Energy

I’m tinkering with data, now that I’ve got a full year of usage information on my house.

* We burned 1162.3 gallons of heating oil last year ($1825)
* We burned 1291.06 kwh of electricity last year. ($1291)
* We used 5,100 gallons cubic feet of water last year. ($199)

I also noticed that last year, fuel oil cost $1.40 per gallon. This year we locked in at $2.50 per gallon, and it’s already retailing at $2.62…so that may have been a good idea. Yes, this is the reason for the insulating frenzy.

There seem to be a lot of pages with totally unsupported claims of “average” residential use. Anyone know a really good resource for specific, regional averages? I found This site, which is pretty awesome. It’s a government sponsored calculator that lets you plug and chug potential savings from various modifications to your house. It’s adjusted for zip code and everything.

I found a water use page claiming that the average american uses about 60 gallons of water per day. Our usage appears to be 5100 * 7.4(gal/cf) / 360 days * 2 people = 52 gallons per day. Once you factor in the fact that we both travel a lot, I suspect that it all averages out.

I’ve got a kill-a-watt on the way, primarily to measure power consumption of the machines I’m benchmarking at work, but I also plan to find out how much energy my appliances are burning.

Edit: I just confirmed that my company’s computers burn more power in a year than my entire house.