Day 14 – energy challenge – how are your savings going?

I am interrupting more technical blog posts on the August energy challenge to ask how the challenge is going for you.  For me, it is going better than expected.

Sometimes it is easy to think that the little changes don’t really matter. So what if you forget to turn off your heater, or if you leave all your the lights on, don’t draw the curtains or even if you dry your hair for half an hour every day?

This week I got my energy bill.  Funny story about that.  You see ActewAGL actually forgot to bill me for seven months.  My phone call to them to enquire about Even Pay/Full Pay and other options (including me asking how much my bill would be), prompted them to realise they had forgotten to send me any invoices since I moved in January. Oops.

Thankfully my bill wasn’t too large – in fact, it was around a quarter of my bill in my previous home.   That’s apartment living for you.  What I found interesting, though, was that although there are up to four people living in my apartment (depending on when my kids are here), our energy usage is less than HALF of what other households in my area use.  Now admittedly there are lots of apartments in my neighborhood but also lots of older style, not especially energy efficient houses.

When I started this challenge, I was not sure if it would resonate with my readers. I mean, sometimes all this energy stuff can sound technical. But really a lot of it is common sense and is about all the small things that we do.

When my Dad contacted me this week to ask me how I negotiated a 12% discount on my energy bill (and then he proceeded to do the same), I knew I was truly making a difference.  And so many people have joined the Frugal Dare to Millionaire Facebook Group to talk about the savings they are making, and to point out more things that I didn’t know about.  Actually, I am finding that I am learning so much through this challenge. There is such a lot that I don’t know about in terms of how we use energy in our daily lives and in our home.  But I do know that I am seeing a real difference.

This is the sort of post you would probably expect me to post at the very end of the challenge.  But I thought – why wait?  Why wait until the challenge is over before encouraging you to share how the challenge is making a difference to you? Why wait until the end of the challenge before you start to share more about what you would like to hear about? (Thank you to the readers who have provided feedback – I have a post about green energy and another about hot water in the pipeline, pun intended.)

Today’s challenge is for you to share a small win.  What habits have you changed on this challenge? And what other things would you like me to write about?