Monday, September 10, 2007

Electricity Challenge - Update 1

Well we're now at the completion of our first week of the electricity challenge.

The figures look great. Our average daily usage has dropped from 18.45 to 15.68 and average daily hot water usage has dropped from 3.8 to 2.6.

Unfortunately, we were also away for 2 days last week. LOL. So that would account for the drop in usage. :-)

The kids came with me this morning to see where the electricity meter was and how I read it which was great (they were actually ready for school early - amazing!).

In my mind, this challenge is as much about raising our awareness of not wasting electricity as anything and I think it'll take a while before the kids form new habits of turning lights off and opening their curtains etc. I'm hoping by filling in our form each week, it'll serve as a regular reminder to them (without me specifically nagging them).

At this stage I've set our form up to run the challenge for 10 weeks. So we'll see what happens over that time frame.

For the form I used a basic table in Word format with the headings running across the top line:

Date : Last week : Today : Week's Usage : Average Daily Usage : Last Week Hot Water : Today Hot Water : Week's Usage : Average Daily Usage


It would be so wonderful if we *could* get our average daily usage down to around the 15kWh per day. Not sure how realistic that is. Whatever improvements we make will be good though. :-)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

that's great that you showed your children the meter and how it's read/works ~ it'll help with their understanding of the concept as a whole.
Great minds think alike! ~ this morning I blogged about our family's consumption too and there is a link showing appliance usuage and consumption which is interesting :)

Grizabella said...

Congrats on getting your usage down, cutting back on un-neccasary usuage is on my to-do list..... look forwad to see your progress