Cut Your Watts

01/08/2017

Electric heaters are a convenient way to stay warm in the home or office in chilly weather. This heater costs about $30 and uses 1500 watts. Be thoughtful about how much you run it, it costs about 25 cents per hour to run, or $2 for an 8 hour day. In a couple of weeks of use, the electricity it uses can cost more than its purchase price!

09/10/2016

It's good to keep an accurate perspective on which things are using more electricity. Then you can prioritize your energy saving efforts. This chart shows a few common items in the home.

04/22/2016

The California Business Alliance for a Green Economy newsletter for Earth Day has a nice profile of Cut Your Watts at the bottom, in addition to links to numerous events, reports, and news articles. If you have a green business in California please join us! http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs143/1103087853936/archive/1124423187548.html

CALIFORNIA'S NATIONAL MONUMENTS MAKE DOLLARS - AND SENSE, STUDY SAYS The national monuments established in California by President Barack Obama benefit the region's bottom line, according to a new study meant to shape an enduring debate. Fresno Bee 04/06/2016 UCLA FORECAST: CALIFORNIA JOB GROWTH T…

03/10/2016

Hourly utility data from SCE can help you understand where your watts are going

02/06/2016

Hourly utility data is a powerful tool to find energy hogs and vampires. Here is an example with Glendale Water and Power.

09/27/2015

It costs about a penny an hour for the electricity to run medium-power devices like an incandescent light bulb, typical stereo, small TV, fan, or laptop computer. https://www.laprogressive.com/cfl-lightbulbs/

CFL lightbulbs

09/26/2015

Don't worry about turning off your computer at night. I received a notice from my utility company's energy efficiency contractor claiming that I would save up to $120 per year by turning off my computer at night. This may have been true with some old computers a decade ago, but I measure around a watt on my computers in sleep mode, which would cost $1 for an entire year. So why would they try to get you to take the effort to restart your computer every day to save only a third of a penny each time?

08/21/2015

Don't worry about unplugging your phone charger every day. For years they have used only about 0.3 watts when not in use, so it only costs you about 30 cents to leave it plugged into the wall for a year. The heavy, fist sized chargers they made decades back could burn a few dollars a year, but they should all be gone by now.

08/03/2015

Appliances typically use only a few cents of electricity per use. Here are some examples, they are a suite of one year old Whirlpool appliances in a one room apartment. Air conditioning is the only appliance that really costs much.
2 cents: clothes washer load
2.5cents: clothes dryer load
3 cents: microwave dinner
7 cents: dishwasher load
3 cents/hour: Heat Pump by FirstCo.com, heating room on high
20 cents/hour: Heat Pump by FirstCo.com, cooling room on high

07/24/2015

Power meters come with instruction manuals, but they are often too general and difficult to follow. These instructions should help you use the meter to tell you the annual cost of running your refrigerator, or any other appliance that plugs in and cycles on and off.

07/13/2015

If you are in the market for a new home appliance, http://www.toptenusa.org/ is a great place to start. It can show just the most efficient models and compare them. One energy hog refrigerator they rated uses $8300 of electricity over its 12 year life, ten times as much as competing models, so it pays to shop! Enervee.com has a huge database of appliances and electronics and has an easy to use efficiency rating system. EnergyStar.gov is the most popular source for energy efficiency ratings, but beware that ratings are within groups of appliances, so a big refrigerator can appear more efficient than a smaller model that actually uses less electricity because they are not compared directly.

07/10/2015

These meters from Floureon and Kill a Watt measure the watts used by a device, and can also total the kilowatt hours so you can tell how much things like refrigerators and washing machines use. They cost about $20 each.