Good news! If you didn’t feel like reading the whole story about how I quit fossil fuels at my house, there is now an option to listen to me talk about it instead! Click here to register for my webinar that is being hosted by the City of Toronto’s “BetterHomesTO” program.

With a couple more months of utility bills, I thought I would also provide a quick update on how my savings estimates panned out. As it turns out, I am saving more than projected. The reason for the difference is that my previous projections were based on a smaller amount of data, so I erred on the conservative side. With more than half a year of operating data (covering all the seasons), I can now make a more accurate projection for the year.

As such, I would like to make an announcement:

MYTH BUSTED – ELECTRIFYING YOUR HOUSE CAN SAVE MONEY!

The trend is very apparent on my utility bills – see chart below. Utility costs are about the same in winter but drastically lower in the spring and summer (it looks like I underestimated how bad my old AC unit was and also underestimated shoulder season savings). I should note that weather conditions were fairly similar for both years for the months depicted in the chart.

In terms of efficiency, my house went from using 14,484kWh of energy per year (10,176kWh of gas plus 4,308kWh of electricity) to just 8,059kWh of electricity – a 45% reduction!! It’s pretty definitive – electricity is vastly more efficient than natural gas.

Scenarios

In my last “Mike at Home” post, I included a few scenarios to give an idea what the results look like under different assumptions. Here is an update to those, too. Under all the scenarios, annual utility costs are now lower without fossil fuels.

Scenario 1: Keep Gas Account Active

Scenario 2: No Tank Rental Contract

Scenario 3: Carbon Tax of $170/ton

Once again, if you want to hear me talk about this, I’m doing a webinar hosted by the City of Toronto – register here! If you want to read the back story on all of this, you can visit my previous posts here:

Part 1: Reducing Heat Demand
Part 2: Converting Hot Water Tank to Electric
Part 3: Converting Gas Range to Induction
Part 4: Upgrading Central AC to Heat Pump
Part 5: Summary and Discussion

Hope to hear lots more stories like this of people kicking the fossil fuel habit and being able to live more true to their sustainable values. With the “Code Red” put out earlier this week by the IPCC it is important to know that it is possible to cut fossil fuels quickly and at a reasonable cost. Let me know about your story in the comments.