We get an electricity bill every two months. I don't know why it's not every month, I guess because energy is so cheap ($0.0376 / kWh), Seattle City Light (the same energy provider everyone has) doesn't bother making us pay every month.

When we received our first bill, we were using about 9.73 kWh per day. We weren't using any climate control, so I guess a lot of that was for the refrigerator, lighting, cooking, and laundry.

Since then, we've been trying to conserve energy by turning up the fridge temperature, turning the lights off when they're not being used, and turning off the surge protector for the computer and TV at night.

And, our efforts have paid off, so to speak, though with our bimonthly energy bill dropping from about $24 to about $21, there's not much of a literal payoff. Still, our use has dropped about 33% from what it was when we first moved here to about 6.53 kWh per day.

When we were back in Texas and using climate control almost daily, we were spending a lot more money, with energy prices being much higher. And we were consuming more energy as well, but not as much as I expected. With the heavy use of the air conditioner in the summer, we were using up to 18 kWh daily. The good thing was that we were able to get clean, renewable wind energy. However, over the whole year, we averaged only about 9.5 kWh per day, which is a little less than what we used when we moved in here. Here we're using the washer and dryer inside the apartment and since we used the community laundry room in Irving and since dryers use a lot of electricity, we actually used more energy than our electricity bill indicated. We also had gas heating for our hot water.

I haven't been able to find specific details on the energy sources used, but Washington uses a lot of clean, renewable hydroelectric electricity. That, combined with the fact that energy here is ridiculously cheap, means that there's not a huge incentive to cut energy consumption.

Still, we're continuing to find easy, effective ways of wasting less energy and we hope the habits we develop will help others to find ways to save energy and serve us well in the future.