Energy

Tonight, I went onto the local power company website to see if they had our current bill listed on there. I am curious since we have been quite bright this holiday season with all of the lights. They don't have the current one on there, however they had this cool, handy-dandy energy calculator to figure out where you spend your energy dollars.
They use the stats from your actual bills and then ask you questions about how many rooms in your house, what appliances you have, what type--gas/electric, square footage, how many levels you have, your heating/cooling system, year built, etc...
After that, it takes you to the next page and shows you a few colored graphs as to where the energy dollars went and how you compare to other homes in your area on usage. We were in the greenest area of the graph for usage on both electric and gas--which means we use about the least possible I guess. I was definitely glad about that! That even factors in my Christmas light season from last year! We use most of our energy dollars in heating our home--no shock there!
I thought we were pretty "green" as far as energy usage in the house, but now I know. That makes me glad. The energy efficient light bulbs do work as do the other things we've implemented. I go "green" to save "green". Anyway, I just thought it was cool and I had fun with it. Check your local power company's website and you just might have the same little charts and such! It's quite informative. I failed to mention that on the bill, it even shows you all of the different reasons the bill went up or down.