Save Money on Gas

Pretty much every time I ride my scooter, someone makes a comment about how much I must be saving on gas. True. We've figured out that it gets between 75-80 mpg. Pretty awesome. Today I had to fill up the tank (around 4 dollars) and it was very fun to be right next to a Suburban at the pump. :)

But this post is about natural gas. In our new place, the water heater runs on natural gas. We also have gas cooking. At our old place, we had on-site maintenance (yeah!) but no access to the water heater. Here, any maintenance requires a written request, which for some reason has been very difficult to turn in.... I just can't seem to make myself get three kids into the car to bring a piece of paper over to the management company. I could fax it, but I don't want to unpack the fax. I could probably e-mail it.... anyway. I haven't done it.

What does this have to do with saving gas? Our water heater is broken, and we can't have hot water until it's fixed. Thus, we're saving a bunch of money :)

It's actually not too bad. We only really use hot water in the shower (and then, it's only 3 out of the 5 of us), but it's so stinking hot that it's not a TOTAL necessity.

I looked at the water heater, and it's rated very low on efficiency. It's exciting to see that I can turn the temperature down (I wasn't allowed to in the old place). According to the Department of Energy, each 10 degree temperature reduction saves 3-5% in energy. When we do get it fixed, I plan to buy it an insulating blanket. (This should save another 5-9%, although installation is apparently more complicated on gas water heaters.) We are also considering turning off the water heater for most of the day, but I would like to do calculations to see how much gas this really saves. Does anybody know if turning off the water heater for 20 hours or so saves gas? Or does all the difference get used up in heating the tank of cold water? How long does it take to warm up?

This site says that it's worthwhile to turn the water heater off when leaving town. It also says you can use a timer for an electric water heater. How about gas? If you go out to the garage and manually turn it on and off, will that work?

Blinded by the Light -- How bright does the bathroom need to be?

We just moved to a bigger place with 3 bedrooms and 2 baths. We checked out the energy bill from the previous tenants, and it was a shocking 200 dollars (!). Immediately, C went into action to make sure that we do not continue that trend.

Now, this sounds kind of dumb to me because changing light bulbs just seems so obvious and non-exciting. But, if you look at lists of green things to do, changing to CFL bulbs is always at or near the top. At our old place, we had no choice because the lights were those long tube lights found in schools, but all of our lamps were CFL powered. Now, we had many more lights to deal with, all using regular light bulbs.

C went around changing as many light bulbs as he could (we had a small stockpile of CFLs that we had bought on sale), but when he ran out of CFLs, he just started taking light bulbs out. The light in the girl's room has four lightbulbs -- they were 4 regular light bulbs -- now we have one CFL.
Savings?
We replaced 4 60-watt bulbs with one bulb that uses 13 watts = 227 watt savings.

Each bathroom had 3 regular bulbs -- now they each have 1 CFL. Honestly, 3 was pretty blinding. I don't know if I want to see that well in the bathroom.
Savings?
6 60-watt bulbs (360) for 2 13-watt bulbs (26) = 334 watt savings.

In one bedroom and 2 bathrooms, that's a 561 watt savings, and we only used 3 bulbs!

The City of Austin offers coupons for packages of CFL (I think it's good at Home Depot). I wasn't going to Home Depot, so I bought a package of 10 at Costco for 13.99. Well worth it.

Some people complain about the light that CFLs give off. It doesn't bother me, but if you don't car for it, you might try the following:

• Buy a CFL that gives off white light (these are different from the regular CFLs)
• Consider how many light bulbs you really need. Do you need 3 bulbs over the bathroom mirror? Maybe it won't be so annoying if there's only one.
• Use a nice lampshade.