How to Reduce Your Home Electricity Bills

The average family in the USA spends $2,200 a year on energy bills. A lot of these dollars are wasted. This article is about what you can do to reduce the waste in electricity use in your home. Using less electricity not only saves you money, but it also helps to reduce carbon emissions from generating plants. If the power plant near you burns coal then cutting down on your electricity consumption also reduces mercury pollution (burning coal is a major cause of mercury pollution). Of course, if you buy ‘green’ electricity from a green utility or you generate your own electricity then you are less complicit in Global Warming.

Reducing your electricity bills is all about being more energy efficient. You have to do an audit of your energy usage and your appliances to find out what you need to do to reduce your bills. A great way to start is to buy a P3 International P4400 Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor that costs about $20. Then you need to find out your utility rates. Now you are ready to start an energy audit. Simply plug in a device into the P4400 Kill A Watt electricity usage monitor and then plug the monitor into a wall plug. Put in your utility rate into the monitor and it will forecast the cost in dollars and kilowatt-hours of using the appliance per day, per week, per month and per year.

As you go around the house doing this you will quickly start to notice what appliances are costing you the most money. It is at this point when you have to decide whether it would save you money to buy a more energy efficient appliance recommended by Energy Star to replace the old wasteful model. Or you might decide that using the home appliance during off-peak times makes the energy expenditure more reasonable.

The US Department of Energy has calculated that the average home can make 20% reductions in electricity bills by monitoring electricity usage and cutting out waste. One of the common causes of waste is the stand-by light. They are found on TVs, stereos, game consoles, DVD players and other devices. LED lights are continually spending your money and not serving any useful purpose. You can power down fully, pull the plug or use an LCG5 Energy Saving Power Strip that overrides stand by on the appliances plugged into the power strip.

Once you are happy with your appliances and when best to use them, you can turn your attention to your lighting and your heating/cooling.

Earthmate CFLs use 75% less electricity than incandescent light bulbs and last 13 times longer. Just replacing 5 incandescent light bulbs for CFLs saves $100 a year.

If you use electricity for your heating and cooling then a key way to reduce electricity bills is to install a good programmable thermostat in your home. Follow the settings recommended by Energy Star and avoid heating/cooling an empty house and you can save up to 30% on your HVAC bills.

Once you have made these changes to your home you will notice your bills coming down and you will feel more comfortable in your home with the climate control properly managed. And of course CO2 emissions are reduced at the same time.