Get a Start on Your Energy Savings

Before you can make good choices about your domestic use of energy, you have to give it some thought and start from a firm foundation. Understanding how and when you use energy will allow you to make the best decisions about updating your appliances or changing your heating and cooling systems.

To get started, the first thing to do is determining what your baseload energy consumption is. Baseload consumption encompasses those things that run all year round. It includes the lights, entertainment centers, televisions, and other such appliances. If your home uses both natural gas and electricity, then you will have to figure your gas and electricity baseloads in separate calculations. It's not too difficult.

OK, let's go. You will need about a year's worth of gas and electric bills. If you don't have them, contact the company and have them send you the last year's collection of statements, or you can usually get them online. Next, get started by taking a look at how your usage varies during the year. Plot the usage levels on a simple graph. The shape of the curve will be defined by the climate in which you live. If you are in a cold region, your bills will be dominated by heating; conversely, in a warmer climate your cost of cooling will be the larger share. Find the months of lowest energy spending. These will be the months that consist of almost entirely your baseload usage. The idea is to identify the months in which seasonal usage is not a big cost. If there are a number of months that are low, use the average usage. Be sure to measure your actual usage, not the dollar amount you have to pay. Gas, heating oil and electric prices move around and are subject to boom and bust changes of world energy commodities like oil, coal, propane and natural gas. Electricity usage is billed in kilowatt hours and gas is measured in therms, or less commonly, in hundreds of cubic feet segments. Record the amount of your usage in the actual units consumed rather than the amount of the bill so that you will have an accurate picture of your energy consumption in real units over the years.

Once you have found what your baseload is, it's simple to see what your seasonal usage is. Subtract your baseload level from each month's total to find out how much of each bill is driven by heating or cooling usage. Add up the amount for each month and this will give you your annual heating and cooling usage. For yearly figures, multiply your average baseload figure by 12 to get your annual baseload usage. As an optional crosscheck, to validate the figures, you can confirm the figures against the amounts you actually paid, which of course can be found right on the bills. To determine what your costs are for a year, find out the amount you pay for each kWh of electricity and a therm of natural gas (or whichever billing unit your utility utilizes to measure gas usage). Multiply the unit price by the annual usage and you can see what your yearly cost is. You will have the amounts in excess of baseload as a reference.

Now, the point of this exercise. Use the information you have gathered to prioritize your home improvement projects in a priority order. Should you get a new, more efficient heating unit or replace that old refrigerator? If you know your baseload energy usage in comparison with seasonal, the decision will be much easier. You will know which project will be worth investing in.

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