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How’s it going everybody this is beat the bush previously i talked about my gas and electric bill being roughly about $55 a month on average now in the summer months it’s likely a lot less than this but in the winter months is probably a little bit high so this is the average over the whole year first of all when i first move in i did an energy audit of every
Single item in the house everything that consumes the electricity after i did something like that i was a little bit crazy back then not that i’m not that crazy right now but right now i backed off a little bit because before i was able to get my energy usage down to close to like $25 a month in the summer month these days it’s about 3540 dollars a month instead so
I backed off a little bit and i added more appliances that improves my quality of life such as security cameras things that are always on all the time like a computer backup and things like that now a long time ago i used to do some firmware programming for a portable music device when you have a microprocessor you have various stages of low power modes when you’re
On full-blast yes you can do a lot of computation but this is not the mode at which you want to reside in most of time when you’re programming a chip for the mobile device you want to be in the lowest state and yet still be able to wake up and do the things that you want it to do you would often hear things like oh that processor is going to wake up for like couple
Microseconds so it’s like one one thousandth of the duty cycle and then it’ll do something very intensive and then it’ll come back down into a sleep mode this is kind of what you need to think about when you’re operating your home and trying to minimize the power usage in your home so to draw an equivalent the slowest state power it’s kind of like vampire power
When you’re not even at home all the devices that are connected in your home that’s drawing vampire power it’s sucking this down so the lower that you get your vampire power the better because even though it’s very small like let’s say one watt or point one watt it’s still consuming this all throughout the year 24/7 365 days a year when you add this up it adds up to
Be a lot now homes in california have a thing called a smart meter where you can just walk outside and look at the meter and you can see how many watts your home is currently consuming you just go look at it and then it’ll cycle through and then they’ll show you how many watts any kilowatt-hour that it’s currently consuming now if you do not have something like
This you can just buy something like this called a kilowatt and just plug it into your sockets everywhere and just plug whatever your devices that you have into this thing and it will show you how many watts that it’s consuming and standby or when it’s operating now let me just go over really quick what you should do with your light bulbs most of time if you have
A lot of them and somehow let’s say led light bulbs are free sure replace all of them but led light bulbs are not free and sometimes the special light bulbs are very very expensive so because the led light bulb is gonna cost a finite amount roughly the best thing you can do is any bulb that you’re using more than one hour a day go ahead and replace it with an led
Light bulb if it is not just leave it as a cfl compact fluorescent light bulb now let’s say you still have a whole bunch of incandescent light bulbs everywhere maybe suddenly someone tells you oh you should upgrade to led you’re gonna save a lot of electricity the thing is if you use that light bulb for let’s say 10 minutes let’s say it’s a porch lamp that you just
Turn on for 10 minutes a whole week then it won’t really matter you can just use that incandescent light bulb until it breaks and then later on then you replace it with something lower energy the point here is for things that are really really low duty cycle it doesn’t not really matter because it’s consuming so little electricity anyway now there’s also a point of
An incandescent light bulb acting like a heater if suddenly you go oh i’m gonna save a lot of electricity and replace all your incandescent light bulbs with led suddenly it’s giving off a lot less heat suddenly you have to turn on your heater all that much more longer now efficiency wise gas is likely cheaper to heat a room then using electricity so if you’re in a
Cold climate area you may not have as good as an incentive to replace those incandescent light bulbs with cfls or leds now if you’re in a really hot place you might want to replace those incandescent light bulbs with cfls or leds and you might find that you’re using the ac a lot less okay so that’s the light bulbs for you the first thing you should do to do your own
Energy audit is basically unplug everything this is exactly what i did unplug everything and make sure that your smart meter is reading zero make sure you know where every scene drop of electricity is coming out of your socket now when i did this i was a little puzzled because i unplugged everything i could think of and when i went outside till the smart meter i’m
Like what how come they’re still like 15 watts it turns out it could be your stove or it could be your refrigerator that you forgot to unplug momentarily now you should not unplug your refrigerator for too long it could also be a 24 volt transformer that’s permanently wired into your wiring that powers your doorbell now if you searched high and low and you still
Cannot find anything maybe someone is tapping off your of your electricity if it’s on the order of like hundred watts a kilowatt or something then you’ll know something is really really wrong now step two you start to plug every single thing in at a time you look at what’s most essential and then you plug those in and see how much power that it consumes if you have
One of these kilowatt hours it’s a great time to plug in all these things and measure the vampire power when i did my energy audit i found a few surprising things i want to share with you so that you don’t have to do this yourself one of the things that consumed a lot of electricity to my surprise was an alarm clock one of those things that sits by your nightstand
It just turns on the lcd and probably they do not have energy saving in mind when they built those things and it consumed something like 7 to 10 watts just sitting there so it’s like a tiny little light bulb that’s always on 24/7 another big consumer is landline cordless phones when you have a cordless phone just sitting there and you have a little wall wart
Those transformer things that are really heavy it’s always consuming some sort of power trying to charge this cordless phone and i found that it’s about 7 to 10 watts also if you have an infrared camera then you can go around and check what is warm or you can just go around and touch everything see what is warm anything that is warm it’s basically like a little
Mini heater and it’s acting like a tiny little light bulb and it’s warming it and it cost energy to warm these things another example is nightlight sometimes even though when it’s not at night and the light is not on sometimes it might consume a lot more power than you think so you might want to plug in one of those and check how much energy it actually consumes
Another one is those plug-in air fresheners those things consume a couple of watts in order to heat the fragrance so that you know it would evaporate anything that does not have a mechanical switch for you to turn things off for example your tv does not have a mechanical switch it just have a soft button those usually consume couple of watts of power a microwave
These days usually do not have a mechanical switch as well now mobile devices that i’ve noticed are generally pretty good for example kindles iphones samsung’s you know all those things even with the charger adapter plugged in it does not consume all that much although if you really really want to save if you’re not charging it sure you can unplug it but i found
That it’s kind of a hassle when you have to unplug it every single day now what is the strategy here i’m not saying oh just because it does not have a mechanical switch go and unplug everything because it’s gonna be a huge hassle for example for some time or a microwave i did unplug it i’m like this is kind of getting ridiculous you know every single time i want
To use it i have to plug it in sometimes when i try to use it it doesn’t work because i forgot to plug it in so the strategy here is if you use it every day or every other day or maybe even every three days you should just leave it in it’s those things that you do not use for more than three days or so that you should actually unplug so that it does not consume
As much vampire power now other ways that i’ve been experimenting on saving energy is possibly instead of cooking some meat that takes maybe about two and a half hours to cook i might get a pressure cooker although i do not have one of those yet an alternative to a pressure cooker of course is a thermal cooker you just heat things up to boiling and then you stick
It into this thermal cooker and it’ll retain the heat and it’ll just kind of sit there and cook itself rather than lose heat whenever you lose heat you’re using electricity of course and you’re just gonna heat up the whole house when you cook something for a really long time if you do not have any of those of course you can just cook something and just turn off
The heat and leave it on the stove because it’s gonna be really hot still and generally i find that you can cook something so that it softens up this sort of uses a residual heat that’s in the stove itself and in the pan and it just kind of keeps it warm just enough it doesn’t need to have a thermal insulation just leave it on there it’s gonna cook the rest of the
Way i hope you enjoyed these energy-saving tips i sort of just stumbled on these just by trial and error of course don’t forget to give me a like on this video comment down below let me know if you’re gonna try some of these tips out if you’re interested in supporting my channel check out my audible link down in the video description below where you can get a free
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Transcribed from video
How to Lower Your Gas and Electric Bill By BeatTheBush
