One of the EV FUD talking points circulating presently is that the'll cause your electric bill to shoot through the roof. I first heard that last summer, about the time we decided to purchase a LEAF. As a result, I set a goal to reduce our electrical usage by 1.2 mega watt hours over a 12 month period. That sounds like a lot, but we did achieve the goal and we did it without installing solar panels or fundamentally changing our lifestyle. So to reduce 1.2 mega watt hours in a year, it means you need to reduce an average of 100 kWh per month or 3.3 kWh per day, now that seems more achievable doesn't it? Here's what we did.
Tools help. You can't manage what you can't measure. We use an indoor/outdoor wireless digital thermometer/hygrometer. That way we know when we need to shut down the whole house fan, when the temperature outside exceeds the temperature inside. We also have a smartmeter from SDG&E and it's tied into Google Powermeter. So we can see our hourly electrical use and this is summed daily, weekly, and monthly.
Below is a post I read from another blog. It appears this guy was thinking along the same lines. He mentions the term "Negawatts", I think that is a great term!
- - Hang clothes to dry on the clothes rack - usie the electric dryer as little as possible
- Use whole house fan, instead of air conditioner
- Only run full loads of wash
- Close vents to all rooms, except the main living area, and only air condition that area (reduced area to cool by 50%)
- Use air conditioning to reduce humidity to about 50% (you'll need a hygrometer) turn it off regardless of the temperature. Use fans in the rooms you are occupying
- Use CFL or LED in all lighting you use regularly
- Check your refrigerator temperature settings. We keep ours at medium. Keep your freezer full but not overstuffed
- Eliminate vampire power. We unplug the TV at night and no charger is left on after it has charged the batteries.
Tools help. You can't manage what you can't measure. We use an indoor/outdoor wireless digital thermometer/hygrometer. That way we know when we need to shut down the whole house fan, when the temperature outside exceeds the temperature inside. We also have a smartmeter from SDG&E and it's tied into Google Powermeter. So we can see our hourly electrical use and this is summed daily, weekly, and monthly.
Below is a post I read from another blog. It appears this guy was thinking along the same lines. He mentions the term "Negawatts", I think that is a great term!
Charles Whalen on another blog said:In the 5 and a half years that my wife and I have been driving our Toyota RAV4-EVs, one of the most frequent questions I’ve gotten from people is ... “How much did your electric bill go up when you got your electric cars?”
People are always confounded and have a puzzled look on their face when I answer that our electric bill actually went DOWN after we got our EVs. How could that be possible, they wonder?
Well, the answer is that we undertook a whole series of household energy efficiency upgrades at the same time that we bought our two EVs, with a result that the amount of electricity saved by all the energy efficiency upgrades was greater than that used for charging our two EVs, such that the net effect ended up being a net reduction in electric consumption.
And that’s without having even done any solar (yet).
So, yes, it's actually possible to produce all the electricity needed to charge an electric car solely from "Negawatts".