So, hubs and I got a notification for our gas and electric bill and it’s over 30% higher than it should be! We already are using less than 250 kWh a month, which is under our baseline (we live in CA so the tiers just go up, it’s not an hourglass in pricing). I didn’t see our BU usage, but he was saying it was from the electric because we went from 44 kWh/week to 67 kWh. I think it’s because we used cooling a couple times but it still seems like a massive jump!

Anyways, obviously we’ll not be using the AC anymore (thankfully the random hot week of June has passed). I already line dry a lot of my clothes, but I think I’m going to start line drying all clothes and only use the dryer for sheets and towels. I would love to hand wash a lot of things too, but I don’t really have the time and I think I’ll be pushing hub’s limit just with line drying. He already doesn’t like that I use homemade laundry soap 😂 I’m also going to try to cut down my shower times, I need to get an in shower timer though because I tend to drift off.

Any other thoughts on what we can do? I’m going to see if we can turn down our water heater (we’re getting scalded anyways) and when the lights in our two fan/lights go out we’ll replace them with incandescents. We already basically exist in the dark so I’m wracking my brain trying to think of more energy saving things.

For reference:

We rent, so no solar panels for us yet. :(

Our place is three stories, including the garage. It’s just under 1,000 square feet.

HE washer and dryer.

We cook at home almost exclusively.

We have a dog and a cat, so we have a roomba who runs every day and an actual vacuum that we use every couple days (German Shedder life).

Personally, knowing it’s gas and electric I don’t think the $101 bill compared to $80 was that big of a deal, but may as well learn how to conserve for money and humanitarian reasonings. Thanks for any tips you have, lovies!

Update:

Husband sent me the bill break down. Apparently we’re paying about 26¢ per kWh which seems insane to me, but I moved from Texas just recently and our expensive electric was like 17¢ per kWh so I may be skewed in perception.

We did use a lot more electricity. Hopefully it’ll return to normal levels since I’ll be going to work full time starting next week and with the other measures.