It is really happening! Our electricity bill has been consistently lowering over the past year and we are thrilled. I say "we" because of our family of five is involved in this process. It takes the whole family to be consistently working on the project.

It all happened one day when we opened our electricity bill and it was over $200. "There is no way we can afford to do this every month!" I said in a panicky voice. It was time to get everyone involved in this problem, so I had everyone look at the bill. This wasn't normal. Usually the bills aren't shared with the family...just paid and on to another task, but this high frivolous expenditure of energy had to stop. It was time to get the family to realize the situation they were causing. We all sat around the table and started discussing. This wasn't very normal in our house either because we usually did our own thing and sitting around the table was reserved for meals.

After everyone realized that this meeting could help them in the long run they started to get excited. Yes we really could do more fun things if we could save on the bills. This is what we as a family came up with:

Turn off the lights if they are not being used.
There was once a time a family member would run around the house turning off the lights and count out loud as the light was clicked off. Sometimes the count was as high as 7 or 8. That's a lot of unused light being wasted. Now we can't count past 1 or 2. Much better!

Stop staring into the fridge.
If your hungry decide what your going to eat, then get it a little quicker. We would catch ourselves staring into the fridge for over two or three minutes just deciding. If we multiplied that by 5 we were losing cold air all day long. It seemed we had everything memorized as to what was in the fridge, but did we have to stare it down to see if it's what we really wanted? The fridge staring stopped. Good.

Use cold water to wash clothes...except whites.
Now that our children are in their teenage years we decided that they should do their own laundry. It's good practice for college. We had to educate them no not stuffing clothes into the washer, not use too much detergent, wash things separately and not all together so the whites wouldn't turn gray. This saved on the clothes bill too..not just a new washer bill cause the teens broke it from over stuffing.

Check the lint trap.
Our dryer will work more efficiently when the lint trap is cleaned every time

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