Can you really save money on electricity?
Yes, but some of the savings are not as visible as you would like. When I turn off the lights again for the 37th time today, I don’t hear coins being dropped into a jar representing my savings.
It can be easy to think that small changes like flipping the switch don’t make much of a difference in terms of saving money. However, every little bit helps and adds up when money is tight or you are working towards a financial goal.
I’m not gonna lie. Trying to cut down your monthly expenses– including your electric bill – is a struggle. However, trimming costs is absolutely worth it when you see how much you are able to save over a period of time!
5 Ways to Save Money on Electricity Without Spending Any Money
(1) Time of Use Plan
Just by making a simple call to your electric company, you can enroll in the Time of Use plan (this may have a different name based on the company).
The Time of Use plan is essentially a schedule of peak and non-peak hours. This can change based on the season and even the day of the week.
For example, the peak period from June through September in Atlanta, GA is from 2-7 pm during the week. As of this writing, the cost per kilowatt (kWh) is 20¢. All other usage times – all day Saturday, all day Sunday and Monday-Friday before 2 pm and after 7 pm – is just 5¢ per kWh.
The idea is that you spend less per kilowatt of electricity used during off peak hours than you would during peak hours. Here are the biggest energy users in the house:
- dishwasher
- oven
- stove
- washer
- dryer
If you can arrange it so that you’re NOT using those appliances during peak hours, you’ll save on your electricity bill. In fact, based on kWh usage alone you’ll save 75%!
We’ve been conscious about this and it’s resulted in savings of about $100 in one year!
Note from Tiffany: Be sure to stay up to date with the current Time of Use plan. Ours changes in the winter, where peak times move to the morning instead of the afternoon!
(2) Budget Billing
While you are on the phone with your electric company, go ahead and set up budget billing. This will equalize the payments throughout the year so you don’t have the wide fluctuations between summer and winter payments.
Technically it isn’t saving you money on electricity, but having a consistent amount to budget each month will allow you to save money by not needing to scramble and come up with extra cash when the bill is higher.
(3) Turning the AC warmer and turning the heater cooler
This past summer, I was trying to cut down regular bills wherever I could in an effort to save as much money as possible.
I found out the biggest electric expense was running the air conditioner, since I was already following the Time of Use schedule. Just by adjusting the air conditioner warmer by 1 degree, I could cut up to 3% of my usage!
So instead of keeping the air conditioner at 76 degrees during peak hours, I bumped the temperature up to 79 or 80. It was a little on the warm side, but bearable with a fan.
As soon as those peak hours were over, we turned our air conditioner down and cooled the place during non-peak hours, which in turn helped keep cool a little longer into the peak hours of the next day.
Since the budget billing is adjusted every quarter, I didn’t see any cost savings until after the summer was over, but when I did, whoa it was a pretty substantial drop!
Normally, I pay between $150-145/month on my electric bill for an upstairs apartment in Arizona, but the amount has been stable at $147 for a while. After the adjustment, the bill is now running $133/month- a savings of $14!
Now that it is winter, I am trying to keep the costs lower by keeping the apartment a little cooler and turning the heater off completely at night. We sleep better anyways when it is cool.
I do live in a very moderate winter climate and understand this method may not be entirely feasible everywhere. However, if you can adjust the heat to be a little cooler than normal, you will save money while bundling up with an extra sweater.
Note from Tiffany: Charissa inspired me to look at the rates for our current electric company and as of this writing, the cost per kWh when you exceed 650 kWh DOUBLES in the summer months. Seriously! So when you’re wondering why people say to adjust the air conditioning to save money, it’s because the electric company is literally charging more to use it!
(4) Cooking habits
When you cook with a crock pot, a pressure cooker or the microwave, you use less electricity than using the stove or the oven – even if you are cooking for a longer period of time with the crock pot.
Since I don’t pay attention to the Time of Use plan when I cook dinner, being intentional about making food in these appliances help cut costs down in the kitchen.
If you do use the stove or the oven, consider double cooking. Instead of heating up the oven twice for dinner and dessert, pop them both in at the same time or one right after the other if the temperature differs.
Another way to double cook, is to make double of the same dish. You can either use the food for leftovers or freeze for later. Either way, it will mean at least one other night you will not be cooking dinner.
Note from Tiffany: I don’t mean to keep interrupting here, but Charissa wrote an AWESOME post on how she stretches one chicken into 31 meals for just $1 each. Her comment about making double of the same dish got me thinking- what if you did double of her whole chicken plan? You’d save electricity of course, but you’ll also have 31 meals made just for the freezer!
(5) Turn off lights and unplug
Why is it that everyone forgets to turn off the lights when they leave a room? I am constantly turning off lights that I, and others leave on.
While you may not be able see the savings each time you turn off the light switch, it is a frugal habit and will contribute towards a lower electric bill over time.
You can also save up to 20% on your electric bill, like Tiffany did, by unplugging appliances that are not in use. I need to try this myself to see how much I can save.
Here are a few additional options on how to save more on your electric bill, if you are willing to spend some money first.
- Change your air filters every couple of months. As the air filters get dirty, the air flow through them is lessened, making your heater and AC work harder, thus requiring more use of electricity.
- You can also pay for an energy audit. Locally, the going price is about $100 and the audit will show you where you are wasting electricity the most.
- Buy a programmable thermostat to regulate the temperatures inside your home, especially for Time of Use plans.
- Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs tend to last longer and use a lot less electricity. Just be careful as these bulbs contain mercury.
It is possible to save money on your electric bill by doing a few simple things around the house, changing a couple of habits, and by making a couple of phone calls. The savings are not dramatic, but can certainly help decrease overall household expenses.
One thing I have found to be a money game changer is tracking your savings each month and putting it immediately towards your financial goal. For example, I have kept the amount for my electric bill at $150 in my budget and transfer the extra money into a savings account.
Tracking your savings will assure you that yes, you can save money on your electric bill. And if you find a solution to lights being left on… please tell me!
Interested in tracking your own savings? Check out my Savings Tracker worksheet here.
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Do you have any other creative ways to save on electricity?
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I live in an older building so we use window A/C units, but I’ve never used them! I’m totally fine opening my windows and running the fans. I keep water bottles in the fridge to help cool down (also drinking your 8 glasses helps regulate body temp). Sometimes I’ll break out the humidifier during the summer because it helps me stay cool. I eat a lot of salads of all sorts too – greens, pasta, bean, etc.
Also LED bulbs are expensive but chances are you’ll never have to replace them again!
I love the fresh air of opening windows and will keep them open as long as I can. I like your idea of keeping cold water in the fridge to help cool you down and using the humidifier to help with the heat.
It may not save us a ton of money, but I’ve been guilty of having the tv on “in the background” a lot of times when I’m alone. I’m make a conscious effort not to do that this year.
All of the advice about electricity pricing in this post made me realize I need to call our company and find out about time of use…
My computer is always on, even if I am doing something else. Hmm something to think about. The time of use savings really do add up over time.
A couple of things: Our power company had a program where they would send you free low flow shower heads and aerators, so we use less hot water. You can also usually turn it down a couple of degrees, or put it on a timer if you have a time of use program.
You can open your drapes during the day in the winter and close them at night for some extra solar heating in your house, and then in the summer close them during the day and open them at night. We use a convection oven instead of our regular oven for a lot of our cooking (it uses considerably less power and can even handle pizza!)
Emily, those are great tips! Thank you for sharing with us.
These are all really great and simple ways to save energy. We don’t think about it on a daily basis but putting some of these tips into habit form will make it wasy to save. Helping the environment is just an added bonus!
I’m single and I am only cooking for myself, but I started this a long time ago when I was working 2 jobs. I cook extra of one or 2 recipes on one day of the week so I have enough meals for the whole week. Then I only have to run my stove once and the rest of the week I’m just warming things up. plus if I’m on the go for work I can pack lunch and dinner in a lunch box to bring with me. You have to like eating the same thing all week for this to work but it works for me to save on the cost of running the stove and having healthy food to pack for work. I also have an electric roaster oven that I can plug in out on my porch if I have to make something requiring an oven and that way it doesn’t heat the house up.
We’ve been doing more of the “cooking once, eating twice” principle too Jenn. When my husband grills on the weekend, we load it up and pre-cook a ton of veggies to have ready for the week. Paired with a roast in the slow cooker and it’s so much cooler!
I often use a sun oven or a crockpot. When I use a crockpot, I put it on the back patio or in the garage so I don’t put more heat into the house.
I didn’t think about my cooking habits and how they affect my electric bill. Good suggestion. I also need to find a way to convince my husband to completely turn off his computer. It’s annoying and it costs us money!
Ok, I’ll share some advice in case you haven’t heard of it already. For those that leave lights on, yes there’s a solution to that. You can buy motion detectors to install in each socket so that if someone leaves something on the light will automatically shut off if no motion is detected within a certain amount of time. They usually have adjustments to how long they stay on after the last motion was detected, each motion detector is different. I think the average is like 30 seconds but it can be more.
To the person that says it drives them nuts that the computer gets left on. There’s a solution for that too which I also utilize. You can set a computer to go into sleep mode after a certain amount of time. If someone walks away from the computer and leaves it running it’ll fall asleep. Each computer is different with what you can and can’t do with it but so far they all can be set to sleep after being idle for a while as far as I know. Usually the settings are under Power Options and if you can’t locate that you should be able to just type a search on your computer and have it come up, and from there you should be able to figure out how to set it, you might want to or have to go to advanced settings to get more precise settings. For example my laptop, you can set when to have the display turn off and when to have it go into sleep mode, that’s where it almost shuts down completely but uses enough energy to remember where you left off. Might be better to just have it shut all the way down but my desktop for example doesn’t have that option for some reason. So I figured sleep mode is better than nothing. I usually have it dim about 5 minutes before shutting off the screen and then 5 or 10 minutes before going into sleep mode. You don’t have to use dim but I like to use the dim/screen shut off as a warning before it falls asleep and you can use it for other reasons too but not every computer has the dim feature such as my desktop. I still have the screen set to shut off a few minutes before the computer goes to sleep just as a warning if someone’s still using it. If not it’ll go to sleep. How much energy you’ll save by setting up for sleep mode depends on a lot of things but either way if you ask me it’s a lot better then just leaving it running x amount of time before someone discovers it’s still on. I can’t tell you how many times my parents have left their computer running because they often just walked away from it, get distracted or whatever. I did them a favor and had it set to sleep after 15 minutes of being idle. I’m sure it’s helping with the electric bill.
Another bit of advice about lights. Something I recently started utilizing in the past few years is timers. I mostly use them for holiday lights but sometimes other stuff as well. Before I started using timers the holiday lights would get left on 24/7, so I can’t imagine how much electricity was wasted because we don’t need them on during the day. And not only that but sometimes someone would randomly unplug them and when night comes they’re not on so I had to plug them back in, that always annoyed me. Using a timer makes it pretty much handsfree, don’t have to flip a switch or anything. Even better are the ones that have a photocell because they automatically turn on when it’s dark enough and off when light enough, they’re mainly made for being outdoors but you can make them work indoors as well if you point the photocell at the window. With a photocell it automatically adjusts on a daily basis so you don’t have to change the times, we all know that the amount of light there is during the day changes, everyday. So eliminating the need to adjust the timer is pretty nice.
Some other random tips, turn down your refrigerator. It won’t fight so hard to keep your stuff cool and that saves energy by reducing the upkeep of that temp. The plus to that personally is that it makes your ice cream softer which I personally enjoy, I don’t need rock hard ice cream, even in the summer.
Also dryer balls are supposed to help shorten the time it takes to dry your clothes, the plus is it makes your clothes softer too. It helps that our new dryer automatically detects how dry the clothes are and adjusts the amount of time needed to dry. Keep the filters clean from lint. The one time I hadn’t cleaned it in a while and it kept adding how much time was left before it was done and I figured out it wasn’t drying because the moisture couldn’t escape, cleaned it, and it was done in 5 minutes instead of 25 that it originally said was left.
You’re welcome.