I got my electric bill today!!

[blakey]

Last month we went through the house with the kill-a-watt and found some energy hogs (printers on standby are terrible!). We replaced most of the light bulbs with CFL's. We replaced the electric dryer with a gas dryer. The electric would run for 90 min and still not dry the towels. We got our electric bill, $62, about half the previous month's. Our KWh/day is down to 17.0, compared to 25.4 last year.

Our propane bill will go up a bit with the gas dryer. We hang dry our clothes as much as we can. We haven't seen the propane truck since Nov. Hopefully prices have gone down since the last fillup.
Dok

Interesting about the printers, I assume they are laser printers? What did you find they are drawing in standby? The reason they are drawing power is to keep the fuser warm (basically a heating element) to reduce the waiting time from the time you click print to the time the page actually comes out. Some of the older laser printers used to take up to a minute to warm up when you clicked print but in todays society that is unacceptable. I assume an inkjet style printer would not draw nearly as much in standby.

 

[Dok]

Interesting about the printers, I assume they are laser printers? What did you find they are drawing in standby? The reason they are drawing power is to keep the fuser warm (basically a heating element) to reduce the waiting time from the time you click print to the time the page actually comes out. Some of the older laser printers used to take up to a minute to warm up when you clicked print but in todays society that is unacceptable. I assume an inkjet style printer would not draw nearly as much in standby.

The Samsung multi-function pulls 30W, the HP 4600 around 50W (seems to vary). Now we turn them off at the power strip until needed. I have two network switches and testing various brands I saw a range of 30W to 55W. The 3Com switches were pulling 55W. HP 30W. Linksys 30W. D-Link 35W. These are 24 port gigabit switches.

One other thing, the pond pumps pull 50W each (there are two). They won't be put back in use until April or May, but this time I'm putting them on timers!
Dok

 

[Moss Man]

Congratulations! There are not many feelings that are better than independence.

Our electric bill runs $45.-$55. dollars a month year round and I'd like to see it even lower than that. Two people, one dog and one cat.