Electricity.

When we turn off the TV, we turn it off at the wall. Equipment left on standby consumes a lot of electricity. Items left on standby can account for as much as 10% of a households electricity usage! If your electricity bill is $200-$300, you could be saving as much as $20-$30. If your elctricity bill is more, the savings will soon mount up.

What will you do with the extra money saved by turning things off at the wall?

Other things we do to save electricity include turning lights off when not needed, make sure people in our house are dressed appropriately before turning on heaters/air conditioners, using the fireplace instead of the heater, making sure the dishwasher is full before turning it on and making sure when we purchase a new appliance, it is the most energy efficient we can afford. We are also trying to purchase LED lighting for our home. LED lighting is much better for the environment than fouros, incandessants, downlights, halogens or compact flouros. Compact flouros which are being pushed here as the solution are quite bad for the environment, as one of the main components in them is mercury. This means that we shouldn't put them in the rubbish that heads to landfill. They should be disposed of at proper disposal centers. Who do you know that takes their spent CFL's to a proper disposal station?

Of course we would just love to go out and purchase a big, juicy solar pv system so we can generate enough electricity for ourselves and extra for the grid, but unfortunately we just can't afford it at the moment. It is something we will do as soon as possible though. In the interim, we do purchase green electricity from our electricity retailer. Although it costs more, most of the electricity generated where we live comes from coal fired power stations. We do not wish to use electricity sourced from a coal fired power station.