I recently posted that our ambient home electricity usage was obscenely high at ~ 900 W with nothing being ‘used’. Well for #earthday I’m very pleased to find that I’ve managed to make my initial < 300 Watt target and as I write this the CC meter showing around 280W usage.

How did I do this?

• Got rid of my power hungry Dell XPS desktop and took it to work. This also allowed me to sell my work Mac pro for a tidy sum. I now use my laptop at home.
• Freecycled an always-on home development server leaving just our one file server
• Put all of the lounge AV devices onto a single extension lead and religiously switch that off at the wall every night
  • Actually soon after I did this I decided to get rid of it all completely so we’re soon to have no telly at all now but this is primarily a lifestyle choice rather than being driven my energy usage concerns.
• became really anal about turning off all the lights when not needed. Those little halogen down-lighters are the worst culprits

It wasn’t very hard at all.

Next is to remove the file server and replace it with something like a NSLU-2 and see if I can disable some of the halogen down-lighters (we rent so I can’t change the fittings).