I have just about everything ?streamlined? you can imagine when it comes to energy concerns, all bulbs are FLCs (15-23 watts I think, or around 60-90 watt Incandescent equivalents), all fairly energy efficient appliances, everything cut off when I?m not using it, etc. It wasn?t really high bills that pissed me off? it was the fact that you are not really told up front about how much these devices are going to cost you in the long run. The FLC bulbs paid for themselves in a month (literally, after one month of using them they were saving me money), and on average save around $100-120 annually (yeah, chickenscratch, but after I got done replacing most energy hogs it ended up being a few thousand annually).
I bought a neat little gadget called Kill-A-Watt to help me determine energy gulpers. Some of them I owned were simply retarded on how inefficient they were. Fridge was taking around 1,200w, I bought one almost in half. One of the most surprising things to me was the fucking coffee maker, it used almost 1000 fucking watts (granted it?s not on much so it?s not hurting that bad). Then the stupid toaster, it took more watts than the coffee maker! Anyways, after I replaced a little of this and a little of that (having to pay around $2000 total in newer more efficient appliances), the annual savings are roughly $2500-$3000 bucks. So after the first year, everything I had to buy paid for itself lol.
I love Kill-A-Watt. I also hate it because the first thing I do now when I buy anything is hook it up through Kill-A-Watt to see how much it?s costing me, other than the initial cost. I still have to replace a few things around the house, namely old CRT monitors. Unfortunately it?s almost time to upgrade my computer which is going to suck on power (the new fucking graphics cards coming out soon eat something like 300 watts by themselves, more than my entire computer consumes atm). Eh, oh fucking well.
Oh yeah: KILL-A-WATT RULES.
