The BudgeX Blog

There has never been a more proactive time than now to change your habits and “go green.”  Recently, the green movement has been sweeping across the nation, and it’s not going to stop any time soon.  Fortunately, if you own a home and pay for utility bills, there are a lot of benefits in it for you to “save green while you go green.” Earlier I wrote about a neat trick to get huge savings on your cable or satellite bill.  Today I will show you a few simple methods to shave several dollars per month from those gas and water bills.

Analyze Your Utility Usage and Cut Down on the Big Players

If you’re like me, every time you open up a gas & electric or water bill– or any bill for that matter– you wonder what the heck you did to make it so expensive.  The unfortunate truth is that utility bills are here to stay, and we’re going to have to keep paying them.  So let’s take the next best route to happiness: cutting the cost of these bills down as much as possible.

There are several general residential energy-saving tips that you should implement, and I have included a few links at the end of this post that explain these processes in more detail, but there is one strategy in particular that will help you achieve huge savings per month and give you additional transparency in your utility costs: analyzing your utility’s usage and cutting down on the biggest factors.  These can be broken down into two categories:

• Water
• Lights

For cutting down on water, I highly recommend using this Water Use Calculator to see how your water bill breaks down in your house.  It has been extremely helpful in giving me transparency as to what appliances use the most water, and how much I would potentially be saving by cutting back.  Before I went through this procedure, my roommates and I were incorrectly thinking that it made a big difference to do things like turn off the water while we put soap on our hands.  Turns out that flushing the toilet just once can potentially counter all our faucet-conscious efforts for almost two weeks.  One flush!  In the end I’m saving about $35 per month on my bill just by doing this process once.  That’s $420 per year! Go through the calculator yourself and see where your water is going.

I included lights in the mix because it is important for you to gain transparency into how much your lights are costing you per month.  It turns out that it’s not that much if you’re using CFL or LED bulbs.  If you aren’t using energy-efficient bulbs, check out the resource links below and switch out your bulbs!  It should be the first thing on your list.  Turning off lights when they’re not in use is obviously a good habit, but just like my water story, the lights on your gas & electric bill are the faucets of your water bill.  Attack the big dogs for the bigger rewards.  Happy saving!

Resources:

Residential Energy Saving Tips from FlexYour Power

Winter Gas Saving Tips from Paciic Gas & Electric

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