Several months ago my wife and I decided it was time to defrost the freezer in our garage. So we moved its contents to our smaller kitchen freezer. We had been slowly using up the contents of the freezer to do just this. We unplugged the freezer, opened the door, then promptly forgot about it. About 2 weeks later I decided to buy a small coffee maker for heating water for my tea. I drink several cups a day and was heating the water, one cup at a time, in our microwave. About a week later we got our PG&E bill. We noticed that the bill was little lower than normal but didn’t think anything of it. Around that time we remember our freezer but decided to leave it alone; we were doing fine with our packed smaller freezer. Another month went by and we got the next PG&E bill. We were in shock. The bill was about $80.00 less than normal. We let another month go by and again our utility bill was $80.00 less than normal. We knew then that the cost savings was from turning off the freezer and using the coffee maker to heat my water. We eventually determined that the freezer was costing us $60-$70 per month to operate. We wanted our freezer room back and we hated the refrigerator in our kitchen — it came with the house when we bought it and the door shelves kept falling off — so we decided to use the old refrigerator for extra cold storage in the garage and get a new refrigerator for our kitchen. In the end we bought a new refrigerator that only cost us about $4.00 a month run. Just by replacing the old freezer we saved $66.00 a month in electricity. Switching to the coffee maker saved us an addition $10.00 a month.
Several years ago we also found out that the newer front load washers and dryers can cut your water and electricity bills by a larger amount over older model washers and dryers. Our 13 year old washing machine decided to die one day. The gears on it were worn out. So we went looking for a new washing machine. After trying several different stores and looking at many different models and comparing energy ratings we settled on a Neptune front load washing machine from Maytag. After some debate we decided to go ahead and get the matching dryer with it. Our dryer still worked but it was near the end of its life. Together they cost use about $1700.00. That was a lot but we figured we’d recoup the cost difference in a year or so with the reduced utility bill. We’ve had this washer and dryer now for about 5 years. Our water bill dropped about 40% and our PG&E dropped about 50%. All together, switching to the new front load washer and dryer saved us about $100.00 per month in water and electricity. We not only recouped the extra cost but they paid for themselves in just 17 months.