What The Toot!

I am a strong proponent and advocate of green and sustainable living and I try to lessen my damage to the environment every day. Recently, I have changed several habits of mine regarding the use of electricity and the results are clear with my recent electricity bill. I have scanned portion of it for your enjoyment:

If you didn’t notice anything, look closer at the graph and the Electricity used for the month of April 07. It clearly indicates from the graph that I have used a negative amount of electricity, -434kWhs for the month of April. The way my brother puts it, it’s as if “we are practically generating energy and selling it back to the grid.” It means that the electricity company has to pay us back instead, which is what they did. The charges for this month is -AUD$30.35.

The second graph on the bottom shows my greenhouse gas emissions for the month of April. Again, this shows an amount of -0.56 Tonnes of greenhouse gases released. In other words, we are un-releasing the gases. We are as if taking in 0.56 Tonnes of greenhouse gases, generated 434 kWh of energy and sold it back to the grid. This technology is in fact, available.

So, my advice to save the environment are:

1. Use less water by taking less bath, or shorter showers, or better yet, none at all. If you don’t feel you are dirty, there is no need to take a bath. Water heating constitute one of the biggest part of your energy bill. Less showers = less energy.
2. Use Compact Fluorescent Lamp (CFL). The initial investment will pay off soon as they use less energy, last longer and gives better lumen to price ratio. That means it is cheaper to produce the same amount of light compared to incandescent lightbulbs. Incandescent lightbulbs produces about 95% heat from the energy supplied to it.
3. Use energy efficient appliances such as washing machines, oven, refrigerator and others around the house. This will help save the environment as well as bring the electricity bill down.
4. Switch off your appliances completely by turning off the switch. Do not use the remote control to turn your TV or DVD player off as they will be on standby mode, which may use more electricity in total than when you are watching movies. The same applies for microwave ovens. Why waste energy putting them on standby mode?
5. Ask Google about it and it will reveal more truth about how to save the environment as well as use less electricity.
6. Watch An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore.

By the way, I did not alter the photo of my electricity bill in any way. It is how it is. The reason for it, I shall reveal in future post. Stay tuned!