You might also look into one of those instant, tankless water heaters added as a supplemental water heater right near your bathroom. Then you could keep the main water heater to 120°, but set the tankless one to increase the temp for hot water in your bathroom.
Whether this is workable and cost-effective depends on just how your plumbing is laid out, and how much work it would take to do this. But it’s worth considering. It gives you the best of both – the lower temp on your main hot water heater is fine for the rest of the house, and saves you energy. The supplemental heater for bath water provides you extra hot water, but only when you are using it – no energy spent on keeping a big tank of water at 165° full time.
That’s pretty much correct, the second part. The demand generally is highest in the middle of the day, when businesses are operating and people are awake. If you were to plot demand on the y-axis and the hours of the day on x-axis it would roughly look like a hill (different regions have different shapes). To suplly the demand the electric company will generally use the most efficeint resources first. Although this really cannot save you money, in the sense your bill is probably a flat rate per kWh. It could if the utility can lower it’s overall costs, which would then be passed on to the consumer. Some customers can get time-of-use or block use pricing which gives them differentiated prices during the various times of the day,
so then the savings can be seen directly.
As far as fluorescent bulbs burning out too soon, I had a similar problem with tubes burning out after only 10 months or so. My problem was that I was turning them on and off many times in one day. That will cause them to burn out sooner. Instead leave them on all day. Only turn them off if you’re going to be gone for a long time (several hours).
We’ve left our tubes in the kitchen on 24/7 and the last batch lasted like 12 years. And I’m not exaggerating. Twelve years! The light is ugly as all get-out, but it’s always there.
Might I respectfully suggest, pertinent to the OP, that 24/7 lighting is both unnecessary and wasteful.
Myself, I turn the heating off and wear more clothes indoors, and recently I’ve taken to not leaving appliances on standby any more - I turn them off at the socket (or unplug where necessary). It’s a minor pain in the arse that wastes about 3 seconds of my viewing/computing pleasure every day, but saves a small amount of energy. If everyone did it, it would mount up.
I compost all organic waste - not for the compost, but just as a non-landfill way to get rid of it. It’s pretty efficient once it gets rotting. And we also sort and recycle glass/cans/paper/cardboard. We now only dump one small garbage bag of landfill waste a week.
Fluorescent lighting draws more power when starting up, and each power cycle shortens the life of the lamp (the lamp which not only costs money, but requires energy to produce, pack and ship).
There will be a break-even point where the extra financial and energy expense of turning off the light is greater than the financial and energy expense of leaving it on while you’re not there. I agree with you though that 24 hour use isn’t likely to represent that break-even point.
If you really must have bottled water, don’t buy the “sophisticated” imported stuff. There is nothing dummer than shipping container loads of H[sub]2[/sub]O around the world - that’s what rivers are for. It’s all just water you know.
Reducing automobile trips is a great way to save money and energy. To do this, you could simply try and do as many errands at once as you possibly can, making no more than a couple trips a week, try and replace trips by car with walking, biking or public transport whenever practical, all the way up to living entirely car-free. Obviously, there’s a range - the latter isn’t a little thing! Also, recycling what you can, turning the lights out when you leave and your appliances off when you aren’t using them really does make a difference. Buy locally-produced food, if possible (yeah, it’s not always in season and can be more expensive). It’s good for local farmers and businesspeople, and the amount of energy used to transport most of our food across the country is enormous.
It’s hard to reach and the switch is kinda jiggly. In addition, the room rarely has enough natural light so it’s better for us to leave it on. I am not a good light turner-offer, mostly because in our old house there is only one wall switch. You have to stumble into the dark rooms to even get to the light. My husband is always turning them off after me. It is my downfall, conservation-wise. I try to make up for it in other ways.
If your goal is to save money, that’s not the best way. Here is an explanation about when it is most economical to turn lights off, vs. leaving them on. The power cost of operating the lamps continuously, plus the increased cooling cost (if you’re in an air-conditioning type of climate) will typically outweigh the value of the increase in lamp life.
10 months for a fluorescent lamp is WAAAY too soon, however. Are we talking a 4’ linear fixture here, or a compact fluorescent lamp? If it’s the linear fixture, it should have a rated life of 24,000 hours or so (3 years), and a CFL usually has a rated life of around 10,000 hours. Also, if it’s a linear fixture, I would wonder if you have a bad ballast, or if you’re using a lamp that’s not matched appropriately with the ballast.
As for premature death of CFL’s: There can be a big difference in quality in different brands of lamps. And, if it’s been a few years since you’ve tried one out (and, if you paid 10 pounds for it, I suspect it might have been), you may find that overall quality of lamps is improved.
Overall power quality in your home or business can make a difference, too. If you’re very prone to voltage surges and spikes, this will tend to make your lamps die much more quickly.
Oh, and as far as the rated life posted on the packaging: This is based on statistical testing of the lamps in the factory. Basically, if your lamp is rated for 10,000 hours, that means that 50% of a sample lasted that many hours when burned on a specified X hours on, X hours off schedule. Which means, of course, you have a 50/50 chance of getting one of the lamps that is an underachiever.
You’re not exactly correct here. The electric company will NOT “use the most efficient resources first”, they will use the cheapest resources that fit within their fuel supply and emissions strategy first. Which, in the US, means coal, and hydro and nuclear if available. Since most utilities in the US have far more coal generation than nuclear and hydro combined, this means that spreading the baseload curve out more and making it flatter means that the coal plants will run at maximum dispatch for longer. Whereas peaking capacity is generally added by gas turbines, which are much more expensive, but somewhat more efficient. And, since they burn natural gas, they also produce less greenhouse gas emissions than the coal plant (in addition to far less SO2, less NOx, pretty much no heavy metals and particulates, etc.) So one could easily argue that by hitting the peak load, although you are costing the utility more money, you’re also forcing them to use cleaner-burning and more efficient resources while doing it.
On the subject of variable rate electricity, exactly what percentage of the US is on such a system? I don’t have my exact figures here, but I’d be surprised if it was more than 2-3% of households (barring odd rural electric schemes with dual-meter systems for home heating).
I just bought a dirt cheap $1,500.00 four-stroke 150cc motor scooter - and run the better part of my 6 miles comute/errands/whatever with it … (southern hemisphere if you wonder )
its fun, i get 80mpg and it still does 50+mph… and did I mention that its fun
I never was too fond of the idea of moving 3000 lb of metal and rubber just to move my 140lb of flesh and bones … no I got 200lb of metal and rubber doing this
Consumer Reports recently studied on-demand water heaters and its evaluators weren’t impressed. CR is perhaps too contrarian at times, but these systems typically require extremely beefy electrical service (100+ amps), professional installations (generally speaking), and are not inexpensive. The break even takes many, many years for the typical family and these systems don’t work particularly well if two people, say, run the shower/tub water at the same or run it with the dishwasher or washing machine or hottub. That said, I know people who have them and some are satisfied.
The day that you–God forbid–wipe out at 50+ mph, your 140 lbs of flesh and bones will miss that 3000 lbs. of metal and rubber protection. Be careful, Alfred!
I know exactly what you are talking about, believe me. But I don’t really understand your definition of efficent. To me efficient is cheaper, not cleaner. Coal and nuclear are cheaper than Natural Gas at the moment, even with the emission standards. Also, not all gas is created equal. If you can switch to lower heat rate gas units that approach baseloading as opposed to high heat rate peaker units, that is more efficient, meaning cheaper and cleaner. Often those high heat rate units are older gas units and are extremely unclean even compared to some newer coal plants. And actually base loading can allow for cleaner energy sources since most renewable energy sources, solar, wind, geothermal are not disptchable. They are more desirable the higher the load factor.
By “efficient” I mean “net plant heat rate”. Gas turbines have a much lower NPHR than a typical coal unit does, even a supercritical coal unit. A poor simple-cycle might compare with a great supercritical, but per MW generated, I know of no gas plants in the US, or the world, which are cheaper than a typical coal plant. Do you have any cites as to any gas plant which has a lower net generation cost than a typical coal plant? The average delivered coal cost to coal plants in the US is roughly $1.37 per MBtu right now, versus about $5.96 per MBtu. Even neglecting that gas can burn with a lower efficiency (due to higher latent heat losses) than low to medium-moisture coal, the difference in typical NPHR for a coal and gas plant (say, 9200 Btu/kWh for coal and 8000 Btu/kWh for a gas plant) is not near enough to make up that 4:1 fuel cost difference. Even applying all consumables and externalities I can’t see it approaching any closer than 2:1.
I’m not sure what you mean by “not all gas is created equal” - in the US major hubs, there is not that huge of a variation in gas quality. True, Rocky Mountain gas supply can be somewhat poor, but it’s just about as expensive as the good quality gas. Unlike coal, gas trading is sorely limited by pipelines and transport.
