For those who haven’t read my old posts about Project Get Off the Grid, here’s a quick summary. During each Duke Energy billing period, I’ll be making specific changes in my everyday behavior to reduce my overall energy use. I’ll maintain all the changes I’ve made since the start of the project, adding new changes during each phase in hopes that the accumulated effects of these new habits will have an increasingly beneficial impact on my energy efficiency and, as a result, my energy bills. At the end of each period, to quantify the impact of the changes I’ve made, I’ll be comparing current energy bills to ones for the same period from last year, then posting the results.

In addition maintaining the habits I developed in Phase I of Project Get Off the Grid, I made the following changes in Phase II:

• I resolved to leave my thermostat off, unless it got unreasonably hot or cold in my house
• With two weeks remaining in the billing period, I replaced two of my five standard bathroom vanity bulbs with CFL bulbs (one of the old standard bulbs had burned out, cost: ~$9)

And that’s all. Nothing too crazy, nothing too complicated, nothing too difficult. Believe it or not, I never had to turn my thermostat on once and the temperature of my place never went below 67 degrees and never went above 76 degrees. All houses are different and weather varies by region, and I realize this may not work for everyone, but maybe it’s worth giving it a shot.

Anyway, here are the results:

I apparently managed to cut my energy costs by 3% and my overall energy use by 11%, as compared to last year. Although my monthly charges were very low, the reductions in year over year energy consumption were actually smaller than they were during the previous month, when I had my thermostat on for the majority of the time and I hadn’t installed any CFL bulbs. It all seems somewhat counterintuitive. I’ve just implemented more energy-saving techniques, so one would think I’d be even more energy efficient.

However, I think I’ve identified the explanation for the disappointing, and somewhat puzzling, results; just over a year ago today, I took a ten-day trip to Mexico to see the Monarchs of El Rosario (highly recommended) and explore the Mayan Riviera, which probably kept my home electricity use down to just about nothing for over one third of the billing period. This could explain both the unusually low monthly charges, as well as the fact that I didn’t reduce my energy consumption as much as I did during the January-February period. It’s certainly a possibility and, hopefully, next month’s bill will show a spike in energy efficiency, supporting my suspicions.

In any case, even though I think it might be underestimating, if I can maintain last month’s energy-saving habits over the course of a year, I’d save about $12.50, or 3% (that’s incorporating Duke’s price increases) versus the year before. More importantly, that’s reducing my energy consumption by over 11%, or 475 KWH per year. I have a feeling Phase III of Project Get Off the Grid is going to yield the best results yet. Stay tuned for updates.

As I mentioned in my Purging Plastic post, I am temporarily saving all the plastic I use to, one, get an idea of how much plastic I actually go through on a regular basis and, two, identify where and how I can reduce that amount. I then intend to do the same thing while consciously making some simple changes to curb my plastic use. Let me start this update off by saying that I consider myself better than average when it comes to keeping my plastic use at a reasonable level. I don’t buy bottled water, I keep and reuse old plastic grocery bags, I use reusable canvas bags to carry my groceries, etc. However, despite these good habits, the plastic I have accumulated in the past week and a half is slowly taking over my kitchen and, therefore, I need to shorten the “status quo” stage of this experiment from the originally stated two weeks to a more manageable ten days. There, I said it. Doesn’t make me feel to good about my plastic use, but now I can finally get this crap out of my house…