I had earlier written to pass along a deal for a free chicken meal from KFC. Well today I just read: KFC cancels free chicken deal after Oprah promo
May 8, 2009
May 7, 2009
See how Your Home Energy Use Compares with the Energy Star Home Energy Yardstick
You can use Energy Star's Home Energy Yardstick to assess your home energy use compared to similar homes. You enter your ZIP code, the # of people in the home, the square footage and the amount of your energy bills. It will then show how your home fits on the 'yardstick' comparing your energy use to similar homes on a scale of 0 to 10 with 10 being the best and 5 average. Since it uses the ZIP code and other specifics such as # of people and size of the home its a pretty good apples to apples look at how you're doing.
Our home came out a pretty pathetic score of 0.3 out of 10. Our results are shown below:
Our house is less than 30 years old and fairly well insulated. Its hard for me to believe our energy efficiency is that low. I did some trial and error and it looks like according to the yardstick data that we're spending about double the average for similar home in our area.
Some reasons why our energy usage may look worse than it is:
One detail that makes our score look lower is that we have a electric plan that uses only wind power. We pay a little more for that wind power plan but the prices are fixed for 5 years. We also have basically zero CO2 emissions since our power is 100% from clean wind power.
My wife works from home with her home based business so she is at home most of the day. That make our heat bills higher than average compared to a lot of people who are not at home during the day.
I wonder if they are comparing my home to all homes including those using natural gas or other forms of heat? Our house has an electric forced air furnace and an electric water heater. We'd have much lower energy costs if we had a gas furnace and water heater. So if they're comparing us to everyone then we might look pretty bad compared to the folks using gas.
Of course its possible that our house is really inefficient and it just needs some improvements to make it on par with our neighbors.
What to do to improve it?
Still even taking the above points into consideration I think we could still be higher than average for the home our size in our area. If you continue on the yardstick site after you get the results you can follow the "improve your results today" section and fill in the details on your Air conditioning, furnace and water heater and hit the "submit button". This will then give you a popup with some suggestions on how to lower your energy use.
The suggestions I got were:
- Seal air leaks
- Seal leaks in ductwork
- Add more insulation
- Consider installing an Energy Star qualified water heater
- Consider Energy Star windows when replacing
- Replace lights with Energy Star qualified lighting (including Compact fluorescent)
- Install a programmable thermostat
- Look for Energy Star Qualified products
We've already got CFL's and a programmable thermostat so that mostly takes care of #6 & #7. We're not due replace our windows and those can be pretty expensive so I don't think #5 is worth much consideration. #4 and #8 would take more investigation. But most of our appliance are relatively new and I don't think theres all that much savings to be had by buying new ones. I think I'll wait till its time to replace them then get Energy Star.
I mentioned previously that we have a plan to cut our home energy costs. The first step of that plan is to get a home energy audit provided by free from our local utility. Once we have the audit that should give us some specific detail on our home from an expert. We'll then look towards taking action on their recommendations. I bet that the #1,2 and 3 items in the suggested list from Energy Star will also be recommended after the audit.
The Energy Star Yardstick site will give you a ballpark estimation of how your homes energy efficiency stacks up. I doubt its perfect, but it is a good starting point. If your score is below average then you probably have some improvements to consider. As a further step I'd recommend a real home energy audit conducted by an expert like we're getting.
May 6, 2009
FREE meal at KFC
KFC has a coupon via the Oprah.com site for a FREE grilled chicken meal. The coupon is good until May 19th (except Mothers Day). Its good for 2 pieces of chicken, 2 sides and a biscuit.
This was covered at My Money Blog Free KFC Grilled Chicken Meal From Oprah
and at FreeMoneyFinance Free KFC Grilled Chicken
Big Fat Tax Refund
The other day I updated my net worth and I mentioned in there that our cash assets were up significantly primarily due to a big fat tax refund. We're getting over $9,000 back this year. I got married this year so our tax circumstances were abnormal.
A big reason our tax refund was so high was that I didn't adjust my W-4 withholding to reflect the change in marital status. So they withheld taxes as if I was single the whole year. Another major reason we had a large refund is that we donated a lot of household goods to charity. When my wife moved in with me we had a lot of unnecessary, duplicate 'stuff' to get rid of. And we also took the opportunity to clear out our closets. That gave us a pretty large charitable deduction. Also we had two homes for part of the year and paid mortgage and property tax on both so we had extra deductions from that. None of this was planned. Its also not stuff that will occur in future years. The only 'mistake' I made was not changing my W-4 sooner but that would have only reduced the refund a bit.
A couple other factors that lead to the lower tax bill were sale of stock that resulted in a loss and our rental property depreciation. The depreciation on our rental property gives us a good tax shelter. This year we had over $8000 in depreciation to deduct. Stock sales and rental depreciation are things we'll have again in the future. Usually stock sales will show a gain, but I might have losses in the future too. I could manage that a bit more to try and maximize the tax consequences. But I don't think theres much opportunity to juggle that to an advantage. Overall stock and rental income elements will be variables in our annual taxes. Mostly they should be gains but some years they will be down.
In future years our tax situation should stabilize and be more predictable overall. I don't expect to get large refunds like this again.
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