Me electric bill is “teh suck”

I was ripping up my floor when it happened. I, for one reason or another, bent down at the now bare concrete wall, pulled the pile of wood pieces from the previous flooring and reached under the drywall, the edge of which was now exposed.

I was shocked.

There was nothing there. Not a stitch of insulation. Just drywall glued to cinder-bloc. Not even a frame. Nothing. I almost choked. “What kind of low rent building did I buy into?!?” and that’s what started this project.

First step, rip the drywall out, fill the HOLES in the cinderblock (Let’s put it this way, I could see sunlight coming through the wall), frame everything, then spray foamed the hell out of it. That was a very quick way to burn through a grand in materials, but it cut 1/3rd off my electric bill from last year, where my biggest bill was $1200. I shit you not. For a one bedroom apartment. But I still don’t understand WHY it was still sitting at $300 a month for a 1 bedroom apartment, which, btw, I only use one room of.

This building has HVAC units. If you’ve ever had the displeasure of owning one, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Essentially HVAC stands for “Heater/Ventilation/Air Conditioner” which is an acronym which describes exactly the things it’s really really shitty at. For heat, these things are essentially a heater coil and a fan that blows hot air up at the ceiling. Very useful when you want to heat the air over your head. They don’t come with thermostats, so essentially if you want to adjust the temperature, you have to turn the knob. More blue or more red. Not “71 degrees fahrenheit”. And the way they work IN the apartment is basically there’s a giant hole cut in the side of the building directly into your apartment where they push these things in with a really shoddy seal.

Even better.

So, back to being green.

I stopped using my HVAC units. All three. And I sealed the hole between the exterior of the building, and the HVAC by putting fiber board insulation, and then adding pink insulation all around the HVAC and then stuffed it tight by any means necessary. As a replacement, I bought a Vornado heater/fan unit. This thing is neat. It’s sort of a space heater, looks like a fan, doesn’t get hot to the touch and has this phenomenal futuristic technology called a “thermostat”, which, unlike the HVAC don’t require you to dial “more red or more blue”.

This thermostat technology is going to be HUGE! You can actually just set this thing at a temperature… say… 71 degrees fahrenheit, and it’ll maintain that room temperature. It’s saved me hundreds this winter. Fantastic.

But my electric bill was STILL 300 bucks.

Damn it!

So I took this green tech thing even more seriously. I went Belkin power conservation crazy. First I bought a Belkin Conserve switch. It’s essentially a power strip with a remote that you can completely power off all the things that are vampire sucking power when still powered off. Examples being the surround sound processor, floor lamp, the subwoofer, the Xbox, the TV and one of my switches.

While I was at it I purchased a Belkin Conserve Insight unit. This puppy plugs into the wall, then the device in question plugs into that. And what it gives you is this really cool little display of how much power that device or devices plugged into it consumes, as well as what it costs on a monthly/yearly basis. And so I’ve gone around the house trying to identify  wtf is consuming over $300 in electricity. I’ve found that the Vornado heater uses between $75 and 100$ per month. I also found that my computer only costs me about $20.00 a month, and that was before I configured my computer to sleep at 1am each night and come back at 7am. No need to be online at that time. I’m not running SETI at home.

On the same Belkin train, I purchased the Belkin Conserve Socket Energy-Saving Outlet. Plug it into the wall. Plug a device into it. Then set your time at a half hour, three hours or six hours. When you need to use it, press the button. So what’s the use case? I set one at 30 minutes, and into that I plugged in my kitchen appliances on a power strip. When I need to use the microwave, or anything else plugged into that little nugget, it’s as simple as pushing a button and it stays on for 30 minutes, then automatically powers off. When I want to power my cordless drill, dremel, etc. I plug them in and let them charge for 6 hours. No need to leave it charging forever.

Finally, I bought a boat load of LED spotlight (G10) bulbs from various vendors. They consume between three and four watts per bulb. In my bathroom alone I have six lights. So, consider this, six lights in the bathroom times 35 watts per bulb is 210 watts being used. With the LED bulbs I’m now using 18 watts. That’s a MASSIVE decrease in power consumption! And I did these all through the house! They are dimmable, they use less power than the previous bulbs and lastly, they last 25 years.

I’ll get my power bill at the end of the month. Thus far I’m still scratching my head as my Belkin Insight isn’t telling me who the big culprit is, however, I’m hoping to find the sneaky bastard sucking up all my power, and with it, banish my electric bill down to 1/3rd of its current amount.

I’ll keep you updated.

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