How did you do it? Just keeping lights off, etc?

I've tried hard the last month or so to do this, so I hope my next bill is lower.

My electric and heating bill are on one bill and I pay an average of $125 a month. We use a geothermol system to heat and cool the house. In the summer it's nearly free to cool the place and we also use it for the hot water heater which is also a near freebee of this system. I love it. I know most of our friends are paying hundreds more just to heat their homes and they can't believe our bills. This is an average 3200 sq ft home fully equiped with energy wasting teens. I love it warm in the winter and cool in the summer, so I'm certainly not sacrificing anything to get the lower bill.

I just made sure to turn the lights, tv's and everything possible off. I also only wash laundry,use dishwasher at night. They say that is when it is the cheapest. I also didn't have to run the ac or heater much.

wjswecampbell: unless you have a minute-by-minute monitoring meter, which is almost unheard of in our area, it won't save you directly to run things at night. Your electric utility won't know when YOU used the power, just how much you use each month. I wish we could do this. Our neighbour has designed a system which monitors electricity prices and turns on things like his water heater when prices are lower and warns him when the price spikes so that he doesn't run optional things like a load of laundry. He can't get the local power company to bill him by time of use, so he is not really saving himself much by doing it.

It does keep costs down for the system, so it benefits everybody.

Some time ago our (city-managed) utility installed extra insulating blanket and a timer that turned on the water heater at 2:00 a.m., giving us a discount on the rental fee as consideration. In my case, it was the full rental fee rebated.

Later a branch of the provincial utility took over that aspect of the system.

My water heater had stopped working, so I told them to come and test it, to certify that it was not working, as I had no intention of paying rental on a non-functioning water heater.

They told me that I could have it replaced, or have them come to remove it ($20.00 fee, if I rcall corrctly), but that those were my only options.

As I lived in a rental townhouse, I thought that having the water heater disappear would not do good things regarding my relations with my landlord.

Also, our resident property manager said that when they came for a service call, they'd remove that timer that turned on the heater at 2:00 a.m.

They did that, and were going to remove the insulating blanket, but I said that they could leave it right there - which they did.

I asked their headquarters why they were removing the timers, to be told that they weren't offering that service.

When I asked why not - no answer.

So it seems to me that they are very unconcerned with spreading the load over the 24 hour period, to reduce the need to fire up generating stations when peak load comes.

Stupid.

Have yourselves a great pre-Christmas week. My best wishes for the season to everyone.

ole joyful