Bath

What luxury. Steaming hot water, peace, quiet.

But at what cost? We have an old, electric hot water tank. Surely *using it* is non-ecofriendly?

Well, with the wonderful Hydro One Time of Usage meters, I can see exactly how much - down to the hour - how much electricity I'm using.

Last night I ran a bath at about 3 minutes to 7pm. The ToU meter shows 4.06kWh for 7-8pm last night.

7pm is when off-peak clicks in here, so assuming little other power usage happened in that hour (it didn't - just the usual, fridge, fan for the forced air system), a bath costs about 4kWh. With a 20 year old hot water tank.

The cost of that bath is about 25 cents, then. Our average daily usage is about 10kWh, maybe a touch higher. I can certainly see that our forced-air system is using a few kWh per day - our lowest usage in the last month has been 6-7kWh compared to 3-4 earlier in the year.

What can I do to save energy (save taking fewer baths - something I only do rarely anyway!)? Well, I put some insulating strip round the front door where there was a definite draft. I still need to block the old letterbox and cover the single-pane window on the front door. And put some stripping round the back door.

The old water tank could be replaced by a much more efficient version, but I believe it would be uneconomical to do so - I will do it when this one blows up. Our average daily hot water usage is probably in the region of 2kWh. Cutting this in half... just not worth it.

We need better curtains; we could use a fancy new furnace with a better thermostat (the current one is entirely manual, so I have to turn it down when I go to bed, meaning it's chilly til someone gets up and turns it up in the morning!). Again, we'll replace the furnace when the current one dies as the savings are unlikely to ever be paid back.

Our gas bill for the last month was about $70 but they estimated high, I think. It'll be interesting to see if this goes above $100 in the midst of winter - probably. The system is only heating the house by 10-15 degrees C at the moment, and will have to work twice as hard when it gets really cold. I guess the snow will add insulation though. We'll see.

Yes. That is all.