Do-It-Yourself – Home Energy Audits

TIMES INT'L

By: K. Anthony Bissoon

Best wishes for the New Year!! Welcome back to Do-it-Yourself, where we help empower you in getting things around your home done yourself where possible, saving you time and money and helping you to a safer more comfortable home. It is most usual for everyone to splurge around the holidays, I figured that now would be an opportune time to start a series on energy audits, given that you will most likely have just paid your most expensive energy bill, and of course, the New Year will bring a chance for resolutions and improvements through practicing of better habits.
But before we get down to brass tacks as they say, we should go over some of the things you should do first.
You should learn to be familiar with your energy bill, well all utility bills for that matter. Utility companies use technical and other jargon that is sometimes not easily followed by the usual consumer.
Especially so, you should make a conscious effort to understand what the rates, how much energy you are being billed for, your average consumption etc. Usually the reverse side of the bill will explain every term hopefully in a language that’s easy for the non-technical person to read and understand. Basically you should understand how to follow how much energy you are being billed for, generally a month, what the rates are…both fixed and variable.
Utility companies usually check your meter and bill you accordingly, however they sometimes do estimated bills, so watch out, you need to have a fair idea what your energy demands are monthly, granted that there will be some variations seasonally like over the holidays etc. This applies to post-paid consumers, if you are pre-paid, then you don’t have to worry about this.
In the next instalment, I will go through with you, how to estimate what your energy charges are, so you can make comparisons with your bill, and trim off where necessary, those areas where you are wasting energy so you can reduce your bill and save some money. So, strap on your calculators and pencil, we will be doing some number crunching next time!

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