Lowering your electricity bill the old fashioned way!

You wanted it? You got it!!

I told you last time that I was going to be publishing a running series on how to make life entertaining when you’re poor and in graduate school. If you’ll recall, the theme of part one was something like “Take Joy in Making Others Happy”: it doesn’t cost you anything, and it makes you feel good! The theme of the second in a cavalcade of awesome blogs is something akin to “Making Your Heating Bill Go Further.”

I was thinking about this topic the other day as I was scanning my electricity bill. For those of you living North of the Mason Dixon Line, down in the South a lot of the heating apparatuses for the winter run on electricity…not gas. It’s a blessing and a curse. So my electricity bill is getting higher and higher as winter rolls in, and I’m starting to have flashbacks about my nightmare apartment on Elm Street (search the archives here…the Elm St. Blogs are classics, people). I’d love to be able to turn my heat down, but if you know anything about me you know I hate to be cold. After reviewing my bill, which was starting to climb into nosebleed territory, I decided to chill out and take a shower.

Now, taking a shower in my apartment isn’t necessarily the greatest experience one can have. The water pressure is just one notch above “slow trickle”, and in order to get my shower “hot” I have to turn the “hot water” handle completely on, and sort of jimmy the “freezing water” handle a little bit to get an adequate amount of hot water. If I give the cold handle even a quarter turn, the cold water completely eclipses what little heat my water heater can produce. But what’s awesome about it is that the hot water kicks on right away and the cold water doesn’t start until about 3 minutes later. So on many occasions I’ve been in the shower thinking it was the right temperature, only to have my wonderfully warm shower turn into an ice bath. It’s as alarming as it sounds, let me tell you. The only good news here is that my landlord pays for the water heating element in my apartment, so thankfully that’s not part of my utility bill.

Since I can never really seem to get the temperature right in the shower, what I’ve started doing is just not turning on the cold water. I know what you’re thinking: “Andrew, that would probably make the shower dangerously warm…I don’t know if that’s a good idea”. Well, it does and it’s not. But while I was standing under scalding hot water the other evening, I realized that I could solve my lukewarm shower AND outlandish electricity bill ALL AT THE SAME TIME!!!! Think about this: When was the last time you were in a hot tub? Probably pretty recently. Hot tubs are great not only because you can relieve yourself in them and no one knows, but also because after about 20 minutes in the hot tub, you are REALLY hot. When you get out of the hot tub, do you instantly become cold (provided you’re not in a hot tub outside when the weather is terribly cold)? NO! Your core body temperature rises and you stay relatively warm for at least 20 more minutes.

This is the crux of my story people! I found out that by standing in a shower emitting dangerously hot water, my core body temperature was being raised! Consequently, whenever I got out of the shower I was pretty warm! If you have read the last few sentences and observed the inordinate number of exclamation points which I have used, you can get a sense for how excited all of this made me!!! What I am now starting to do is when I wake up in the morning, I turn my heat off. I quickly run to the shower and turn the “hot water” knob on. I then take a painful shower, but afterwards I’m able to get dressed, eat breakfast, and get out the door to class without being cold! It’s a miracle!!!! I won’t know how well my plan works until next month, but I’m sure it’s going to lower my electricity bill a little bit. That way, if I leave my heat off ALL day, whenever I come back to my apartment all I have to do is hop in the shower for about 10 minutes to get all roasty toasty, and then I won't mind the period of coldness where my apartment is starting to warm up. I think my idea is just shy of "genius" level, but somewhere above "legendary" status.

That's all for this installment of helpful tips for you struggling kids out there. Make sure you stay tuned for more insight, "learning by doing" life experiences, and an update on when you can catch Andrew in a town near you (i.e. maybe I'll get to see some of you rascals over Christmas).

Until then, Merry Christmas (not Haunakah or Kwanzaa)