Who says Smart Meters don't work?

Despite the Florida heat and humidity we received our latest power bill from FPL (Florida Power and Light) our Energy usage dropped once again, I was hoping it might get to in the $70's range and we did! It was actually $79 not bad for 2,000 sq ft under air and considering we had guests in during August ramping up the usage too. I was continually shutting outside doors left open and they probably thought I was miserly or nuts!
Oh I also forgot we work a considerable amount from our Home Office too.

Learning from our eMonitor Smart Meter where our Phantom Power loss was coming from, we kept fine-tuning our energy bleed as I call it, "a lot of crumbs can make a nice size piece of cake" and here's the proof. We weren't being overly frugal either, just using commonsense and its within easy reach of almost anyone with the will to save some money and help the environment at the same time. In these economic times whats not to like? For those who are inclined towards Energy Efficiency, Sustainability or just plain being Green just look at the carbon footprint...


Next on the agenda as we work towards the dry season is more Water Conservation. We've tested out a rain barrel system that we created with a Rain Chain for aesthetics and this season we'll up the ante despite being on a Recycled Water system which magically keeps going up in cost every year... it use to be FREE. Being right beside a lake no water catchment system is needed, but pumps use a fair bit of energy and there will be a fair bit of elbow grease, we'll see...

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.

Department of Energy Joins with Manufacturers, Environmentalists to Announce New Efficiency Standards for Home Refrigerators

Good timing... after reviewing my latest report card off my "e monitor" our Energy Star Fridge is now the second highest user of power and I've just cleaned the coils! Which by-the-way cleaning them does make a difference. The coils are far better off not being wrapped in a fur blanket.
I also made a modification to the main intake of air utilizing reusable air filter material (it doesn't restrict the air flow) just as an experiment to see if kept the coils any cleaner, we'll see..

The article...

August 26, 2011

Today, the Department of Energy issued final energy efficiency standards for home refrigerators and freezers that will improve their efficiency by about 25% by 2014. These new standards, developed through a consensus process with manufacturers, consumer groups, and environmentalists, are expected to deliver more than $200 in electricity bill savings for the typical consumer over the lifetime of the refrigerator. Nationally, consumers are expected to save more than $21 billion on their energy bills through 2043 as a result of the standards announced today.
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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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