I feel that my energy consumption is pretty low by comparison to a lot of people. There are days when my tv doesn’t get turned on, and that I enjoy taking the time to walk to work or other places. So, the other day, these things became part of my strategy for minimizing my energy usage for the day.

In the morning, I woke up to the alarm on my cell phone (I do not have an alarm clock, and I do not have a home phone, so turning off my cell phone isn’t really an option for me). I timed myself for a 5 minute shower, which I went over by 1 minute. The sun was already coming up outside, so I left the bathroom light off and skipped the hair dryer that morning and walked to work. Luckily, work is only 1.25 miles from my house and I usually try to reserve this walk for casual Fridays. I find the walk to be more relaxing than the short drive. It takes about 20 minutes and gives me some time to collect my thoughts from the previous week, or to daydream about upcoming events.

The energy consumption at work is mostly out of my control. However, when I left for the day, I made sure that I turned off my computer that it didn’t continue to waste electricity when I was not using it.

When I returned home for the evening, I had had my walk for the day, but my dogs had been stuck inside the house all afternoon! So, I took them on another walk to my neighborhood Subway where we grabbed sandwiches for dinner. The rest of the evening was spent catching up on homework and reading a magazine.

In all, this day was not bad at all. I will consider walking to work more often, weather (and circumstances) permitting. I do feel that I can reduce my shower time down to about 5 minutes, however I don’t know that I am entirely ready to give up my hair dryer.  Giving up tv might be out of the question, unless the prices become more ridiculous than they already are. There is a maximum price that I am willing to pay my cable provider, anything above $75/month for cable and internet and I will turn them both off without blinking an eye. There are a few additional energy uses in my house that don’t necessarily affect my everyday life, but I have plans to change over time to help reduce energy consumption in my house. The most immediate that I can think of is turning up the temperature on my refrigerator and freezer. This will still keep the contents cold, but will not make the refrigerator work so hard to keep the inside temperature at unnecessary levels. I also have a fish tank with one lonely fish in it. The filter uses energy on a constant basis, but this is necessary for the fish’s survival. As soon as the fish dies, I intend to retire the tank.

I have saved the biggest energy hog in my entire house for last. That would be the pool. To cut energy consumption on the pool, we have recently purchased an energy efficient pump which allows us to control how many rpm’s the pump is operating at and set the timing for off-peak energy usage. The long term plan for the house (and pool) is to install solar panels. This is not something that I intend to do over the next week, but is a possibility over the next 5-10 years.

In this particular experiment, I did not use my washer/dryer or the heat/air conditioning. The weather is perfect right now, so we are not finding the need for heat or ac. I like to open the doors and windows to let cool/warm air into the house as needed. During other times of the year, we have a programmable thermostat so that we are able to adjust the temperature automatically as we sleep and we do not keep the heat/ac on when no one is home. I used to be diligent about hanging towels, jeans and sweatshirts outside to dry most of the way. This is something that I intend to start doing again this year as the weather gets better.