For the first time in our married life, my husband and I are living in an apartment where we are responsible for all the utilities. Assuming we keep things under control, we should be paying nearly $100 less to live here than we did at our previous apartment.
Here are a few things I am doing.
First of all, I bought this tripod-style clothes dryer to dry clothes. It was reasonable, and since I used my Amazon gift cards from Swagbucks, it was $10 cheaper. I don't use it as often as I'd like because right now it's only useful for shirts. I've not tried blue jeans on it, assuming they will take too long, and what's a load of blue jeans every so often. Also I've not used it yet for small items, but this weekend I am getting a package of clothes pins. They are cheap and will be well worth the electricity savings.
Next, we are being more aware of the electricity we use in a day. The lights are out when we aren't in a room, and when I'm home by myself, unless I'm reading or something similar, I tend to leave the lights off during daylight hours. The air conditioners (almost) always are turned off when we leave. The printer, computer monitor and speakers are turned off when we're not using them. The computer itself isn't shut off as often, but much more than it used to be. All of our TV items (TV, Blu-Ray, Roku) are plugged into a power strip, and we shut the whole thing down when we aren't using it. I thought about doing that with the computer, but the wireless is connected and it takes so long to boot back up, and we use the internet connection pretty regularly, with the computer, iPhones, and Blu-Ray.
The gas bill is not much seeing as it is winter, but one thing I am looking into is instead of buying a whole uncooked chicken from the grocery store, I'm going to price the cooked chickens from the deli and if the are close in price, not only does it save me a bit from not having to cook it, I also save the two hours and some that it takes to bake. Sounds like a win/win situation to me!
The water bill is difficult. When we got our most recent bill, I looked it over very carefully. Most of the bill was for trash pickup and sewage. There was a $10 minimum water charge, and above that, we had a charge of about $5.00. Any amount we would be able to get it lower, would be pretty negligible. That being said, we certainly don't want to let it get any higher. Probably the place where I waste water the most is doing dishes. While looking for a way to make homemade dish soap (still looking for a good one), I found these instructions on how to conserve water while doing dishes. It sounds pretty common sense, but I wasn't doing it so maybe you aren't either!
That's all I have for now. Help me out and let me know your best tips for saving on utilities!
