Turn off lights, save the savings
Everyone knows that you should turn the lights off if you are not in the room, but can this really help you save money? Let's take a look at how getting in the habit of switching off the lights can help you reduce the cost of your utilities:
The nationwide average cost of electricity is roughly $0.10 per kilowatt hour. The average light bulb in your home eats 20 watts. This is a rough estimate, and is for CFL bulbs, if you are using incandescent bulbs, it is closer to 50-60 watts per bulb.
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Ok, let's do some math now. If you were leaving your house to run some errands for a couple of hours, and you remember to turn off four 20 watt bulbs that would have run for two hours, so that's a total of 160 watt hours of energy, or 0.32 kilowatt hours. The effort to turn them off with save you approximately 1.6 cents. That is really not much. But, let's say you remember to turn those same four bulbs off while you are at work for nine hours a day for five days a week. That would be 7.2 cents a day. Still, not very much. If you were gone for the weekend, those same four bulbs would save you about forty cents.
Ok, so this is not very much, it means in a year you may save close to ten bucks total. Is that ten dollars worth the effort to walk through your house and shut off all of the lights? Yes, and the reason is, that when you get in the habit of turning stuff off when it is not in use, you start to save a little here and there all of the time, and those little bits add up to a big whole.
For example, if you shut off the lights, you may also start to shut off your computer, your television, your stereo, etc. A television uses roughly 150 watts on average. A computer close to the same. So, if you shut these things off when you are gone for the weekend it could save you a couple of dollars. If you plan to be gone for a few days, do things like unplugging devices, powering off everything on your entertainment center, unplugging your laptop's power supply, and so on. This cuts down on a lot of drain and can be done pretty quickly. Why pay for the red indicator lights to be on if you are not even going to be home? The time it takes is well worth it, and your savings, on average can be close to $100 a year.
So, make a habit of shutting things off, unplugging them, and powering them down when they are not in use. Turn off your lights, your tv, your computer, etc. To make it fast and simple, plug everything into one power strip, then you just have to unplug one thing in each room, and reap the savings benefits of doing so.
