Some quick suggestions:
Get rid of anything that uses resistive heat. This includes but is not limited to an electric water heater, hair dryers, curling irons, clothes irons, toasters, etc. These items pull a massive amount of current.
Ok... we have a toaster that gets used maybe once every 10 days.
Nothing else in the house falls into that category.
Get efficiency light bulbs. You can cut your power usage for lights by up to 90%.
Unfortunately not possible. All but two of the lights in the house are the compact halogen type (see photo) and not cost-effectively changeable. The two exceptions are run less than an hour a month between them. At that rate it would take 7 months to use 1.4
pesos worth of electricity (1 KWH at the intermedio rate), lets call it 2.4
pesos per year, so replacing the six incandescent bulbs with $15 worth of compact fluorescents would save me 1.8
pesos per year, requiring 72 years to amortize the cost of the bulbs. Not an acceptable ROI.
Put all computer peripherals that you don't use constantly on a power strip. Only turn them on when needed.
My UPS has a master outlet that turns off all peripherals when the computer is off. The only exception is the laser printer (never run a laser printer through a UPS!), which draws 6 watts when in sleep mode, so I leave it on. Since it is a shared printer I don't turn it off, although doing so could save me nearly six cents per month.
Get a Mac already. Just kidding, but consider a notebook computer. They are far more efficient.
No. I despise laptops even more than Macintoshes, with their squinchy little keyboards and tiny screens. The most frustrating deterrent to productivity I have ever experienced is the touchpad on my wife's laptop.
Consider a propane or butane refrigerator. They use a lot less power. They're less convenient because you have to switch tanks once a month or so and re-light the pilot. We have both electric and butane fridges for redundancy.
Too late. Three weeks ago I purchased a new, very energy-efficient electric refrigerator. It is ridiculously large (25 cubic feet) but we were wasting so much food with the old refrigerator (less than half the size) that we decided we wanted something where we wouldn't forget about food stacked behind and under other food until it went bad. Out of sight, out of mind... This refrigerator, large as it is, uses less electricity than the old one. With a cursory look it appeared that propane refrigerators were smaller and more expensive than conventional models.
If you get a solar electric system, get a grid-tie system. Maintaining a battery bank is a pain.
Absolutely. It would be strictly a supplement. CFE, in a surprising act of modernity, will provide "smart meters" for solar power users where any solar power generated goes through the meter and "counts down" your KWHs. I seem to recall that if you generate more electricity than you receive from CFE, they will issue you a credit instead of a bill, but they won't ever pay you money.
That's all I can think of at the moment. Will come back if I think of more.
Thanks for taking the time to read through all this and respond!
tanstaafl.
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