Frugality is the key!

The great thing about having a part time off grid house is that it teaches you a lot about energy conservation. When you have a finite supply of daily power that is dependent on the sun shining and the wind blowing, you learn to be pretty frugal with your energy usage. It's easy to waste energy when you're connected to the gridpower supply is infinite. Learning to live off the grid is pretty easy once you get the hang of it and anyone who has spent time up here in Heathcote knows that we don't really do anything that differently here than we do at our place in Melbourne.
In the 6yrs that we've been off grid here, we've discovered a lot of tricks to conserve power and put them into practice in our Melbourne home and have managed to bring our monthly consumption down to about 3.5 kWh per day (the average is 18-20 kWh).

Here are a few ideas that will help bring your energy bills down.

1. Lighting.
Replacing old globes with LED globes is the first step. These can be sourced as cheap as chips on EBay. I recently replaced 12 50 watt halogen down lights at my Mum's house with 12 watt LED globes. Instant power reduction from 600 watts down to 144 watts. It goes without saying that turn off lights in rooms that aren't being used. Porch lights don't need to on unless you're expecting someone to call.

2. Heating.
Only heat the areas you are using. Consider closing the openings to rooms without doors by hanging heavy curtains to contain the heat. Put on a jumper. For gas heating, close (and cover) vents in rooms that aren't being used.

3. Put a timer on your chest freezer.
The chest freezer does not need to come run throughout the night. Consider putting a cheap $10 timer on the power plug that switches off the power to it from say 9pm until 6am. During the winter months this is a great energy saving trick as a freezer will retain its temperature throughout the night if it's unopened.

4. Check you seals

While we're on freezers, make sure the door seal in the fridge and freezer is in good nick and seals well. A damaged seal will mean the fridge will come on more often and for longer as valuable coldness is escaping.

5. Use a thermos.
If you're a big tea drinker, consider boiling the kettle ONCE and fill a thermos to use throughout the day rather than boil the kettle each time.

6. Switch off!

All unused appliances switched on at the wall draw small amounts of power.
This includes phone chargers and anything with a transformer power pack. Standby power usage can add up over the course of a year.

7. Standby mode.
Despite what they tell you, LED TV's are power hungry. The bigger the TV, the hungrier they are. If you're not watching it, TURN IT OFF!

8. Use your electricity to boil water rather than the gas.

With the price of gas about to explode, it's often cheaper (and quicker) to boil water for cooking using the kettle first and then transfer it into the saucepan on the gas stove.