Five Ways To Cut Your Family's Electricity Bill – That Really Work!

Brought to you by Nuffnang and Mojo Power

We’ve just had the cheapest electricity bill since we became a family of six living in a house with a pool.

What a relief.

The bill was $191.44 for the month of September and we used 743.65 kWh of electricity.

This is a big change for us.

We’ve had to pull in the belt in every area since Paul has been looking for work over the past six months.

Changing electricity provider to Mojo Power was one way to cut the cost of our electricity, but reducing the actual amount used was also vital.

And that’s hard when there are heaps of us, teenagers, lots of devices and a pool to heat. The pool has solar heating but the pump is on six – eight hours a day in spring and summer.

Here’s what I can see on my usage meter, it feels great to keep a close eye on electricity usage and spend.

Learned to use the time delay switch on the washing machine and dishwasher. I run each of these once or twice a day. If I delay until 10pm when the power is really cheap, I can save a lot.

Also, we use a front loader washing machine which uses less power and water, plus we do some cold water washes – it all counts.

Just don’t use the tumble drier. Like all my Scottish relatives, I use an indoor clothes horse so clothes can dry even when it’s pouring. Ours takes up half the sitting room but it must save a fortune.

Switch off those devices. My husband and the teenagers are TERRIBLE at actually closing down their computers, laptops etc. But I’ve trained them up. And I switch off TVs, modem, XBOX etc off at the wall.

I bet this doesn’t save a huge amount of power overall but cents saved turn into dollars… it’s good for us humans to switch everything right off once a day. We’re in charge!

Switch off the second fridge. We had an old fridge in the garage and kept ice and beer and wine in it. Switched off!

It was old and probably not at all efficient. We will hang onto it and it may get fired up when we have family staying over Christmas. But it’s off for now and we should have done it years ago.

Check the bill to be aware of electricity consumption daily. This is easy for us as we have the new Mojo Power smart meter which gives us real time updates. I do check these and I show the kids and Paul what we are using.

It’s very motivating to see that the changes we’ve made do make a difference, day in and day out.

What happened on the 7th!? Why did we use so much power? I checked up and found teenagers had been using peak power for washing and dishwasher – eek.

And also….

I understand my bill now and I understand the electricity market in Australia.

This took me a bit of time, but I’d been so frustrated at not understanding my bills that I put a bit of effort in and feel much more on top of things now.

We’re not at the point of getting a battery ourselves yet. But one day we’d love to have more solar panels and to be able to store some power to use throughout the day.

This still feels too expensive for now, but it’s bound to get cheaper. And we better wait until we have a more stable income.

I think trying to use less electricity, as we make and store our own, would be hugely motivating one day.

Mojo Power do not earn more money the more their customers us. They only charge customers what they pay themselves, so there’s no mark up for them.

Mojo is very committed to working in the solar space and to assisting customers to use less non-renewable power.

Their business model is very different from the other providers who have a deep interest in selling more power to customers, the markup is how they make their money.

Our previous electricity company feel old-fashioned by comparison. It feels good to be on the side of innovation and change.

Please do share this post with others who need to save some cash!

Do you have other energy saving tips?

Always keen to hear more!

Cheers

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