Carbon Footprint 1/3 of the average Florida Home

Let alone the saved energy and cost, our home Carbon Footprint is now almost a 1/3 of the average Florida home.

The recent savings hands-down goes to our "emonitor". It's  ability to inform us how to optimize and make adjustments to our energy usage, then with a little tweaking get some pretty darn good results.
Another factor worth consideration is that when we are ready to go to PV (solar panels) or the thin film variety our overall Square Footage requirement will be considerably lower... hence less cost. Bonus!

For some feedback our home is just under 2,000 sq ft of air conditioned space with a Great Room, lots of sliders and a 19.2 SEER dual scroll A/C (which I highly recommend) with a heat exchanger to capture a fair bit of the heat and put it into our Hot Water. We don't have a Solar Hot Water Heater.

eMonitor and DwellGreen. The savings keep rolling in...

I had the opportunity to review our FPL Electric stats online, now we been using the eMonitor and implementing reductions after finding out which circuits had the most bleed as I would call it.

It's been a learning process but with some trail and error and not exactly a full month, the drop has been pretty substantial and I thought were 'Switched On' (pun intended) as far as energy retrofit goes.

Now its down to some more fine-tuning and some circuit monitoring changes. The Microwave circuit doesn't need anymore monitoring... it hardly counts. The Hot Water heater definitely benefits from the A/C Heat Exchanger which is easily verified when its switched on and doesn't pull any kw. So most of our hot water is almost free at the moment.

Any other suggestions?

Next Generation Lighting

With my eMonitor kw usage measurements in hand its pretty easy to see the difference in energy used between any of my blend LED, Compact Flourescent and dated Incandescent. The sooner LED costs come down the better, its the easy low hanging fruit of energy consumption.

EERE article... Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced nearly $15 million to support eight new research and development projects that will accelerate the development and deployment of high-efficiency solid-state lighting technologies like LEDs and OLEDs. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have the potential to be ten times more energy-efficient than conventional incandescent lighting and can last up to 25 times as long. The projects selected today are located in four states across the country and are focused on advancing core R&D goals, developing new products, and expanding domestic manufacturing capacity to help the U.S. remain competitive in this growing technology market.
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