Kauai Energy Efficiency At Home

If all the households in Hawaii cut their energy bill in half, we would save one million dollars per day in energy costs. Therefore, energy efficiency in the home is the cheapest, safest, and fastest option we have available. If you want to get started cutting your home energy bill in half, you may want to do an energy audit to see where you can make the greatest difference in your energy consumption. You can do an energy audit yourself, or you can hire a professional to tell you where savings can be found.

A typical Hawai’i home uses:
40% – Water Heater
15% – Refrigerator
12% – Air Conditioner
8% – Lighting
8% – Cooking
8% – Clothes Dryer
5% – Misc
3% – Dishwasher
1% – Clothes Washer

You can find resources online for completing your own home energy audit, including the Department of Energy. New tools make it easy to measure how much energy your various appliances and devices are using, and different electricity monitors are available at home improvement stores. Many of these monitors allow you to plug in an electrical appliance, and it will measure how much energy the device is using and will tell you how much it costs to operate it. More sophisticated models can track exactly how much electricity your home is consuming at any given moment, allowing you to switch on or off various appliances and electric devices to see how much they are consuming individually. Some of these will interface with your home computer and allow you to record changes so you can track your usage over time. These are incredibly useful tools for helping you identify where you can make the biggest energy improvements and save money.