Two Cents Worth

This is a literal post.   It’s about two cents and how I discovered it.   It is not about my daughter’s eyes, which will probably be featured in tomorrow’s blog post as we’re going EUA (evaluation under anesthesia) tomorrow at 7AM.   But for tonight, sit back and read all about my two cents.

We’ve done our best to reduce our energy consumption from a light bulb perspective by replacing almost all of the bulbs in our house.   Where applicable, we further added dimmer switches so we could potentially reduce kWh usage even further.   We looked at our energy usage bills and compared from prior years.   We pondered, but ultimately, we didn’t know how much energy each and everything in our house costs.    Then, we had an idea come from an unexpected direction.

Our outdoor lights were on a timer.   Originally, when we built the house, the timer was one of the manual ones with the little tick notches for portions of an hour.   We decided we wanted to go to a digital timer so we could control the low-voltage lights on a day-by-day basis.   My husband found a product called WeMo, which was wifi-aware with an accompanying app that let us set a schedule, manually turn the lights on and off and monitor energy consumption.

My husband got an idea: he would purchase a second WeMo that we’d be able to move around the house to find out how energy-costly various items were.   Yesterday, he got the second controller configured and today I put it into use.

I’d been wondering how much my 1500 watt hair dryer and unknown watt flat iron cost us each day in energy usage.    Today, I found out.   I was really surprised.   Even with the energy rates for our location, to dry my hair and flat iron it, it only used two cents of energy.   The estimated monthly consumption from those appliances for that amount of use per day, we were only at $.79 per month.   I was impressed.  

I feel better.   I think I can manage two cents per day to have my hair look less-than-crazy.    Thanks, WeMo.

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Uncle Update:  My son and daughter have been very excited that Uncle Bob arrived via plane to visit today.   They have been equally disappointed that Uncle Brian didn’t come as well.   We have been explaining that Uncle Brian had to work and he’ll be here in three weeks to see us and spend some time visiting, but they are still disappointed as of today.    Know that you are missed, Uncle Brian.

Fitness Update:  Seven miles running this morning.   I didn’t want to run at the start, and then I didn’t want to stop running at the end.