I'm extremely new to going "green", but I have been lurking around here for some time, but it's time for me to start looking specifically at how to reduce the electrical consumption of my home.

Background.  Located in Northern Minnesota = long cold winters, fairly short summers.  The house is 3,000 square feet ranch style, two floors.  One large fireplace is located upstairs, and a smaller downstairs.  Two tank water heaters are in the house, one that services just the main bedroom at the far left edge of the house, and the other that services the dishwasher, washing machine, kitchen, and other bathroom at the far right end of the house.  House is brick and was built in 1985.  Original water heaters and stove.  My electrical bill is as follows:

Jan: 312
Feb: 360
Mar: 317
April: 225
May: 200
June: 156
July: 128
August: 130
Sept. 131
Oct: 168
Nov: 235
Dec: 285

Total:  $2645

Open for any and all suggestions and commentary.  Thanks for your time!

Since electrical costs vary across the country, your KW use would be more helpful than the dollar amount. Have you changed over your incandescents to CFLs? Do you have your TV & computer on outlet strips so you can shut them off after use? These are the easiest things to do & wil make a big difference in your useage. Do you have energy star appliances? We changed the gasket on our old refrigerator & saw a noticable reduction in our bill. In general, computers, TVs (I understand flat screens use lots of juice), heating and AC, lights and motors all use KW, so look at each of those areas individually.

How old is your furnace? Your bill outlay shows your winter pretty well, and an older blower motor uses alot of juice.

No AC is installed in the house. We have been slowing moving towards CFL's. Every light in our house is turned off when not in use, fairly fanatical about keeping lights off. Our washer/dryer is energy star, our other appliances are not but will be when they are due to be replaced. I'm really curious about the two tank water heaters, is there a economical alternative to maybe one of those that I would see a ROI on?

Our heating is primarily electrical, then the wood fireplaces are used as a second source of heat.

Fireplaces look nice, and heat the room they're in, but suck cold air into the rest of the house as combustion & bypass air. Converting them to air-tight inserts or (where possible) a small woodstove increases their efficiency from about 15% (on a good day) to about 70%, and reduces the parasitic infiltration losses when they're not in use. Heating with wood can be a PITA, but if it's cheap & plentiful in your neighborhood, you can get a lot of heat & comfort out of a mid-efficiency wood burning appliance.

Move ALL of your lighting over to high efficiency to start with. Self-ballasted CFLs are only about 2/3 as efficient as electronic-ballasted fixtures.

Get a Kill-a-Watt or similar watt-hour meter and test all your plug loads- put any with high standby power on power strips that will interrupt power. (There are "smart" strips out there to be a bit more selective, where need be.)

Insulate all of the near-tank plumbing on the HW heaters (including the coldwater feed and the temperature & pressure valve outflow plumbing) with 3/4" walled closed cell foam pipe insulation (available at plumbing supply houses or Grainger, but not at orange or blue box stores, which only carry the 3/8" stuff.) Include everything within 6' of the tank. Where accessible, do the same, or at least the 3/8" walled stuff on all hot water distribution plumbing.

If the HW tanks are in conditioned space, the standby loss ends up in the house, and in a climate with 8-9months of heating season, that's not much of a loss. The near-tank insulation cuts the standby loss roughly in half in most instances. Insulating the hot water plumbing causes you to draw less hot water on successive draws, since it takes much longer to cool off, and less of the hot needs to be mixed in at the tap. By far the largest amount of energy would be going into the water, not the house, in any event.

If yours is a showering (not tub-bathing) household, about 40-50% of your hot water use will be in showers. A drainwater heat recovery heat exchanger pre-heating that 35F incoming water up to 65-80F where it enters the hot water heater can cut the energy use for showers by about half. IIRC MN subsidizes the installation of drainwater heat exchangers for electric hot water heating customers. Even with elecricity as cheap as 7 cents/kwh (which you might) there is a cost effectiveness rationale if the shower runs 30 minutes/day or longer @ 2.5gpm: http://www.renewability.com/uploads/documents/en/analysis_dwhr_minnesota.pdf

If this is a 2 person household that takes short showers, odds are your refrigerators are using as much or more electricity than your hot water heaters. If there are 5 people over the age of 12 showering daily hot water is likely your biggest non-space-heating use.

Hybrid hot water heaters with tank-top heat pumps work by sucking heat out of the room, so if you're heating with electric baseboards or electric forced-air the net reduction in power use doesn't exist except during the brief summers. If you're heating with wood, they will cut the electricity used for water heating roughly in half, while adding to.


Upgrade/fix the thermal envelope. From most cost effective to least cost effective:

1. Air seal the place. REALLY air seal it, don't just take some wild guesses where the leaks are, pack in some stuffing, maybe replace some weather stripping, etc., rather get somebody to run a blower door test and get your ACH/50 number down to well under 1.0 (that's air changes per hour @ 50 pascals pressure.) Odds are pretty good that your flue dampers aren't an air-tight type (some chimney-top dampers are pretty good though)and you may have to use flue-balloons or similar on a seasonal basis. Your foundation sill & rim joists are leaking air into the brick cavity, and your attic floor/conditioned space interface is leaky too. Dryer vents and bath/kicthen fan backflow preventers are usually absent or not fully air tight too. Fix everything you know about, THEN call the folks with the blower doors & smoke pencils.

2. Spot-insulate: Find any & all voids in the insulation layer (thermal imaging helps), and fix them. Here again the foundation, foundation sill, and rim joist were often afterthoughts in 1985, but could be 25% of your heat loss. I recently discovered that MN has a hard-limit of R10-max on foundation insulation (haven't figured out the rationale yet though), but R10 is a HUGE improvement over an R1 poured concrete foundation, or an ~R2 rim joist + brick veneer.

3: Boost the attic insulation from R38 (or whatever was code in MN in 1985) to R60+ with blown fiber insulation. Blown goods fill all gaps & voids, and are easier to make near-perfect than batts. Cellulose will "fix" the R-value losses that occur at peak-cold temps with low-density batts by effectively killing off the otherwise substantial convective losses. When it's ten below 0F outside an old-school R38 batt in an attic performs to around R25. Three inches of cellulose overblow brings it up to R50 and it retains it's R over a wide range of temp. If your attic insulation is less than R38, this moves up the cost effectiveness list, since insulating attics is usually cheaper & easier than insulating foundations as a retrofit.

4: Windows: If yours are 1/4" spaced double pane units and in good shape you may be able to use indoor or outdoor storms over them for a net thermal improvement. In some instances exterior storms may result in failure of the gas-tightness of the glazing though. New windows aren't usually cost effective from an energy use point of view, but with the right low-E coatings for the climate, can increase comfort. (Standing next to a new-school window vs. a 1985 version on sub-zero days feels noticeably less cool.) Only your windows leak a lot of air and aren't easily weatherstripped/treated would replacements make any sense from an energy use point of view.

Hey there,

It looks like the comments above have given you plenty to think about in your new adventure of lowering the energy bill. However, I thought I'd offer one final suggestion, if you haven't already thought of it. Solar power can be an extremely effective way to power your house, while also saving you some money. It sounds like you may not get enough sun to be able to put juice through your entire home, but if nothing else, you might be able to use it to power one aspect of your house, like the lights.

Anyway, I hope this helps. Best of luck to you.

--Chris Dalzell
ShorelineConstructionSC.com