Darren and I just received our latest electricity bill the other day. Thankfully we didn't experience bill shock and our provider said we are using 6% less than the same time last year. Compared to other similar household in our area, we are using far less than a household of one person. That's pretty good considering we have 2 people living here and family that visits a couple of times a week.
Following on from last week, here are another 10 items you can turn off at the power point -
1. Turn off your electric doorbell. How likely are you to have someone knocking at your door ? It's even better if you don't know there's a pesky salesperson is at your door. I only turn our doorbell on when I'm expecting visitors.
2. Turn your electric toothbrushes off when not charging. From memory they only need an hour to recharge.
3. Turn off your electric reclining chairs. That function doesn't need to be available 24 / 7 unless you are sitting in the chair.
4. Turn off your floor lamps, table lamps and bedside lamps when not in use. While they might not have a standby light, it's just good practice to turn things off at the wall when you don't need them.
5. Turn off your toaster oven at the wall to eliminate any standby lights. The reality is, you'll only use it at meal times.
6. Turn off your heated towel rail. Usually towels dry naturally in between uses. If you have a ducted heating vent in your bathroom, just close the door and let the vent do all the work.
7. Turn off your outdoor porch lights / security lights. They are great for night time use if you really need them especially when navigating steps and locks on the doors. We have many neighbours who have their outdoor lights turned on during the day for no reason. It's such a waste of electricity and I'm sure they have no idea they are on.
8. Turn your gaming consoles off at the wall. Those little standby lights don't need to be on 24 / 7 when the family might only use them for an hour or so.
9. Turn your bar fridge / drink fridge / garage fridge off at the wall if they are empty. If you only have a couple of bottles / cans being chilled, perhaps move them to the main fridge.
10. Turn off your robot ( automatic ) vacuum at the wall. You might only use them once or twice a week for an hour yet I've seen many turned on just waiting for someone to need them.
We don't have switches next to our sockets. I would love them, but when I asked about them, shop assistants look at me as if I'm crazy!
ReplyDeleteWe have bought extension cords with switches, we have timer clocks for certain electrical items (e.g. our above ground outdoor pool filter), and we have a few sockets-with-a-switch that we can plug into our fixed socket.
For appliances with clocks or standby lights, I have added switches that plug into an outlet so I only send power to the appliance when needed. I'm also using a motion-activated solar-powered security light, which is semi-bright but not consistently activated. It was very inexpensive plus marked-down, so maybe a different model would be more effective.
ReplyDeleteI was gifted an electric toothbrush, turns out it only needs an hour to charge and lasts a month!
ReplyDelete