Opening the electricity bill every quarter is a stressful time for most people. As the costs of living soar and prices soar even higher, we are looking for ways to limit our electricity use and save money in the process.
There are many standard ways to reduce your power consumption and make your home sustainable. You can also purchase a Smart Energy Monitor will help you understand your usage and make changes that will put more money back into your pocket.
Today, we thought we would share some unusual methods that people are employing to bring their electricity bills down and improve their carbon footprint.
Unplug your phone chargers
We rely heavily on our smart devices in the modern world, and keeping them charged is essential. We tend to leave phone chargers plugged in when we are not using them for the sake of convenience.
A charger is an energy vampire and will consume 0.26 watts of energy every hour it sits in the socket with a phone attached. When your phone is charged and still connected to the socket, it is going to keep drawing 2.24 watts an hour. Consider how many smartphones and tablets are in your home and how many chargers are left plugged in permanently. It can be easy to see how they quickly add up to 10 per cent more being added to your power bill.
Delete your emails
This won’t impact your electricity usage, but it will help the world save on unnecessary power drains. Our emails are stored on servers or data centres (the cloud is not really a cloud), requiring enormous volumes of electricity to run.
To put that into perspective, if every person in France deleted 50 emails, you could save enough power to light up the Eiffel Tower for 42 years.
Get warm using a coffee log
Most of us need a cup of coffee in the morning to get going, which is causing environmental problems.
The waste from coffee beans is enormous, so companies like Bio Bean have created a way to condense these leftovers into logs that can be used to heat your home. Coffee logs generate 80 per cent fewer emissions than coffee scraps in landfill, and they will burn 20 per cent longer than traditional wooden logs.
Landscape your garden
We all know greenery is good for the environment, but few realise the benefits just a few trees can have on our power bill. Simply planting trees in your yard can reduce your heating and cooling expenses by up to 30 per cent – plus, the more trees we grow, the better.
Use motion detectors
Many homes are using these outdoors for security reasons or providing illumination when arriving home at night. Why not use them indoors as well? Large businesses have been using indoor motion sensors for years to save on lighting expenses, and you can, too.
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