Progress!

Last month I reported my monthly electricity and water usage for the mid-August to mid-September time frame.  It was atrocious, but it was also the hottest time of the year - when air-conditioning and frequent lawn watering is required.  Well, I got the new utility bill for the mid-Sept. to mid-Oct. period... and it is MUCH MUCH better!

Electricity
My electricity use went from 19.84 kwh/day to 7.13 kwh/day, a 64% decrease!  And there were several days in Sept. when I still had to use my air conditioner.  This new value amounts to about 300 watts being used all the time, though I imagine about half of it is still from the air conditioning needing to be fired up for several hours during the month.  It'll be interesting to see how much I use in a month without any air conditioning - which should be this month.

Water
My water usage went from 1.26 CCF/day to 0.75 CCF/day, a 40% decrease.  Again, this seems to be almost entirely dictated by how much I water my yard.  I've already decreased the watering frequency and duration again for this month, so it should be significantly lower next month.

This conservation saved me $82 this month.  Not too shabby.

Observations
1.  It's cold here at night now.   The average temp has been hovering in the low 50s (F).  Even if the temperature gets in the mid-90s outside, my house never goes above 78 or so.  Therefore, I don't need air conditioning.  This will probably be true until May, when the average temperatures are similar.  That means for 7+ months I will not need to use my air conditioner at all, and for another two months it will only sparsely be used.  This really does mean that upgrading to a more efficient air conditioning unit will not pay off for a LONG time.

2.  I'm still using 560 gallons of water per day.  This number is just completely unacceptable to me.  I still haven't really pushed the lawn watering to extremes.  I'm going to start watering it far less frequently now.

I've been accumulating good blog post ideas.  More soon to come.