The WB family cuts thier hydro consumption by half!

Dave and I consider ourselves to be very environmentally conscious. We barely ever use the air conditioning, we hang our laundry to dry. Big C is in cloth diapers and we walk to the grocery store. We were really confused when our hydro bill came two months ago and it was higher than many other people's that we know. We looked back and realised that this has been going on for quite a while. It caused us to take a good hard look at how 4 people were using 1900 Kw hours over 58 days.

We toured the house and we made some changes. These changes resulted in us cutting our consumption by more than half, down to a mere 900 Kw hours in 60 days.

So how did we do it?
*We toured the house and we started to use a power bar to turn off the computer, printer, modem, speakers and monitor all at once. That represents more than 2 Kw hours per day. These things use "phantom power" even while they are turned off
*We put the TV, VCR (yes those still exist), DVD player and cable box on a power bar and we shut them all off every time we are done with them.
*we turned off the de humidifier in the basement. I don't know if this will be sustainable through the winter when the clothes are hanging down there-we'll see.
*we turned off the furnace fan
*we never used the air conditioning (there was one night where we wished that we had used it, we just didn't think of it soon enough)
*we only used the ceiling fan when there was no wind and the windows were open. It helped us to keep the AC by sucking cold air in to the house
*we turned off Monkey's CD player (it used to be on 24 hours per day)
*We borrowed a kill-o-watt meter from the library and took a good account of where we were loosing our power. This also helped us to see which appliances were not taking power (my clock radio and the noise machine seem to run on air alone!)