Kill A Watt

I just got my Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor the other day, I am not sure why it took me so long to get one. I am very excited, I cannot wait to start measuring everything in my house. I have started my spreadsheet here. I am looking to revamp our home entertainment system within the next 6 months, my goal is to cut my power usage in half.

Light bulb replacement

Like most people, when our old incandescent lights bulbs would burn out, we would replace them with CFLs (compact fluorescent). CFLs are supposed to use less energy (which they do), not give off as much heat (still pretty hot though) and last a lot longer than incandescent bulbs. My anecdotal evidence shows that they really don't last any longer, I have had to "dispose" of just as many CFLs as incandescents in recent memory. Also with little kids in the house the mercury clean up scares the heck out of me.

So we have made the switch to LED. Which is expensive, but we have been buying them one every two weeks for a while now and using them as needed. The kind that I have been going with are from Home Depot A19 8.6-Watt (40W) LED Light Bulb. I know that some people are saying that broken LEDs are just as bad as broken CFLs, however with everything that I have read, you would have to crush up the LED light bulbs to a fine powder, then eat several light bulbs of powder to feel the ill effects. While that is still a concern, I do not think it is a realistic scenario. Plus its not like eating a broken incandescent is "ok"...

Anyway I had to replace another CFL with an LED today. The one in the shower, probably in the top 5 of most used light bulb in the house. So here is our current break down.

LED - 14 (all are the Home Depot ones)
CFL - 25
fluorescent - 4
incandescent - 11

Monthly Energy Usage

Here is a link to the spreadsheet that I have been using to keep track of our monthly energy usage. I have not been keeping good track of this, however I am going to start doing this so I can show a correlation between the work that we are doing, and our usage/bill.

Ameren Pure Power

We have been using Ameren Pure Power for several months now. The long and the short of it is that Ameren rebuys our power from a Missouri wind farm. If you live in the St. Louis area, I would highly suggest this program. Since almost all of St. Louis' power is generated from coal, Pure Power is an incredibly easy and not terribly expensive way to reduce emissions.