We had a chat with Chris Hunt, an energy coach for HEA. He explains how he is an energy coach for Californian residents for free.

In part 4 of this series, Chris explains the key to reducing electricity and gas bills is not to give up your favorite stuff and lifestyle. The key to cutting utility bills is to identify and get rid of unnecessary waste. Residents are often relieved to find that it’s not really the wine cooler or something they are afraid to lose in a budget crunch. Worst yet, some people inherit home features that they have no idea would waste so much electricity.

Chris provides us some examples of outrageous unnecessary waste, including a complete car washer at someone’s house.

This is part 4 of the series. You can read part 3.

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TRAVIS:  You are giving a lot of examples of devices that just keeps on using electricity for nothing essentially.

CHRIS:  That’s right, that’s right. What happens with a pool set-up is they have two pumps normally and one is … one that just pushes the water around so it doesn’t get stagnant. And the second is literally a sweeper. You’ll actually see a crawling across the bottom of the pool floor and is picking up debris that has fallen into the pool. So all these pools will have two of these devices. And even in California, people don’t use their pools for six months out of the year. But the device is still running for the entire 12 months and that’s just a waste. So you can basically say, “Look let’s turn it down for at least six months out of the year. And then when it comes to being June or whatever time you want to get back in the pool, we’ll turn it back up again, if you need it.”

TRAVIS:  How often do you find these big wastes versus obvious stuff like replacing the refrigerator or stop drying clothes? Because those are things that I have to give up, and it affects my lifestyle.  If it’s an instant hot water tap, it seems like it’s just sucking up electricity for no reason. And just turning that off (when not needed) is great. How often does that happen?

CHRIS:  That’s a really good point. I try to encourage people that there are certain things that are part of their lifestyle that we’re not going to change. They’re afraid. And I’ll be frank, a lot of the times the husband will say to me, don’t tell my wife it’s the wine cooler. He doesn’t want me to say, “You know what, that wine cooler is the biggest hog in your house.” And it turns out, it never is. It really never is. They’re actually very efficient, the ones that are either under the counter, so they’re only a couple of feet high, or the ones that are even floor standing. Even the ones that are wine cellars, because wine coolers are rarely opened. They may be opened once a day or once every two days. They’re kept at 57 degrees and there’s not a lot of energy to keep it at that temperature. So, I’ll reassure somebody that we’re not going to change their lifestyle, because they won’t want any energy coach to come in and tell them they have to live like a hermit.

CHRIS:  We just want to find out where the waste is. And that’s my most salient point. I can go into these homes that have $2,500 a month electric bills, and believe it or not, the homeowner says, “I can pay the bill, I just want to know where it’s going.” And what I find that we have in common is, even though that homeowner can afford that outrageous bill, they are also upset about the waste. They’re simply saying, “I don’t like the fact that $500-$800 a month is being wasted on something that I don’t realize is going on. And I wanna eliminate that.” So that’s the way that I get people to actually make the changes. Because I convince them, we can find the waste and we can eliminate or mitigate it. Here’s an example too. Electric cars are becoming much more popular.

CHRIS:  But some people find that, they have turned off the scheduling software. So you get an electric vehicle, it’s got software and it automatically says, “Look, I’m going to start charging at one minute past nine o’clock,” so one minute passed the peak hour or 11 o’clock, whatever it is for your area. And sometimes what’ll happen is, the person who says, “I need that electric car right now at 11 o’clock or two o’clock this afternoon,” and it’s 11 o’clock in the morning and it’s not fully charged yet, so I’m just going to plug it in right now. I’m going to turn off the scheduling software. They forget to turn the scheduling software back on. So even though they put the plug in and they think that every day at 11 o’clock it’s actually starting to charge their car, it turns out that it’s just charging the car whenever they plug it in. So I’ve come to people’s houses and said, “Look, something’s going on in the middle of the afternoon that you can’t account for and I can’t account for, and I think it’s the electric vehicle.”

CHRIS:  And they’ll swear to me, that it’s on a schedule. And I’ll say, “well, let’s test it.” And sure enough, they find out that it’s off scheduled and it’s being charged in the middle of the afternoon when the rates are really expensive. So that’s the type of thing I try to find is not to say, “Let’s not charge your car,” or “Let’s not use an electric car, Let’s find out what’s going on with your electric car.” So it’s not going to be costing you a small fortune to charge it.

TRAVIS:  Oh, okay. So chances are people get to keep their stuff?

CHRIS:  Yes, yes. And that’s a good way of looking at it, because I will find houses, where they have a main refrigerator, a good sized one, like a subzero in the kitchen. But they also have a small outdoor kitchen with one of those small refrigerators under the counter, plus an old refrigerator in the garage. And I’ll say, “Look, I understand that you want the conveniences, but if you’re not using them, let’s offload one or two of them. So if you go out to the garage and it is filled with food, that’s fine. That means they’re using it and they’re saving money by buying in bulk, and I completely get that. Same thing with a freezer. But if it turns out that it’s the little refrigerator under the, or next to the fire pit outside, is only being used a few months out of the year, let’s unplug that one because they are not efficient. So, I never encourage people to have to do a wholesale, the equipment upgrade, but if you’re not going to use something, let’s make sure that we don’t have it draining energy as well.

TRAVIS:  These are pretty wealthy people. What if I’m just a … I’m a guy, but my bill is like 200 to300 bucks a month. Like during the summer or winter or something. And normally it’s like 150, can I use an energy coach or do I have to be rich only?

CHRIS:  No, not at all. Matter of fact, I’ve had some great successes recently with people who had exactly that type of bill. They were paying 300 bucks a month and they couldn’t figure it out. And they were trying to … they were basically living like hermits because they were turning the heat down, they were turning the lights off, et cetera. And they were the people who had that runaway electric floor, and they didn’t realize it. There were two different bathrooms that had electric floors or electric mats underneath the floor. And the beauty of that, supposedly, is that when you wake up at three o’clock in the morning and you stumble into the bathroom, the floor is already cold … the floor is already warm, as opposed to that cold tile you would get otherwise. But once they found out what it was costing them, they said, “Yeah, let’s turn this off completely. I can get a pair of slippers.”

CHRIS:  So that … each one of those bathrooms could be as much as 30 to 40 bucks a month, and you weren’t getting any value of it. The temperature was set at 58 degrees. So it wasn’t like it was exactly warm and toasty when you walked in there, but it was still burning 500 watts an hour for each one of those two bathroom floors. So that’s the type of thing that I find all the time and they … and 300 bucks a month is actually not that bad a bill, but we took that bill down … I took $100 off their bill just this past month. So they were thrilled.

TRAVIS:  Wow. $100 dollars a month, wow.

CHRIS:  Yeah. They went from $300 to $200. So that’s $1,200 a year and over 12, 10 years. That’s a lot of money, actually. And it’s just by reducing waste, just not by doing anything else.

TRAVIS:  Hey, can you share some of the crazier ones that you’ve found? I mean you mentioned some last time we talked. I thought they were just kind of hilarious and just kind of shocking.

CHRIS:  Yeah, I’ve run into houses where they’ve had huge aquariums. Just a set up I saw a few weeks ago where there were two tanks. One was upstairs in the living room where you can see it and there were some nice exotic fish in there, but there was another tank equally the same size. And I say a good, 100 gallon tank both upstairs and downstairs. And downstairs was where all the pumps were, and it would circulate this water and send it up to the pump, to the aquarium in the top room. But nobody was using it. A lot of these houses, these aquariums are off by themselves. So you might look at it for a few minutes, but you’re not spending the whole day for it. So, I don’t want to be cruel, but that’s kind of a waste of energy, just to have these fish swimming around in here for the moments that you may be looking at them.

CHRIS:  A good example of that is very similar, is Koi ponds. I’ve done houses where people had fish and their Koi ponds have very expensive fish. And the kindest thing I could actually do for them is to bring in a raccoon. Because these fish were huge. Nobody was getting any enjoyment out of them. But to aerate that pond 24/7 was costing them a small fortune and to keep these fish going. So that was just–to me–a complete waste, that people bought the house that already had a Koi pond and they kept it going, but it didn’t make any sense. Other people I know had bought houses and were stunned to find they had a $2,500 or $1,800 a month electric bill.

CHRIS:  And there’s various things that are doing that. For example, I mentioned the bathroom heated floors, there’s other types of heated floors as well, and one is called a radiant floor heat. And this is where water is heated and sent through a pipe that basically snakes back and forth through the floor in your living room, kitchen, dining room, et cetera. What happens then is, you not only have to heat the water and send it through the floor pipes, but you actually have to have zones set up in your house as well. I did a house just last week that had 21 different zones for heating and the catch with radiant heat is, it’s true that it’s nice and warm and comfortable all the time, but these people didn’t want to have it on in certain rooms of the house. So they were always hitting the button, the thermostat trying to get it warmer.

CHRIS:  And it takes a while for a floor to warm up when you’re sending hot water down through underneath the tile. They were using space heaters in addition to effect that they had radiant heat floors in their house.

TRAVIS:  No way.

CHRIS:  It was crazy. The space heater is either 800 watts on low or 1600 watts when it’s actually on high. So here’s an expensive home with radiant heat and they still were using space heaters like you would in your local apartment to try to get it warm in the morning. One house I did, I’m looking at the panel and it’s basically a commercial panel. This is a house that has an 800 amp set-up. And I look at one of the labels for one of the circuits and there’s like six circuit panels and it says, “car washer.” And I look at the ceiling, and I turn to the owner, he’s standing next to me and I said, “You have a car washer in your garage?” And he said, “Not in this garage.” He had another garage around the corner.

TRAVIS:  Wait you said a car washer? What is that?

CHRIS:  A car washer. He actually had the water, and the pump and the frame in the ceiling, in the garage around the corner. So you could drive your car in and actually get your car washed.

TRAVIS:  No way. You mean like when I go to the gas station?

CHRIS:  Yes.

TRAVIS:  In his house?

CHRIS:  Yes.

TRAVIS:  That’s funny.

CHRIS:  Those are just good examples of people who have these outrageous bills and outrageous gadgets. And again, this guy who inherited the house or bought the house and inherited the bill, he didn’t want that. He was looking for ways to cut it out. And I did as much as I could. For example, he had this home automation system that was running in a utility room and there were so many racks of equipment for all the lighting, for the Lutron lighting, these vantage lighting systems essentially. And the cooling in each room that I couldn’t turn it off. It was like the nerve center for the entire house. And it was running not only all the time, but it was running hot. There was an air conditioner in the utility room, that continuously cool down the equipment that was running all the time.

Continue reading Part 5: Controls and Smart Home for $1000