Energy reduction challenge - 1st real update... with real numbers!

So we are 2 months into 2014 and I have received a power bill for the first part of the year.  December and January were particularly cold this year thanks to the Polar Vortex. When checking out  www.wunderground.com, you can see that over December and January, this winter was colder than the same 2 month span a year ago. Now lets see how much it affected our energy consumption.

I was absolutely shocked when I received my January power bill to see that my monthly payment had jumped from 156$ to 195$! I knew that our power rates had gone up a little but that jump really surprised me! I guess I shouldn't be all that surprised since 4 out of 6 billing cycles, our usage was higher than the previous years. But I guess I can't quite dwell on that since I can't change anything. I can just change what we do from now on. So keeping in mind that our winter has been colder than last year's, I am happy to say that our average kWh per day so far this year has been 74.6. That is only up slightly from 74.3 last year.

Since our home is already very efficient, there really isn't very much for us to do. It may take a bit more time to do laundry since only 1 load can be hung on our drying racks at at time. Luckily, with Keegan gone, I don't have to do laundry daily. I also went around and dropped all my programmable thermostats to 20*C instead of 21 like Jen and Joey Go Green.  I am also making a conscious effort to turn off lights when I leave a room. I am much better than I used to be!

The Efficiency Nova Scotia site is great since it takes care of all the numbers itself. With winter slowly coming to an end, our main energy hog (electric heat) will be limited so I am pretty confident that we will meet our goal by the end of the month (using 5% less energy than last year). 

Have you set yourself an official energy saving goal?