Well, the results are officially in: we have saved money! Woo hoo!
I have analyzed my electricity bill from last year and the year previous and compared it to this year when we started trying to save electricity. Here are the results so far:
| Month | 2006 kWh | 2007 kWh | 2008 kWh | % Savings | $ Savings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | no data available |
674 | 620 | 8% | $13.38 |
| February | no data available |
658 | 490 | 25.5% | $35.82 |
| March | no data available |
586 | 455 | 22.4% | $29.04 |
| April | 593 | 621 | 470 | 24.3% | $33.44 |
Note that we started trying to save electricity in mid-January, hence the smaller savings for the month of January. At this rate, I project that we will save about $400 this year.
And even better, we are not done! There are lots of things we could do to reduce even further. I will blog about those as we do them. (Have to leave something to blog about later! 
So how about the carbon?
Well, we have saved a total of 504 kWh so far since January. At 2.095 pounds of CO2 per kWh, that comes to a savings of 1056 pounds of CO2 saved so far. Annualized, that would be about 4000 pounds … 2 tons! Not bad, eh?
Now if I project that level of savings over all Americans… assume 120 million households * 2 tons a year saved per household = 240 million tons saved. Wow. And we haven’t done anything really radical yet.
I’m hoping this will inspire someone out there to save some money, some electricity, and of course, some carbon!
Min said,
2008-05-23 @ 21:55 PDT
Neat, Edwin, we have to take to doing some of this greening ourselves, think we’ll start slow with just the light bulb replacements, that should probably save some money as well as reduce the emissions. Eventually we have to get to bigger stuff, like the water heater and so forth… oh well, may be we’ll save that until the next house.
By the way, I’m jealous of the little gardening you’re doing. Our backyard is raided by ants, my poor peaches are never going to be mature at this rate. How sad.