Category: Energy Hog

I preface this story by saying I bought Sense to better understand how I was using energy, and as a tool to help manage my consumption. My electric bill is stupid high every month, and to add insult to injury the utility sends a usage chart every month as comparison to neighbors and energy efficient users. It’s like a running joke, because I have never met anyone who was not pegging the chart as a big user.

Like many people, who replace kitchen refrigerators, I moved the old one to the garage for spillover, drinks, convenience. The power utility is regularly saying old fridges are energy hogs and should be discarded, but I never knew how bad.

What I found was the garage fridge would run for 100 minutes, turn off for 10-15 minutes, then run for another 100 minutes, all day long! The alert I had set up to notify me when the fridge ran over a certain time was stabbing me many times every day, so much so that I disabled it, as adding more time to it didn’t help much. I was able to use the run-time data to convince my wife that we should get rid of the fridge. We already had one in the basement, plus a large wine fridge, neither of which have comparable energy usage.

Before Sense, I knew my sump pump ran a number of times each day. I didn’t realize how often it was really running. I discovered that the pump regularly ran 30 to 50 times each day. And that was on a non-rainy day.

This knowledge helped me to recognize that I better get a new sump pump, since the old one was at least 20 years old, and include a battery back-up to boot.

Given savings are a low estimate, based on the the possibility of a flooded basement.

Over the years I have changed many conventional bulbs to LED bulbs when on sale for many styles. I replaced 10x 8ft garage lights, outdoor spot lights, inside bulbs in many fixtures and have saved a large amount in our electricity bill. Our standalone generator starts up much easier when needed. I have over time been able to identify different usage to label areas on upgrading better appliances when needed.

We moved into a house that has 45 recessed light fixtures. I installed Sense and was rather shocked to see how much power we were using at night. I found that they all had 85 watt incandescent bulbs. Talk about energy hogs. I immediately replaced them with sealed LED trims which use 9.4 watt and put out more lumens of light and less heat. If we figure that only 25% of them are on at a time for about four hours a night that comes out to about $150 to $200 a year in reduced electric consumption. We also replaced all the outside lighting with LEDs although I don’t think that is saving any money as we now keep many on all night for security as they don’t use nearly the light of the 85-150 watt bulbs that were in them before.

I had 10 can lights in the living room ceiling with old incandescents, and I turned them on while looking at the Sense monitor. Bam! 600 watts. I went through the entire house and checked every light bulb, then took the list to Lowes and spent $500 to replace every incandescent bulb with LEDs. That was another $40-$50 per month off the utility bill.

I found out our 20-year-old resistance electric water heater would run for an hour or 2 at 900 watts. I researched water heaters and found one that runs like a heat pump using about a third of the power – only 300W vs 9000W, with an energy sticker of $100 per year. I knew the old water heater would fail suddenly so I decided to plan ahead, buy the new one and install it. My hot water heating bill went from $200 to $160 per month.