Riot for Austerity – August 2012 – Month 46


This is the Riot for the month of August of 2012 for the three of us plus my parents-and sister-in-law. My summary of our first three years is here. Edson fixed the calculator: all go tither to crunch those numbers!

Gasoline.  Calculated per person. DH and SIL have been driving into Boston every day for work and that is inflating our gasoline usage.

13.15 gallons per person

32 % of the US National Average

Electricity. This is reckoned per household, not per person. We cook on an electric stove. According to our solar meter, we produced 5673 kWh since the system was turned on, and 615  kWh this last month (you can follow our solar harvest live here). We owed NStar nothing but how much we consumed is a mystery: the NSTAR billing software apparently cannot handle negatives. So we used less than

615 kWh per household

34% of the US National Average

Heating Oil and Warm Water. This too is calculated for the entire household, not per person, and since our numbers have doubled, our consumption has obviously gone up, but not by twice as much, which is good news. Bad news is that this is ONLY for hot water, since obviously we’ve not needed  the heating to be on. We’re looking into an electric on-demand heater with perhaps a solar thermal unit…

9.75  gallons of oil

15.8% of the US National Average

Trash. After recycling and composting this usually comes down to mainly food wrappers.

6 lbs. pp per month

4.4% of the US National Average

Water. This is calculated per person. Unfortunately this is again a higher average than usual.

660 gallons pp.

22 % of the US National Average

***

After three months of having at least 6 people in the house – at peak times 9 – a general exodus is taking place and we will be down to just Amie and I for a couple of weeks. Hopefully there won’t be a repeat of last year’s storm and week-long power-outage!

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