We have two living rooms, two baths, four bedrooms, very large kitchen, an office and laundry room so cooling this place is no easy task! Our electric bill ranged from $150 in winter to well over $200 in summer and maybe once over $300. But, when we began this "lessen our mark" journey, we replaced all bulbs in the house with those 'soft serve' looking ones and installed solar lighting all outside and thought there's gotta be more we can do! There was! Its called the time-of-use program with our electric cooperative.
Basically your charged .096 per kilowatt hour on regular service. With TOU your charged .041 pkh on any electricity you use during "off-peak". Which in the summer (Ap 1- Oct 31) is from 9pm-1pm. Plus all holidays and weekends are "off-peak" as well. "On-peak" it's .12pkh. During Nov1- Mar 31 the "off-peak" is 10-6 both am/pm.
Now, since it's too dang hot to go all day with no A/C at all what I do is save all laundry/dishes/ showers for the off peak times and anything else that takes a lot of electricity and keep the temp at 78. Last summer we hardly used the A/C "on-peak". Anytime it'd get too hot, me and the kids would just jump into the pool! Sadly this year it's not looking like will be able to do that, the kids cut the liner about a foot long multiple times.. I swear I have no idea what goes thru their heads! And we are NOT buying another one of those"disposable" pools from Wal-Mart again... $400 and its really only good a couple of summers. We want to save for a 'real' one. Back on point... we haven't had a bill over $100 since!
So if your have a electric company that offers it, I say give it a try because not only did we save a bunch I find us using a lot less!
For info on Tricos TOU program go here!
