Surprising news. It looks like our electricity consumption has dropped 25 percent. Last time we looked up our annual electricity use it was 28,000 kWh, based on 12 months of electricity bills. That was a little over a year ago when we started planning for a wind turbine. But just recently we’ve had to do our bench marking for our Green Tourism Business Scheme assessment, and our annual electricity consumption from September 2009 to September 2010 was 20830 kWh. That’s 25 percent less. Amazing – and very encouraging. Shame I can’t find last year’s September to September figures for a tighter comparison.
How did we do it? It certainly wasn’t dropping visitor numbers – we’ve had a good year. I guess the 28,000 kWh could have been before all the solar heating went on and the cut out switches were installed for the immersion top up. And we’ve added timer control to the hot water in our own house (which runs on a back boiler with an immersion when the fire’s not on). And then there’s the washing – we’ve tried hard to keep it out of the tumble dryer on and on the line.
All in all it’s made a big difference to those electricity costs. And we’re not through yet. Cutting the energy use in Otter Cottage will be one of our next projects.