The Fridge is on Hold
I mentioned a week or so ago that the next culprit I was looking to replace was my fridge. I ran the Kill-A-Watt meter on it over the weekend and it came up with 1.75 kilowatt hours in 24 hours. Extrapolating that out, it's using 638.75 kWh in a year, which is significantly worse than its efficiency rating new. So, yes, I do need to plan for a new fridge.
The fridge is using 53.23 kWhs a month, which is 6.5% of my monthly usage of 815 kWhs.
However, the difference between 638.75 kWhs a year for this one and 415 kWh per year for a new Energy Star-rated one is 223.75 kWhs per year, for 18.65 extra kWhs per month. That's only 2% of the 815 kWhs I've been using per month, so that's not going to help significantly.
At the beginning of the month, we realized the heater was kicking on when the house was comfortably cool. That's the difference between having the air temp in the house be a homogeneous 60 degrees instead of having the spot by the thermostat be 64 degrees and the rest of the house vary based on windows and heat outlets and other environmental things. So we turned the heat off. I'll be getting a utility bill in the next week and I'm really curious to see how much of a difference the heater makes.
4 comments:
Anne, Not sure if you had seen this post on my site, but it may offer you some ideas on normalizing the different temps in your home. It deals primarily with dealing with heat, but the section about using your fan to circulate air applies to both heating and cooling.
P~
P.S. I deleted my own entry because I'm a dork and forgot to add the link.. oops. :)
I'm a big fan of fans p~, ;-) I got one of the Reiker fans for my biggest problem area, I'm just waiting for my handyman's schedule to free up so I have an extra pair of hands to help me hang it.
Anne, Just for reference, the fan I was talking about is the one generally built into a central heating/cooling unit. When the thermostat kicks on the heater or A.C, it runs a fan to circulate the air through the registers. With digital thermostats and some analog ones, you can elect to have the fan run all the time. This uses a bit more electricity, but will keep the actual furnace or A/C from turning on as frequently so overall it will reduce energy usage. It also makes for a much more comfortable home because it will draw the air in from all areas, mix it and redistribute it out the registers thus leveling the temps and helping to remove the hot/cold spots. If you do not have central air then obviously you can't use that feature. Either way, fans are a good thing!
P~
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