Category Archives: Money Saving

Oh Why, Oh Why You’re So High?

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Guess what I’m talking about, my energy bill!

Can you imagine living without electricity?  I can’t.  It powers my alarm clock to which I wake up in the morning, makes my shower water hot before I go to bed and everything in between.  Electricity, you are my savior!  But it doesn’t come cheap, every month energy company sends me a bill for the luxury of having electricity.  For some people the bill amount is surprising, for others it’s expected.  But wouldn’t it be nicer to understand how this figure gets to be, so you can have a better control over your energy bill?

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Estimate Energy Use By Appliance

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You can calculate power usage of any appliance by finding a label that shows how much current (in amps or A) and the voltage (in volts or V) it uses. The amount of voltage appliance draws can vary, depending on the appliance. Maximum voltage is what you usually find on the appliance’s info panel. For example, a clothes dryer has multiple power settings, depending on the temperature setting for a given load of clothes. So voltage draw depends on the dryer’s operating temperature. Higher voltage draw is required with higher temperature.

In some cases the label tells you how many watts (W) an appliance uses to operate. A watt is a product of amp and volt (W = A * V).  In this case you don’t need to look for volts or amps.  Such labels are usually found on the door or the door opening of the dishwasher, clothes dryer, on the back side of the iron…  In case you are having a hard time finding it on the appliance itself, you can find it in the appliance’s operation manual.  Use this formula to calculate how much power it uses in kilowatt-hours (KWHRs). One kilowatt-hour equals to 1000 watt-hours. For your estimation you will need to know how many hours (HRs) per month the appliance is running.

KWHRs = A * V / 1000 * HRs    or

KWHRs = W / 1000 * HRs

Keep in mind that even if the appliance’s ON switch is on, it doesn’t mean that it draws the same amount of power all the time it stays on.  For example, even though refrigerator is plugged into the wall all the time, it turns on and off automatically.  So, when it is ‘ON’ (you hear a light buzzing sound coming from it), it draws the power according to its label, and when it is ‘OFF’, it draws a very insignificant amount of power.
Calculations for estimating power use by the water heater are more complicated, but if you are curious enough, then read on.

To find out how much power appliance is using due to its hot water use, you need to know how many gallons of water your appliance uses, the temperature of your water heater’s thermostat setting and the temperature of cold water in your house.
Use following calculation:

(# of gallons of water) * 8.33 * (hot water temp F – cold water temp F) / 3413 = #KWHRs used

To estimate how much money it costs to operate, find out how much your electric company charges per kilowatt-hour from your energy bill.

# KWHRs * $/KWHR = $

Example:
According to the label, my dishwasher uses 120 volts and 2.7 amps and say it takes approximately 1 hour to complete the wash cycle.  My dishwasher is Energy Star, so it uses 4 gallons of hot water per cycle.  Since I live in Florida, I’m assuming my cold water is 80 F and my water heater’s thermostat is set at 125 F.  My electric company charges 10.5 cents per kilowatt-hour.  So a load of washing dishes in my dishwasher costs me:
120 volts * 2.7 amps / 1000 * 1 hour = 0.324 KWHRs
(4 of gallons of water) * 8.33 * (125 F – 80 F) / 3413 = 0.439 KWHRs
(0.324 + 0.439) KWHRs * $0.105 = $0.08

How I Decorated My Nursery Cheaply

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It seems like we would do anything for our little miracles that we are about to bring into this world. Baby paraphernalia that people used to do fine without (and still do in most of the world) is now considered to be a necessity. Hats off to the baby industry marketers!  They know exactly how to get into the wallets of the emotional, hormone-filled expectant mothers and the nervous and excited fathers-to-be.  New parents can easily blow thousands of dollars on baby items, anything from designer bibs and cute little socks to dressers, cribs and changing tables.

When it comes down to the core of it all, do babies really care whether they are wearing a new Disney onsie or the one that was worn by their older cousins? Do they care whether the crib they are sleeping in, cost you an arm and a leg at Babies’r'Us, or if you bought it at a garage sale for a fraction of the cost. You know the answer, babies don’t care! As long as the baby industry has you convinced that you “need”, “can’t live without” everything that they are so successfully pushing on you, they will stay very successful.

I guess the difference between me and many other parents is that I draw a more defined line between “want” and “need”, “necessary” and “optional”. So anyways, here is the story of how I decorated my nursery.

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GROCERY BILL CHALLENGE

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Every week I am faced with the same ordeal — grocery shopping.  Over the last couple of months the grocery prices have noticeably gone up.   I have been a loyal customer to Publix, our local supermarket chain, for as long as I lived here, which is over 16 years.  These stores are practically everywhere in Florida, they have their own line of organic foods and the bagger will even help bring and load groceries into the car…  Despite all these wonderful services, our escalating food bill made me look for alternatives.

So for the past couple of weeks I have been doing my grocery shopping at Wal-Mart.  I did notice a smaller grocery bill, but I haven’t been able to really compare apples to apples to find out the actual difference.  So on October 27 I decided to do just that.  I did my regular grocery shopping at Wal-Mart and since I had to go to Publix to pick up couple of other things, I checked out their prices for the same groceries I bought at Wal-Mart.
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