Energy Saving
I have spent the last few years trying to reduce the energy consumption in our house. It was pretty easy to do, when we moved in virtually every light in the house was a spotlight. Gradually I have gone round converting them all to CFL type fittings and bulbs. We started off with:
- Living room 150 Watts – Now 33 Watts
- Hall down and up 120 Watts – now 22 Watts
- Kitchen 160 Watts – now 44 Watts
- Dining Room 60 Watts – now 11 watts
- Conservatory 100 Watts – Well, still 100 Watts as using dimmer and restricted bulb space
- All bedrooms 3 x 60 watts – now 2 x 11 watts 1 x 15 watts daylight bulb
- Bathroom 4 x 25 watts – now 1 x 25 Watt daylight bulb
- Outside lights 250 Watts – now 22 Watts
Was 1130 Watts – now 294 Watts
I used to have a desktop computer that drank an unhealthy 400 – 500 watts of power on load. I sold it an bought a laptop that uses a maximum of 75 watts at full load. Unfortunately I now have to run a machine as a server full time at home. I bought a Mac Mini which is typically only using about 18 Watts on idle and 24 watts under load. I also set it to shut down between the hours of o2:00 and 04:00 to cut down on consumption.
We have a small garden so rather than use the flymo lawn mower we have a push mower now which uses nothing at all!
What else? Well we now run a dishwasher and washing machine after midnight – whilst it doesn’t save our consumption it does cost us less 
I would love to start using solar for electricity but I think the trees round the garden would limit the amount of sun our south facing roof gets. Let’s face it it is a labour of love as a typical 3 bed semi will cost a good £8000 to kit out… We did switch our tarrif to Npower Juice which is 100% renewable.
