want his house!! I want his solar panels!!
Posted by Kate on 10/02/07 at 01:18 PM
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Okay, but I MUST ask, are you living well during this experiment? I have no quarrell with saving energy, and I have no doubt that most of us waste a LOT of energy (and resources). But in your effort to cut back, are you slashing part of your lifestyle and living less well than you care to? I don’t mean that we should live lavishly. I mean more like (and I exaggerate a bit) are you warming your soup over a matchstick rather than use your stove? Are you wearing dirty clothes rather than washing them? Are you reading week old newspapers rather than getting a current one.
I’m being a little funny there, but my point is that I am eager to know if you are hampering life in pursuit of savings? Or have you found that you can live comfortably and have an enriching life and still be able to cut back severely on energy and resource consumption?