To help people think about energy savings and lowering utility bills, we like to break down home energy use into five categories:

• Idle: costing you even when not in use
• Recurring: done daily at the same time
• Summer Cooling: cools the home down
• Winter Heating: warms the home up
• Variable: no regular pattern

Why do we like to break your energy bill into these five usage categories?

When we help people reduce electricity or gas bills, it’s much easier to identify the quick wins this way. When you go to a nutritionist, she will put food into food groups for the same reason. It’s much easier to think about what you eat in terms of vegetables, meats, carbohydrates etc. More importantly, it’s a good way to identify “empty calories” and where to focus on changing what you eat for much better nutrition. Likewise, we are looking for unnecessary electric use in your home first. The waste that gives you very little or no enjoyment, comfort or utility.

Idle Load

We start with idle load first because it’s the equivalent of empty calories. Not long ago, we did a 3 part series on idle load. Idle load is sometimes called “standby power” or “vampire load” instead. We sometimes refer to it as “always on” … and you didn’t even know. A home has a lot of devices always running in the background. By identifying them, we can use $20 devices to cut electric cost month after month. Most people don’t even notice the change, except for a lower bill.

Recurring Load

Recurring energy use occurs at the same time every day. In a modern efficient home, energy in this category might power a pool or spa pump, outdoor lighting and other electric devices on timers. Appliances contributing to category are usually on timers you can set. One quick way to lower your energy bill is to shorten the duration. Because these devices come on every day and are often forgotten about, little savings per day add up fast. Some people are blown away how turning off outdoor lighting an hour earlier each night can cut their electricity bill.

Summer Cooling & Winter Heating

People new to energy savings and conservation are usually the most familiar with the cost of cooling or warming the home. We believe it’s because they are the most noticeable on your bill. Unless you live in a temperate climate, it’s not uncommon to see electricity or gas bills double–if not triple, during hot summer months or cold winter months.

Also, people can feel the effects of adjusting the thermostat. This can be good and bad. The good is that people notice, but the bad is that people have misconstrued notions of how to get energy savings from their air conditioning or home heating system. They instantly think of $5,000 A/C upgrades or the need to sacrifice comfort, e.g. shivering and wearing parkas in the house.

This is hardly the case. Check out our two part series on ways to lower high summer electric bills. We recommend focusing on the cheap and easy stuff first by doing things where you “get the bang for your buck.” And when we say “buck”, we mean both literally dollars but also skimping on comfort. People have the right to be comfortable, and they shouldn’t have to commit to expensive upgrades that take more than a decade to pay themselves off.

Variable Use

Variable energy use is pretty much everything else. What remains are all the devices in your home that you or your family sometimes use throughout a month. Like cooling and heating, people are aware of these activities, i.e. they can “feel” them. Again, there’s a misconstrued notion that energy savings is about sacrifice, and people wrongly believe that means they can’t do their favorite activities around the home.

When looking at variable use, we educate people on what devices use how much electricity. That’s all. The goal is to identify few of those activities that just aren’t worth it. For example, if you have a strong electric clothes dryer, and once you know that it takes thousands of watts to power that thing, you might not want to use it just to dry a few underwear.

Background and Foreground

Background energy costs come from the things you “don’t know” or aren’t aware of anymore. Foreground energy costs come from the things you “know” because you can feel them.

The first two use categories are background. They are the stuff that are “always on” and the daily recurring stuff. They have become so automatic that people aren’t even aware of them anymore. By looking at what are “always on” and recurring, we can identify the worthless costs to get quick easy savings that last on and on. The beauty is that people don’t have to think about it again because it just fades back into the background. Even better, most of these changes are unnoticeable because they don’t affect or barely change the comfort of your home or lifestyle.

The last three categories are foreground. People can feel the temperature in their home, and they know when they are blow-drying their hair or watching their favorite TV show. People too often believe energy savings mean sacrificing comfort and enjoyment in their home. This is not true and not what we recommend. Likewise, diets that starve people or bar them from carbohydrates don’t last and don’t work. The key to saving on energy bills for foreground energy use is just to identify the huge power hogs you didn’t even know were. More often than not, people would just naturally cut the “really bad junk” that isn’t worth the mediocre enjoyment or comfort.