Our manufacturing infrastructure has been farmed out to other countries over the last thirty years as we know.  Manufacturing or the processing of raw materials into finished products requires massive amounts of energy.  As we have lost our manufacturing base, the logical assumption would be that the demand for power would decrease proportionally.  In the American society, it has not done this.  Power demand and consumption has steadily increased.  This information can easily be researched by a government website such as this one, http://www.eia.doe.gov/ .

In 1971, the rock group Three Dog Night had a hit titled “Family of Man”.  There is a part in the lyrics of the song that says, “Prices are rising, the Devil’s to blame.”   It is easy to blame others for the misfortunes that we find ourselves in.  I am not so sure whether the devil is really to blame or not but one thing is for sure, we all dig deeper into our pockets to maintain our standard of living or what we perceive to be our lifestyle.

The average person asks what can I do to make things better or what can I do to pay less.  How can I help or what can I do to get involved?  I will answer that question along with the cop out I am only one person what can I do?  I am only one person also.  I had a vision with wind turbines and am making things happen.  There are other out in society with the same vision.  I am a businessman and an engineer.  I know how to design things and make them work.  Principles of economy are involved in design, manufacturing and marketing.  Okay, we are not all alike.  Not all of us end up doing the same thing as the other fellow.

Let’s look at a person as a business.   Your revenue stream is your paycheck.  You have what is called hard costs and soft costs that are associated with your living costs.  Your bills are in direct proportion to your income, how much of your income is left over is determined by the use of discretionary income and variable debt structure.  Fixed bills are costs such as rent or a mortgage or a car payment.  These are also a variable expense in a way depending upon where you choose to live and what you choose to drive.  The variable part of soft costs are how much electricity you use or how often you take a bath.  How you eat is also a variable cost.  Your discretionary income is what is left over after you put together all your composite expenses against your income. 

The best thing to do is to keep yourself as debt free as possible.  Granted this is not an easy thing to do.  Many of us look to raises and colas to give us more discretionary income.  That’s what all of us want, some more so than others.  You hear all kinds of economic advice from people telling you how to make more money through buying real estate or investing in some type of economic instrument.

The real secret that is used by businessmen and millionaires is to cut internal overhead and keep it low.  I am not referring to instant millionaires or millionaires of circumstance.  This does not apply in the case of sports figures, actors or lottery winners.  The great majority of these ‘millionaires’ end up either in bankruptcy or penniless.  Earned money understands what it costs to acquire and accumulate money.

That being said, look for ways to reduce your operating costs.  I am not referring to going into the generic bins found in a grocery store and eat food that tastes like cardboard.  Besides, your mortgage or rent costs, the next biggest bill is the utility bill.  There are a number of things which can be done to reduce energy consumption without having to sacrifice creature comfort.  Direct energy bills can be reduced by as much as 70% if you are willing to use energy saving devices. 

I have a friend that lives outside of Raleigh, NC that is a computer engineer.  He lives in an 8,000sf house.  He has a wife and three kids.  His wife is a stay at home mom.  His house was designed from the ground up for energy efficiency.  He has multiple zones of geothermal water to air heat pumps, argon gas encapsulated in between double pane glass windows.  He has yet to have an electric bill reach $100, better yet, he has yet to have a bill reach $80.  Even in the dead of winter his heating units might come on once every three days.

Okay, that is a unique scenario, but you can do the same right in your own house.  The first place to start is to remove every incandescent light in your house and replace it with LED lights or lights that do not have electrodes.  These lights can be purchased from our website if you do not have a local source for these lights.  You can achieve virtually the same lumens for a lot less money.  The cost of one kilowatt is roughly eight cents per hour.  This doesn’t sound like much but once you start adding it all up it becomes a lot.  If you want to figure out how much energy that you are using find the wattage of each item that you plug into your wall.  Most people will find that all there devices together use quite a lot of energy. 

Start by replacing the least expensive electrical items first such as light bulbs.  You can replace a conventional light bulb with an energy efficient light bulb that uses only one tenth of the energy of a conventional bulb.  Turn lights off in rooms when the room is not occupied.  If you cannot remember to turn off the lights then install motion detectors on the lights.  There are a number of common sense things that can be done to reduce the overall energy bill of a particular structure.

There are other things that can be done to improve energy efficiency of a particular structure but this will require some investment.  The most inexpensive approach would be to take care of cracks and gaps found in walls, window mullions and other building components.  There are a number of treatments that can be inexpensively applied to windows.  The next course of action would be to upgrade the insulation where ever possible. 

When major appliances are replaced, upgrade to energy star items that are energy efficient.  The major items such as heating and cooling units should be replaced with the most up to date models.  Oil furnaces have came a long way over the last few years and gas furnaces are very efficient.  If practical, look to solar and/or geothermal heating.  There are even water to water heat pumps that can replace existing water heaters that can supply the same temperature hot water for only thirty percent of the cost of a conventional hot water heater.  You could remove the water heater all together and use an on demand water heater.  That way you are only paying to heat water that is actually used versus maintaining a tank of hot water in reserve.  Solar works very well with passive parasitic heat to keep a reservoir of water warm.

Use light colored shingles when the roof is replaced especially in warm or hot climates.

We are way behind the curve where other countries are concerned when it comes to saving energy.  With the rising costs of energy, we all know how energy is directly related to money.  We have to work so many hours or days to pay our energy bill.  The simple measures that I have written about can be performed by all.  Even the more expensive energy saving measures can be performed by all as well.  Everyone can point to the inefficiency and problems that we find daily in our government.  Yet, Congress managed to do something right.  They made way for a low interest low available to all homeowners that will allow them to use this money to install energy saving devices that are ‘big’ ticket items. 

This is where to start.  Start in the home by conserving energy usage.  Recycle as much as possible as recycling is an energy saving measure as well.  It takes more energy to process raw materials into finished products than it does to recycle products that are already processed.  If people get in the habit of conserving then it will become second nature.  As these measures are applied in one’s daily life, the net result will be realized in dollars and sense. 

By Bill Harrill