April Challenge - Natural Gas
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
I mentioned last month that I was preparing to take on the utilities. I figured I'd start of slow with a monthly focus on each utility then check in monthly with an update on each, so see how we are doing at reducing our usage. This month I am focusing on gas, natural gas to the Americans :)
The reasons for reducing our dependence on utilities are many, not only does it help the environment it also saves US money! We already lots of things to save on Gas, the biggest thing being that I line-dry laundry when I can, which is pretty much 90% of the year here in Southern California. Other than that we have a gas water heater, gas heating system and gas oven.
The first stop in reducing any utility is figuring out what you're using right now! So I turned to our monthly statements from So Cal gas company. We have a baseline determined by California as the 'average' household use, anything above that gets charged more per therm, naturally, though I couldn't find anywhere that listed these so called baselines amounts online so I'll take their word for it! lol! The only reduction *I* as a consumer can change is the therm usage. Sticking near to baseline as possible (using previous year as a guide) and reducing the usage year on year, I'd say month on month but our season here is so erratic as you can see from the spreadsheet below. *Nov 2008 missing*
The first stop in reducing any utility is figuring out what you're using right now! So I turned to our monthly statements from So Cal gas company. We have a baseline determined by California as the 'average' household use, anything above that gets charged more per therm, naturally, though I couldn't find anywhere that listed these so called baselines amounts online so I'll take their word for it! lol! The only reduction *I* as a consumer can change is the therm usage. Sticking near to baseline as possible (using previous year as a guide) and reducing the usage year on year, I'd say month on month but our season here is so erratic as you can see from the spreadsheet below. *Nov 2008 missing*
Looking at the figures it's easy to see that we are using less therms year on year. In fact the only anomaly was Feb 2008 where we used more, not sure why that was? My goal for the future is to keep reducing our usage, comparing each month to the previous year. Now I know what we're using I can work on ways of reducing that usage next week!
Posted byDi Hickman at 9:28 AM
Labels: monthly challenge, utilities
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