My usual commute to work is like eight miles. I've considered purchasing an old leaf just to use to drive to work and back. The fact that they only get 40-100 mi round trip is negligible to the fact that I would save a decent amount of money on gas.
The trade-off turned out to be that my insurance rates and the other maintenance would more than absorb the cost savings from any gas so unless I also got rid of my primary vehicle which I'm not likely to do it would be a bad move for me.
Costco has smart switches from feit electric, it's a fairly simple install that should only take you a few hours to do six or seven of them.
Then anytime you want you can turn off all of those lights from your phone.
You can also upgrade all of your bulbs to led.
If you're paying roughly the same as I am, every watt you cut annually saves you about a dollar.
I will also note that the water heater I had was 20 years old at the time and well due for a replacement, making some of this 1600 expenditure an actual necessity and not just a thriftiness move.
Take that into consideration when you are taking my advice.
If you have an area with sufficient sunlight it might be worth looking into a solar system.
With all of the tax breaks and the supply surplus if you have the space it could be very economical to add a four or five kilowatt solar set up and that would dramatically reduce your power bills.
You could even splurge a little and buy a grid tied inverter system That's rated for 10 KW with plans to expand later as more money comes in.
Sounds like you should do an energy audit.
It'll cost you $80 to 100 bucks but that money could be well worth it if it could identify where your money is going for your electricity usage.
It could be that you have a massively inefficient HVAC system, which would suck as that's a very expensive repair especially if you go hybrid, but it could also be something as simple as not having sufficient insulation which depending on the layout of your home could be fixed with a friendly visit from a local foaming company, or adding some window treatments and some appropriately placed shade trees.
If it does turn out to be your HVAC, you could also look into a ductless mini split as an add-on to cool the hottest most commonly used rooms in the house. Those can be installed DIY or mostly DIY and if you have a single problem room making that one addition could result in a dramatic decrease in your electricity bills.
Any of you who are paying more than 20 cents a kilowatt hour, especially if you live in a warmer area of the country, are doing yourselves a grave disservice by not buying and installing a hybrid water heater.
They are fairly spendy, oftentimes costing $1,600 or more just for the water heater and then another thousand or two to have it installed, but heating your water is one of the largest most inescapable bills that you have and a hybrid water heater does double duty by taking the heat out of your air that you are paying to condition and putting it into your water that you were paying to heat, saving money on both at the same time by being more efficient.
If you encounter a scenario where you have $2,500 to spare on a project that will decrease your monthly bills and pay for itself, that's the one to pick, especially if you are a diy'er and are not afraid of doing a little bit of PEX work.
My electricity cost me 13.2 cents a kilowatt hour and installing an 80 gallon hybrid water heater to replace the 55 gallon that I had took $20 a month off of my power bill.
I did it myself with a little bit of help from a friend and it took me roughly an entire Saturday.
Total cost out the door was about $1,600 because I got a $500 credit from my power company to get it installed, and the water heater cost $1,600, the parts and pieces I needed cost me another $250, and I slipped my friend 250 bucks for helping out.
At an average of $20 a month power saved that water heater will pay for itself in a little under 7 years, which is a good while yes, but if you're paying 50 cents a kilowatt hour it would pay for itself in under 2 years, and if you live in a warmer climate than Washington State the extra air conditioning it provides free of charge will further decrease your energy bills especially in the summer.
Which is fair. Fedora never called itself red hat. CentOS never called itself red hat.
Suse is a pretty good company and deserves the right to their intellectual property and trademarks. OpenSuse shouldn't make a big deal out of simply changing their name.
They could rename themselves to OpenSusame and keep rolling without any issues whatsoever.
I'm paying $0.12/kwh base rate but then there's a 10% additional fee added on to support solar in my area so 13.2.
From late March to early October my monthly electricity bill is something like $89, from late October until early March my monthly bill is like $129 thanks to heating expenses.
2600 ft home in Washington State.
Is it weird that I don't want to pay for any streaming media, I don't have a cable package, but if some reasonable system were created such as that I could have access to digital copies of media for a flat monthly rate I would pay it?
Like if someone would come and just say you pay $80 a month and you can watch listen to or read anything you can find and save them all locally for future reuse, no problems, I would probably pony up.
Got my first real concussion on one of those things. All I remember is that one minute I was flying off of it and the next minute I was at home and I had been there for several hours.
How is your insulation between your ceiling and the roof?
A radiant barrier helps but it's not going to be a match for fully functioning r22 batting or anything.
And you might want to consider replanting shade trees now that the old ones have been removed. Once it's the same height as your house it puts out as much equivalent cooling as a window air conditioner, and during the summer that's money in your bank.
And honestly, since you live in Texas and you're paying $285 a month for electricity, looking into some sort of solar might be well worth it.
If you have a larger property like my dad did down near Austin, you could probably do a ground mounted solar install and save a lot of money on the installation which is where with current rates the majority of the costs go to installing solar.