The Energy Nazi

This is one of the nicknames Julie has for me - I have always been "frugal". The last couple months I went all out to get our electric bills back under control as they went through the roof this summer (which I found out was partly due to the increase in the APS rate hike). But still, it was just insane - Almost $400 in July!.
So I did some googling and looking at ways to decrease our electric consumption without having my wife kick me out of the house. So I installed programmable thermostats on both the upstairs and downstairs A/C units (which also control our electric heat pump as we don't have gas) and then last month installed an electronic water heater timer. Got them all on ebay - Motorola thermostats are $99 each at Home Depot but got them for $50 each including shipping and the water heater timer retails for $149 but got it for $60 - you can also get a mechanical timer instead of the digital one for about $25-30. (Just be sure you disconnect the power before doing these as its 240v :)
So we reduced our Nov bill by $60 over last year same month, and December (with addition of WH timer) reduced our bill $100 (53%) over last December - our $94 December bill is our lowest electric bill in 3 1/2 years (which is probably still a little high, but no gas heating costs, so I guess that will have to do). So these basically paid for themselves in 2 months time. Will be interested to see what type of savings we get from these in the summer months. I won't hold my breath on cutting those 50%, but anything we save will be a welcome change after this last summer's bills.

Oh and yes, we instituted a total laundry ban during peak hours which I am sure helped some too - the only catch is that now I have to do the laundry on Saturday mornings - a little compromise on my part :)