On 6/24/2012 10:01 AM, Winston wrote:
snip
Lemme say this about frugal...

The electric and gas bills around here come with a graph
of the last 13 months of consumption as an average
number of consumption/day. There are also numbers
for the average consumption/day and average daily
temperature for this month and 12 months ago. Even on
such a coarse graph, I can see when I installed the DIY
heat recovery ventilator and the two months of pollen
season when I ran an air filter 24/7.

Don't discount the value of turning off vampire devices.
Back when the US converted TV formats, I ended up with
four cable boxes and two VCR's hooked to the antenna so I could time
shift stuff.
Later, I discovered that the cable boxes were almost 35 watts
each when powered off. OUCH!
So, I put a power strip in the line and shut 'em off when not
needed. Visible savings. Problem was that I had to reset the
clock and scan the channels every time I powered 'em up.
I stuck with it for several weeks before I gave up. Switched
to 7W HDTV converters and just left 'em on.
Big initial savings, but petered out.

Back in the day, I had a tiny RV with an 18 gallon water tank.
Two people could live off that and shower every day for a week.
I tried it at home. Yep, you can take a shower on very little
water. That lasted a week. I really like a long hot shower.

For years, in summer I covered 50% of the windows with R5 pink
insulation board. In winter, 100%. I painted it the color of the
house and used a marker to put lines that matched the T-11.
From the front, it looked like a house with no windows.
BIG savings. My neighbors called me "the mole".
Putting in double pane windows actually made my HVAC consumption go up,
but the there's more light. It was hard to turn down that stimulus money.

I light the place with three 1.5W LED lamps. But I'm lazy and leave
'em on 24/7. Yes, it's cheaper to flip on the bathroom CFL when I go
pee than to leave the LED on 24/7.

You can tell that I live alone ;-)