I mean, honestly, how are we supposed to go a day without reading a tweet on our cell phone, or watching our favorite show on the television. It's unheard of right?
 | ||
| http://www.westerncape.gov.za/image/2004/2/eetip8_lights.jpg |
Well, would you feel the same way if you knew that the average U.S. home uses 30.16 kWh of energy a day? According to the Southern California Edison website www.sce.com, the average U.S. home uses 30.16 kWh each day. This is equal to the combined kinetic energy of 108 1-ton vehicles moving at 100mph. Would you feel different about conserving energy if you knew that using your air conditioner to cool your house uses 16.5 percent of your homes total energy consumption? It's something to think about huh!
I sat down with my family this weekend and told them that we were going to spend our entire Sunday using the bare minimum of our energy consuming products in our home. At first everyone was on board with this idea, UNTIL I told them the rules.
No cell phones
No computers
No television
No air conditioner
No driving our cars
Minimal light usage
No kitchen appliances
When the rules were laid out, their tones changed. Suddenly I had every excuse in the book being thrown my way on why we couldn't do this. I didn't give in though and we started our Sunday, April 29th, in the dark.
Saturday night, before we went to bed, my younger son Cameron and I unplugged all of the appliances in the kitchen, except for the refrigerator of course. Our day started off pretty slow. We all ate cereal and milk for breakfast. After we ate, we decided that we should do something that would keep our minds off of the items that we CANNOT use. We went into the backyard and painted the fence. This is something that we had planned to do in a few weeks anyway so it all worked out. The painting took a good portion of our morning, and thankfully it wasn't too hot out.
The rest of the morning and early afternoon, I did homework, not using my computer, but reading my textbooks. Cameron went outside to ride his bike with his friends, and Nick left with his girlfriend. He said that he wasn't breaking any rules since she was driving her car and he wasn't.
We made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch and they were pretty good. Without having any TV to watch or computer use, I had plenty of time to take a nap. It was wonderful. I haven't been able to do that in a long time.
Our day concluded with an evening walk around the neighborhood and then for dinner we barbequed hot dogs. I can't believe that we actually made it through the day without picking up our cell phones or watching the TV. It wasn't impossible and honestly it wasn't that hard!
I wanted to wait a couple of days before writing this blog, to see if we actually made a difference. SCE has this feature for their customers on their website www.sce.com, that gives you daily totals of energy usage for your house. You can even view hourly usage totals if you wish. It usually takes a couple of days for the website to be updated, that's why I had to wait a little while.
So here are the results!!
 |
| www.sce.com |
As you can see, we made a significant change from Sunday April 22nd to Sunday April 29th.
I shared this information with my family and we all agreed that we would try to conserve more energy on a daily basis.
The toughest part of this whole experience for all of us was not being able to sue our cell phones or computer. The easiest part was using less kitchen appliances and making meals that did not require turning on the stove or using the microwave.
My husband has made a promise to contact a few companies to get quotes for installing solar panels on the house. Hopefully this will help us try to conserve more energy without giving up the things that we love.
Why don't you give it a try!
This was so much fun to read! The ability for you too make it a household, group effort is amazing. I tried with my mother and brother, but Sunday is their television day so I was the only one away from it. I especially like how your son said he wasn't cheating since his girlfriend drove her car. That was cute! We seemed to share the overall feeling that television wasn't that hard to give up. Thank you for the Edison link too, that is very interesting. I will have to take a look at our usage soon and see what we can do to improve ours too. Good luck with the solar panel adventure for your house! :)
ReplyDeleteGreat post and I catch myself telling my kids the same thing: "turn the lights off when you leave the room!" lol so guess what we tend to turn into our parents at some weird stage in life :)
ReplyDelete