ComEd online tools and reducing electricity usage

Locals who get electricity from ComEd – have you checked out their new SmartMeter-driven online tools? You’ll need to sign up to use them if you haven’t already.

If you live in Oak Park, you should have a new digital SmartMeter which can provide lots of usage data, broken down by day or even by hour. Other tools include ways to reduce your energy usage and comparisons with your neighbors – anonymously, of course, as the data is aggregated. You can also look at your own historic data as well, although the data broken down by day and hour will go back only as far as the installation of your SmartMeter.

I can see, for example, that the hours in which we do laundry comprise our heaviest usage times, which is what I suspected. Much of that probably has to do with our ancient electric dryer, which may be about 40 years old at this point. I’m trying to convince my husband that we should line dry more items and possibly replace that dryer. He’s the one who does laundry, since I really hate doing it. In return, I clean the bathrooms because he hates doing that. Even line drying and then using a dryer for a short period of time to de-wrinkle would be better than using an ancient dryer the entire time, and it may pay for itself in short order. I’m looking into green ways to dispose of the dryer as well, since an ancient dryer that goes on to use enormous amounts of electricity elsewhere isn’t really doing the planet much good, even if we’re not paying for it anymore.

In this area, coal and nuclear plants generate most of our electricity. Both of them produce very eco-unfriendly waste and coal contributes a lot to greenhouse gas emissions, but until we have viable alternatives, reducing electricity and natural gas usage is a goal most of us can reach. Using ComEd’s tools allows us to take hard data into account when we make decisions about how to go about reducing our usage, which can only be a good thing.