Yes – a ceiling fan can make you warmer.

Let me explain – in the summer when you’re hot you turn the fan on high and blast the air down to cool off. That’s easy to understand. However, just about everybody also knows that hot air rises. Last I checked we’re are closer to the floor – not the ceiling. So all that warmer air is doing nothing for us – unless we move it. That’s where the ceiling fan comes into play

2 things to do first:

1. Turn the fan rotation so it blows up. (look for a small switch on the side of the motor unit just under the part where the blades connect to the fan. Make sure that the fan is off when you flip it!)
2. Set the fan to run at the lowest speed it can.

The fan should now be pulling air up toward the ceiling – and as a result pushing the warmer air down along the walls of the room.

A few well placed ceiling fans (say in a bedroom)  being used this way may allow you to reduce the temperature you set your home at overnight. Try it out and knock down your entire homes temperature overnight by an extra degree or two. You won’t notice the change in the bedroom and you’ll be sagving a lot more in natural gas costs than you’ll spend on electricity.

From Amazon.com:

Product Description
The Electricity Detector and Electricity Monitor can reduce your monthly electric bill and help you save a lot of money. Electricity bills can be murder. But now with Kill a Watt you can cut down on costs and find out what machines are actually worth keeping plugged in. Simply connect your appliances to the Kill A Watt and Kill a Watt will assess how efficient they really are. Kill a Watt with large LCD display will count consumption by the Killawatt-hour, same as your local utility. With the help of Kill a Watt you can figure out your electrical expenses by the day, week, month or year. Kill a Watt can check the quality of your power by monitoring Voltage, Line Frequency, and Power Factor. Now you’ll know if it is time for a new refrigerator or if that old air conditioner is saving you money. Don’t be another casualty. With the amazing Kill A Watt, you’ll have wasteful devices pushing up daisies.

I absolutely love this simple, cheap, and effective tool for accurately measuring power consumption. It’s paid for itself more than a few times in helping me to determine what items I really need to turn off – and home much power some devices still draw when they are off!

The meter is very simple, all it requires is that you plug it into an outlet and whatever you want to measure gets plugged into the meter. I took the meter and plugged it into a power strip so I don’t have to plug it into the wall – it’s easier to read this way because I can move it around. As soon as you unplug the meter all the recorded information is lost however – so keep that in mind.

You can use it for a week to see what total kWh something uses or you can do quick on the fly calculations by simply looking at how many watts are being used at any one moment. (# of watts)/(1000)*(Cost of a kWh, $0.10 is pretty average in the US)*(hours used per day)*(365 days per year) = total cost per year to use that device.

When you get one do yourself a favor and use it to measure your entertainment system – when it’s off. Then look at your phone recharger when it’s just plugged in with no phone attached. unplug that recharger and you’ll save some money. Unplug all your random device recharges and you’ll save even more…
It’s pretty easy to find a few hundred watts of power being used 24 hours a day you can eliminate. 200 watts at $0.10 kWh is $175 a year. Thats something that deserves a closer look isn’t it? Get a kill-a-watt!

“The rule of thumb is that you can save about 3% on your heating bill for every degree that you set back your thermostat” full-time, says Bill Prindle, deputy director for the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). Turn down the thermostat 10 degrees when you go to work, and again when you go to bed — a total of 16 hours a day — and you can save about 14% on your heating bill, says Prindle.

If you own a home and you don’t have a Programmable Thermostat you are spending money to heat a home when you don’t need (or want) to.
A decent Programmable Thermostat can save you $150/year on natural gas – easily offsetting the cost for purchasing it.
The key to purchasing a good Programmable Thermostat is to look for the number of days you can program. Most are coded in the following maner:
5-2 Allows you to setup a program for Mon-Fri and one for Sat-Sun.
5-1-1 Allows you to setup a program for Mon-Fri, Sat, and Sun.
7-day Allows you to setup a program for each day

Another item to consider is the number of periods per program you have, generally most offer 3 or 4 periods which can generally be divided up like this:
3 periods: Day, Evening, Night
4 periods: Morning, Day, Evening, Night

Due to my families schedule and for maximum expandability I purchased a 7-day, 4 period Programmable Thermostat.
This allows me to setup my week like this:
Workdays (Mon-Fri are identical currently, will change when the wife starts working part time):
4:45am – Morning (we get up at 5:am), hold at 67 Degrees
7:00am – Day (we’re at work) Hold at 60 Degrees
4:15pm – Evening (we’ll be getting home soon), hold at 67 Degrees
9:45pm – Night (sleeping), hold at 60 Degrees

Basically, when we’re away or sleep we have no need to keep the house warm. Why pay for natural gas when we’re either not around or asleep under some nice thick covers? I’m thinking about knocking the day time temp even lower – like 55. We can always adjust the temperature if needed.

How do you know if water is leak – somewhere – in your house? It could be a slowly running toilet, a dripping sink- anything.
This is a fairly simple way to determine if you have a leak.

Generally you’ll want to do this when your home alone or when you’ll be gone for a few hours.

Step 1: Make sure you’re not running anyting that uses water.
Step 2: Go to your water meter and write down what it says for usage (not all meter say this – if yours dosen’t then this isn’t going to work fr you – sorry!)
Step 3: Wait a while (longer is better) and don’t use any thing that uses water!!
Step 4: Check your water meter again.

If the numbers from Step 2 and 4 are different you have a leak – somewhere.
That leak could be hot water too – which not only costs you money for the water but also for heating it (Gas or Electric depending upon your water heater)!

If you have a leak – and you can’t hear it, well – good luck hunting! Check your toilets for slow-always running, sinks/tubs/showers for drips, and any outdoor faucets. Those are the top 3 spots for leaks!

Do you keep your PC on all the time? I used too – until I figured out that it was costing me $14.78 per month or $177.30 per year!

My PC uses 200W (+/-10) when running with everything on. I determined this by using a Kill-A-Watt meter I picked up from Amazon.com – check it out on the left. It has paid for itself many times over!

Now I use the power management control panel to cut my computers ‘on time’ from 24 hours to 8 a day, I’ll save $118.20 this year as a result.
Thankfully, the computer industry figured this out ages ago (mainly as a way to conserve battery power on laptops, but we’ll take it!).

Power Management Options for Windows Computers:
Turn Off/Shut Down: Computer is off – no power usage.
Stand By: Your session is saved into the computers RAM and just about everything is shutdown. Your PC continues to use power to support the RAM however (RAM needs power to work – not going into details here!)
Hibernate: Just like StandBy except that the session is stored to the hard drive and the PC is turned off.
Sleep: (Windows Vista): Sleep combines Stand By and Hibernate. This way if power is lost the PC can still restart from where you were. Additionally it can be configured to power down (aka ‘hibernate’) after a set quantity of time has passed.

The same items by power usage:
Turn Off/Shut Down: No Power (Slowest boot time)
Stand By: Power to RAM only (Quickest Boot time)
Hibernate: No Power (Medium Boot time)
Sleep: Power to RAM only initially; No power is used once machine turns off. (Medium, then slowest)

Moral of the story – to save energy and to boot fairly fast – Hibernate!
The concept that you can damage hardware by repeated power up/downs is also false, fyi. Hardware these days is tested for this ability and can withstand it.

You can set these options up to occur automatically via your power management control panel. go and do it now!