Energy Conservation Tips for Your Home and Investment Property

The first step in understanding energy conservation and energy usage is finding out what your base load energy consumption is. Your base load consumption encompasses those systems and appliances in your home that operate all year round. It includes such things as the ovens, entertainment centers, lights, computers, water heater, and other regularly used appliances. If your home uses both natural gas and electricity, then you will have to figure your electricity and gas base loads separately. It's not hard.

OK, let's go. You need a year's worth of gas and electric bills. If you don't already have them, you can contact the company and request them to send you the last year's collection of statements. Next, you'll want to take a look at how the amount of energy usage changes during the course of the year. Mark the numbers on a chart. The usage curve will be determined by your climate. If you live in a cold region, your biggest bills will be for heating; conversely in a hot climate your air conditioning costs will be more significant.

First, find the lowest energy usage months. These are most likely the months that are composed of mostly base load usage. The goal is to identify the months for which seasonal usage is not a factor. If there happen to be a number of months that fit this pattern, take the average usage for those months as your base load figure. Measure the actual energy usage, not just the amount you have to pay.

Energy prices are subject to cyclical economics of energy commodities such as natural gas, coal, and oil. Your electricity is measured in kilowatt hours (kWh) and gas usage is in therms, which is a unit of heat energy, or less commonly, in hundred cubic feet blocks. Measure your usage in these units rather than in dollars so that you have a clear profile of your energy usage at the commodity level from one year to the next.

Now that you have found out what your base load is, it's simple to find what your season-dependent usage is. Simply subtract the base load level from each month's total to determine how much of each bill is due to heating or cooling usage. Add up the amount for each month and this will give you your annual heating and cooling needs. For yearly figures, simply multiply the base load figure by 12 to get the yearly base load numbers.

As an extra step, to put the calculations in context, you can check the figures used so far by checking them against the amounts you actually spent, which of course can be found directly on the bills. To determine what your annual costs are, find out the amount you pay for each kilowatt hour of electricity and each therm (or whatever unit of volume your supplier uses to charge for natural gas usage) of natural gas. Multiply the annual usage and the unit price together and you can see the yearly cost.

So what? Use the information you put together to put your energy conservation projects in a priority order. Should you buy a new furnace or replace that power-hog of a refrigerator? If you know your base load energy usage versus seasonal ones, the decision will be a lot easier to make. You will know which project will save you the most. Knowledge is power when it comes to energy conservation and saves money too!

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Article made available courtesy of your Longmont Colorado experts of Automated Homefinder.

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