How to reduce your electricity consumption?

We are regularly told (and especially in winter) to reduce our electricity consumption. And that, in general, really bothers us. We immediately think that we have to turn off the heating and then freeze our ass in our house by setting the thermostat to 12°.

But reducing your energy consumption is not as drastic. In fact, thanks to the research we did for this ecological gesture, we realized ourselves that it is full of subtleties!

Programs like ENERGY STAR® exist so that our devices have better energy efficiency, offers like dynamic pricing or the Hilo smart home service exist to optimize energy consumption.

Finally, there are plenty of things in place to move towards energy sobriety!

WHY REDUCE?

“Yeah, why? In Quebec, our electricity is renewable though? »

Yes, it's true, but renewable does not mean unlimited !

Worse in Quebec, we consume more than in most countries (perhaps because we say to ourselves that it's not serious, and we'll always have plenty of electricity).

The problem is that the greater the demand, the more we need to produce. If our dams are at full capacity, we must build more and THAT has a considerable impact on the environment and our ecosystems. In fact, building a dam = an ecological disaster. Yes, it’s for greener energy in the end, but it’s disastrous up front.

Also, the more we consume for ourselves at home, the less it is available for other sectors which could be electrified instead of depending on fossil fuels. For example, if we all want to have electric cars one day, we will have to optimize somewhere!

Reducing our electricity consumption does not need to compromise our comfort. We really just need to be a little more vigilant. And in the end, you can save money doing it!

So why reduce? For ecological and economic reasons. And because waste remains waste…

Now how do we do that? Because let's face it, no one wants to freeze their behind in winter?

“DO YOUR MAX!” »

To start somewhere, we went to the Hydro-Québec website, to the “Make your Max!” page. » :

In one-minute video clips, Max already gives us some tips that make a lot of sense and are not complicated.

Then, you can easily get lost (in a good way) on the Hydro-Qc site, because there are a host of tools and information to intelligently reduce your electricity consumption.

BURST IDEAS

Here are some little tips we found here and there to reduce your electricity consumption! Are you already doing all this?

1. Change the bulbs for LEDs and choose devices with ENERGY STAR® certification to ensure better energy efficiency.

2. Turn down the heating when you go on vacation and if you have thermostats, set them so that the heating drops by 1 or 2 degrees at night.

3. Make more sober energy choices: the new living room furniture with integrated colored LEDs or the electric garland for the terrace may look cool... But decor can also contribute to increasing our consumption, so let's think about greener and more economical alternatives before buying them.

4. Avoid phantom loads: this is when a device is on standby, closed or has finished charging and the wire is still plugged in (and therefore current still flows continuously through it). It seems that this represents around 10% of our consumption!! The most energy-intensive devices in standby mode are, among others, video game consoles: so ideally, we turn them off when they are not in use. Power strips or smart plugs are super practical at this time.

5. Wait until the dishwasher is full before leaving it. Same thing for the washer; we avoid washing the little Bateau Bateau rolls alone when we can put them with an armful of towels, stockings and bobettes.

6. Turn off the lights when leaving a room (and if we're not good at this, there are even smart outlets that turn them off for us).

7. Avoid placing furniture in front of the heaters, this prevents the heat from diffusing into the room (we also remember to remove the dust from the heaters).

8. Avoid placing the refrigerator next to the oven in the kitchen.

9. Put a lid on the pot or saucepan when cooking. It seems that this way you can save up to 25% of energy.

10. Avoid using the microwave to defrost food. Take them out the day before in the fridge to give them time to defrost naturally. But to reheat a dish, the microwave (or even the air fryer) is better than the oven.

11. Install door draft excluders in winter.

12. If you have an electric car, program its charging.

13. If you redo the painting, opt for light tones, this means you need less lighting power.

14. If you have a spa, make sure its cover is well insulated and close it (and lower the temperature) when you are not using it.

15. Working on dimensional sobriety: this is the act of thinking about the size of devices before purchasing them and adapting their size to the reality of our daily lives. No need for a huge TV screen if you have a microscopic living room or a huge fridge if there are two of you doing small grocery shopping.

A good idea to know how to reduce is to look at your Hydro account and monitor your consumption a little more.

Especially when buying new appliances, it's a matter of seeing the savings in the short and long term (for example, some Air Fryer fans talk about their Hydro bill and have fun making comparisons since they got this ultimate device that changed their lives).

As we said above, the tools are also there. In our customer profile on the Hydro-Qc website, there is an energy performance tool to help us see where we consume the most and how to reduce where it hurts our wallet.

In short, we just need to find out and see how, depending on our home and our lifestyle, we can successfully reduce by simply changing small habits.

What kind of small energy-saving gesture are you already doing?

And what new action would be most relevant for you to adopt to reduce your consumption?