Welcome
Welcome to the Utilities Section of SavingsNut.com, dedicated to providing money
saving advice, tips and ideas on how to be frugal, reduce your utilities budget,
and save money on electricity, home energy and all your utility bills. Tips on heating
& cooling, home weatherizing, lighting & home electronics, appliances, water and
telephone services. Start reducing your utilities and energy costs by reviewing
the tips presented below. For hundreds more tips, advice and savings, click on the
navigation buttons on the left.
Heating & Cooling - Do not try to heat or cool your house faster by setting the thermostat
to a higher or lower temperature than desired. The house won’t heat up or cool down
any faster, and chances are you won’t turn the thermostat back to the desired temperature
until the house has gotten too warm or cool, resulting in excess energy consumption.
If you are using a heat pump, avoid large changes in thermostat settings (usually
over two degrees), to avoid having the supplemental heat strip activate, which is
quite costly.
Home Weatherizing - Conduct an energy audit to determine where your home needs weatherizing.
Before you can effectively weatherize your home, you need to determine just where
energy losses are occurring. You can conduct this audit yourself, use an independent
energy auditor or many utility companies will conduct free or low-cost home energy
audits to determine ways to improve energy savings. Try going to EnergyStar.gov to
see if they perform energy audits in your area. Also consider ResNet.us for a list
of certified energy auditors. It may also be possible to offset part of the cost
of making your home more energy efficient with incentives provided by utilities and
governments. Look on the web site of your utility company and on the web site of
your state energy office, which can be found at NASEO.org under “Member Center.”
Lighting & Electricity - The average household spends over 10% of its energy budget
on lighting. Taking a few simple actions, and changing a few habits, can significantly
reduce the cost of lighting your home, perhaps by over 50%. Visit michaelbluejay.com/electricity/howmuch.html
for an easy way to calculate the cost of electricity for lighting and other electronics.
Home Appliances - If your refrigerator has a power save switch use it. However, use
the anti-sweat switch only when needed if moisture is forming on the outside of the
refrigerator door. Also, make sure the door seal on your refrigerator and freezer
seals tightly. This can be checked by closing the door on a dollar bill and seeing
if the dollar bill is held in place tightly. If not, the door may need to be adjusted
or the seal replaced.
Water - If you do not have new low flush toilets, reduce the amount of water used
by your toilet. If your toilet tank has a floating ball and arm, bend the arm down
so when the water fills the tank after flushing it will fill it to a lower level
by shutting off the inflow valve quicker. If you have a valve without a ball and
arm, either adjust it to fill to a lower level by using a screw driver to adjust
when it shuts off the water inflow after flushing, or adjust the slide mechanism
on the side of the valve to adjust water flow level.
Cell Phones - With many cell phone plans you can have up to five lines with five
unique phone numbers. Additional lines after the first line usually cost $10 per
month. Consider joining with friends or relatives to share one plan and the plan’s
minutes. If no one talks excessively, five people can usually have cell phone service,
including nationwide long distance, for about $20 per month, with no excess minutes
charges. And often free phones come with the plan. Minutes are tracked by phone
number, so if someone does use the phone excessively it is easy to determine who
owes any additional charges. Just make sure everyone is trustworthy and will pay
their share for the entire two-year contract period, since the cell phone account
will need to be under one person’s name, and they will ultimately be responsible
for all charges on the account.
Thanks for visiting our Utilities Section and we hope the ideas and tips for saving
money on your energy and utility bills will make life just a little bit better for
you and your family.
