How to Minimize Your Energy Use: Electricity

Getting in the habit of monitoring your energy use can play a major role in reducing your utility bill.

The spread of the infamous coronavirus has been keeping the world’s population at home for the past few months. In the US, many of us have been at home for the past 10 weeks, if not longer. While there are many upsides to working from home, a big downside is our growing utility bills.

Living at home all day means we are spending more money on heating and cooling, lighting our homes, charging and powering our appliances, etc. Tasks that used to be done in the office are now being done using our personal resources. During a time of job insecurity, it’s not ideal to be paying higher electricity, gas, and water bills.

But there is a solution! There are simple things that you can do around your apartment and home to decrease your energy usage, thereby decreasing your bills and your carbon emissions. Today, we are going to cover some of the most commonly used utilities, as well as the simplest to cut back on.

Appliances

One of the easiest things you can do to save money and reduce your carbon footprint is unplugging appliances. Believe it or not, even if you are not using your toaster oven, coffee maker, microwave, floor lamp, hairdryer, computer, phone charger, etc. they are still leaching energy by virtue of being plugged in. This form of energy is known as “standby,” “phantom,” or “vampire” electricity. In order to gain these savings, simply unplug appliances when you’re not using them. If this is hard to remember, try plugging these appliances into a central powerstrip. Turning off the power strip when you aren’t using it has the same effect as unplugging!

When it comes to your computer, try shutting your computer down when you are done using it for the night. This is actually better for your computer than leaving it on and charging 24/7. It also means that electricity isn’t being used to charge your computer while you are sleeping. If you want to take these savings a step further, try keeping your phone on energy-saving mode. This will make your phone charge last longer, so you don’t have to charge it as often.

Lighting

Arguably the easiest thing you can do to save money is turn off lights in the rooms you are not using. I’ve been doing this for so long that I find myself not even turning on the lights in the first place. I sit in the east-facing room of my house in the morning, and the west-facing in the afternoon. There is enough natural sunlight this way so that I only turn on the lights after sunset.

Now you may ask, how does turning off a light in my house decrease my carbon emissions? Well, the lights in your home are powered by the electrical grid, which is fed by power plants that are powered by coal, gas, and oil. Each time you turn off a light in your home you are no longer feeding the electrical grid or the power plant, which means less coal is needed.

If only one person turns off the lights, there is a minute difference. However, if everyone turns off their lights, in the rooms they aren’t using, a staggering amount of carbon emissions would be eliminated. Research conducted by Boston University will show you a little more about the impact of what I am talking about.

There are 32,551 students at Boston University. This number does not account for the faculty, ground keepers, dining hall staff etc. In 2009, BU reported that they “consumed 209 million kWh of electricity, enough to power 20,000 homes for one year.” They went on to explain that if “everyone at Boston University turned off one light, for one hour a day, for one year, [they] could save 733,475 kWh per year, the equivalent of removing 97 cars (or 1,161,000 pounds of CO2) from the road for an entire year.”

Now this study was just done within a college campus. A campus that is .004% the size of New York City. Imagine the impact that turning off a light or unplugging an appliance would have on that scale.

Bonus: Next time your lightbulb goes out, try switching to LED light bulbs. They are brighter, last longer, use less energy, and cheaper than the rest. You really can’t go wrong!

So tomorrow when you wake up and remove your phone from its charger pull the charger from the socket so it doesn’t sit, energized, waiting for your phone to be reconnected. When you are done making coffee, try to unplug the coffee maker. When you’re about to switch on a light, take a look at the room. What are you going to use the room for? Is it possible to turn on some of the lights and not all of them? Little decisions like this will add up and reduce your bills and carbon impact.

This blog series was inspired by all the ways in which nature has made a come back while people have been forced to stay at home, and driven by an itch to do something positive and productive while in the midst of a global pandemic.

About the author

Tali Gasko is the Project Coordinator for GRID Alternatives Mid-Atlantic, a renewable energy nonprofit based in Washington, DC. Gasko graduated from the University of Delaware with a B.S. in Agriculture and Natural Resources with a background in Organic Farming, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning. When not working, Gasko tends to her garden, cooks, hikes, and prepares for her NABCEP Associate and PDC.