You got your electric bill last month and nearly choked on the amount. How can it be so high? You’ve been taking every precaution to try and get the amount of electricity that your family uses to come down. You’ve told everyone to turn off the lights when they leave the room. You set the air conditioner up a little higher. But where is all of this extra cost coming from?
Most people don’t realize how much electricity we use on a daily basis. We think our lights are the source of most of our power consumption, but an incandescent light bulb is actually one of the lowest energy using culprits that you have. They only cost 0.6 cents per hour. We have dozens of items in our homes that use much more. And while some of them are only costing us pennies at a time, others can really accumulate.
Electricity Adds Up
Take your central air conditioner, for instance. It uses more energy than anything else in your house at 15,000 watts per hour. That means that, on average, it is costing you $1.50 for every hour that it runs. You were wise to raise the temperature a bit. The less that it runs the cheaper it is.
Then you have things like your washer and dryer that use about 4,000 watts each. They cost you 40 cents for every hour that they’re on. Your hair dryer costs you 12 cents. Your refrigerator costs 10 cents. And your desktop computer is costing you about 4 cents an hour.
Again, it seems like pennies and nothing for you to take seriously. But if your family is home, they all have their lights on, the air conditioner is humming, and everyone is playing video games or watching TV while you wash and dry a load of laundry…well, it’ll make you think twice about brewing a cup of coffee.
What Can You Do?
The good thing is that there is something that you can do to stop hemorrhaging cash every time you flip on a light switch. You can plug all of your appliances into power strips that you can turn off when they aren’t in use to save on phantom power drains. You can get a smart thermostat to keep your home comfortable and not lose money. The biggest thing that will save you money, of course, will be to switch to a solar energy system.
Going solar will start saving you money on day one! At Aurora Energy, our goal will be to get your energy expense down to zero within a year. If you’re paying $200 or more on electricity then that will be an amazing amount of savings for you.
All you have to do to head in that direction is to take one step. Contact us and make an appointment. One of our friendly solar consultants will analyze your needs and help you determine the route you need to take. Visit our Facebook page to see some of the people just like you that we’ve been able to help over the years. We look forward to hearing from you soon!
