Step Two
Review and reduce your Carbon Emissions. 6-8 hours effort over several weeks and up to $70 expense.
The easiest targets are electricity use and transport. We built our house to minimize emissions, and we still managed to reduce electricity use by a further 20% though a (admitted lengthy) review of electricity use. Our neighbour saved 30% off her bill purely by changing light bulbs and turning the worst of the lights and standby power hogs off when not in use. Secondly be aware of your transport use, and possibly reduce it through better planning.
- Buy (as a group?) a “Kill a Watt” or similar meter (from Jaycar) and use it to understand your electricity use. While they are not very accurate they allow you see how much power your fridge uses over a day, or how much your TV / DVR / stereo / phone charger / iPod wastes on standby. Some are quite horrible, and if you can force yourself to turn them off at the wall it soon becomes an automatic habit. Look around and see if you are running appliances that you hardly ever use, or that you can consolidate (bar fridges spring to mind, especially as they are often the most inefficient types).
- Ideally take a complete inventory of appliances and gadgets with the meter, and add estimates on lights, A/C, cookers and water heating that can’t be measured directly. This can be compared against the daily KW hours on your bill. That way you know which are the major components, and which habits are worth changing. I have a spreadsheet that does the calculations here. It is worth checking each bill to see if your use is going up or down, though it does tend to change with the seasons.
- Keep a rough diary of your car use for a few weeks, and then see if you can easily combine trips by, for example doing the shopping on the way home from work, or by planning and consolidating trips.
- See if you can conveniently carpool with others, or travel in a convenient but low-emissions way.
