Back in July, Brooke and I started consciously trying to simplify and reduce our "footprint" in the world. One of the biggest, ugliest footprints we could think of was our power consumption. Don't get me wrong, we didn't actively waste power before. We drive two small Hondas. We keep the heat at 68 and a/c at 78. However, we could clearly do better.
By simply replacing all our light bulbs with CFL bulbs, and by being very conscious of when we used A/C this summer, I think we've made a sizeable difference in our kilowatt hours used per month. I was going to save this post for after I collected more comparison data, but I was so shocked by the initial results, that I couldn't wait. See the 2006 vs 2007 (to-date) comparison chart to the left.
It's not hard to see where we started trying, and it's not hard to imagine what the rest of this year's line might look like if we keep it up. Perhaps the most amazing thing to me is that we were able to make such a noticeable difference with almost zero impact on our "life style" and without having to give up very much.