Doing Something Right?

Yesterday I got the electric bill.

I have been paying the electric bill for years, ever since we moved into this place. A few years ago, when I became aware of how everyday things were affecting the planet, I started paying attention to how much electricity we were actually using.

Well, that's not quite true. Actually the bill has a little graph in one corner that shows you how many kw were used in the past month, how many were used the month prior, and each month going back a year. It gets really exciting to see the amount go down,  and really frustrating to see the amount go up.

In my most active "going green" stage I used to despair and do all I could to make the number go down even more. Some of the things I started doing I still do. I unplugged the coffee maker when we were done with it and only plugged it back in to make coffee. I turned down the heat. I tried not to use the dryer if I could hang something to dry. And that's basically it. There really wasn't much more to be done.

So I had kind of accepted the fact that our electric bill was as low as it was going to get, until we stopped using the fridge, the microwave, the TV, the dishwasher, and heat. In the winter the usage went up and we paid more and that was that, unless we were to freeze.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the bill this month and found it was half what I expected.

OK, not half. It's only half if you use my faulty math of rounding up in one case and rounding down in the other....still. It was a lot less that I expected it to be. I was sure there had been some mistake - perhaps they checked the meter after only 3 weeks for some reason? Maybe it was an estimate - they have done that a couple of times if the dog is out and they can't get close to the meter, and then they make up the difference in the next reading. Or maybe some tax or service charge wasn't correct?

Then I looked at the little graph.

People, the little black line for October was very, very short.

I went and dug out the last two electric bills (yes, I filed them away, shut up!) and it turns out we used half the electricity we'd used in August and September. Almost half.

What have we done differently?

Well, air conditioning, for one, I guess. Steve used to run the air conditioning in the den. He's been used out for weeks now, but half of the September bill is actually the end of August. Even so, it hadn't been running that often.

Then I thought - Steve's computers. Steve's computers run 24/7. It's one of those things I didn't think too much about because 1 - Steve wasn't about to shut down the whole system every night because it was impractical and 2 - how much electricity could they be using anyway.

Steve's computers lived here until the beginning of October, when he came and moved them to his place after being kind enough to make sure out internet was still up and running.

I can't help but feel it has something to do with Steve leaving. It's too much of a coincidence. I knew we'd be using less, but I just didn't expect such a drop. I know it will go up again, as we move into winter and the days get colder. Maybe it is an error and next month they'll tell us they only billed us half?

Whatever the reason, it made me giddy. And happy. And almost forget about the trip to the vet I had later that morning which cost me just as much as the August, September, and October electric bills in total.