Easy Ways To Reduce Your Electric Bill

Cutting costs is important to the American family, and one big expense that every family braces for each month is their electricity bill. Electricity costs are on the rise and are directly rated to the cost of fuel. What’s more, reducing your electricity usage will not only decrease your monthly bill, but is also a great step towards reducing your family’s carbon footprint (the measure of how much damage your family does to the environment through your consumption patterns). There are simple tricks that you can use around the house to reduce your energy consumption, pocket a little cash, and make the world a greener place in which to live.

Check Your Refrigerator
Unbelievably, the refrigerator is a huge energy sucker in the home that can account for up to 1/5th of your total electric bill. Most people are actually unaware that their refrigerator’s temperature is set much too low. Any temperature between thirty-seven and forty-two degrees in the refrigerator section and zero to five degrees in the freezer section is ideal; anything lower is a waste of energy. The seal around the door should be tight, too. In order to test it, stick a piece of paper between the two seals on the door and the shut it. The paper should be hard to pull out if the seal is tight. If you can easily slide the paper out, have the gasket replaced. Additionally, if your refrigerator is equipped with an energy saver switch that it is turned on.

Curb Dishwasher Use
Washing partial loads of dishes in your dishwasher is not only a waste of electricity, but is also a waste of water. Pack your dishwasher efficiently and only run the dishwasher when you have a full load. Air-drying your dishes is another way to cut down on the use of electricity, cutting energy usage from the dishwasher by around twenty percent.

Wash Laundry in Cold Water
Although there are certainly instances when you must use hot water in the laundry, not every load that you wash requires it; there are many instances that you can use cold water (which requires no electricity from your hot water heater). For those who are not willing to switch to cold, try warm water instead.

Adjust Thermostats on Furnace, A/C, and Hot Water Heater
The heating and cooling system for your home and your home’s hot water heater make up the bulk of the electrical expense for your entire home, so make sure that the thermostat is set at a comfortably affordable sixty-eight degrees year round. Turning down the thermostat on your hot water heater can also save you a lot of cash on your electricity bill because the heater has to work twenty-four-seven/three-sixty-five to keep water piping hot, and then you likely just mix cold water with it to arrive at a warm temperature. Ideally, the hot water temperature should be around one hundred and twenty degrees.

Cutting the costs of electricity is an effortless process that just requires a bit of forethought and diligence to pay off big.

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