For all those who want to know how the challenge ended
Keeping the routine that I have had during the last 2 weeks, and being very detailed with my consumption, I must say first that the most difficult of the whole process was to know that I had all the appliances free to use “as if they called me”, that I have electricity, but not being able to use them, and with this I come to the conclusion that many people who do not have electricity in their homes and have lived like that all their lives, do not know another reality, and get used to not having it, a situation that requires time. Possibly, if we were to run out of electricity unexpectedly, at first it would be very difficult for us, because we were used to a reality with electricity, but my theory is that after a while we would adapt, and living without electricity would become our new reality and we would stop dreaming of another one.
In these two weeks, I have learned a lot, not only about myself, but about the power of the community, about my own energy consumption, and mostly, about being aware of the small changes that can be made to reduce consumption, this is my result:
My initial strategy was to reduce the use of certain appliances, such as microwave, vacuum cleaner, oven, microwave and stop charging the cell phone in the house, but as the days went by I began to realize my dynamics of use with other appliances, and today I can say that I stopped using: oven, microwave, kitchen extractor, the fan in my room, the lamp in my room, the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner.
Last day: Sep 29th
As for the other appliances and electricity consuming elements, I decided to reduce the consumption to half, and this because some of them became very difficult to stop using them like the first ones, others must have electricity all the time, like the refrigerator. These appliances are: The led bulbs in the kitchen, since I tried to cook during the day or when it had just got dark, to consume the minimum of light, living from 2 hours of consumption, to more or less 40 minutes, and this exercise I also did with all the bulbs of the apartment, also taking care to turn off all the bulbs that someone else in the house left on.
Trying to charge the cell phone and the computer outside the house is not at all easy, or cheap, since I had to take the train, get to a place, eat, and find a place with wifi and connectors for charging. Therefore, my strategy was to reduce the consumption of the load from 2 hours — 3 times a week to using it 2 hours but once a week, especially on weekends, also I realized that since my computer is relatively new, your battery lasts longer. A curious fact is that the computer and the cell phone are the electronic elements that I use the most, therefore I could not stop charging my cell phone at home, but I reduced the charge to only 3 times a week, compared to every day before.
In a few words, I learned that you can live well with the basics in terms of appliances, is truly posible go from 33,867 aprox kw/w , to 2,6kw/w, prox, with out the fridge expenditure And the first step is to be aware of the consumption, even in small things, such as leaving the cell phone chargers connected, then selecting the appliances that are considered not necessary to live in order to stop using them without altering the routine, and finally, start to creating a dynamic and routines around the decisions so as not to spend so much electricity, doing the experiment and sharing it with others makes the process less traumatic.
