Riot for Austerity – November and December 2012 – 49-50

OVER FOUR YEARS OF RIOT!

Four year summary coming soon (I know, I keep promising)

This is the Riot for the months of November and December 2012 for, mostly, the three of us. My summary of our first three years is here. Edson fixed the calculator: all go tither to crunch those numbers!

Gasoline.  Calculated per person. There were two trips, one to Providence, one to NYC, which brought up our usual consumption of gasoline:

17.7 gallons per person

43.1% 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 6897 kWh since the system was turned on, that’s only 420 kWh over the last two months (makes sense, these being the darkest months - compare to 302 in October, 615 kW in August – you can follow our solar harvest live here). It was also the first time I had to pay NStar  – meaning the credit we gathered last year through our overproduction is finished. The bill came to $1.38! This means we used 420  + 58 kW (November) + 207 kWh (December) =  685 kW for two months, which is

342 kwH monthly

18.9% of the US National Average

Heating Oil and Warm Water. This too is calculated for the entire household, not per person. This is for heating water and space heating, which we mostly do with our wood stove, except for the guestroom (thermostat at 45F – no guests in there, obviously), at night and when we’re not home (thermostat at 59F).  In December the temperatures finally started dropping and we had to turn on the heat. This number is going to change soon because we’re going solar hot water soon (but the Riot calculator, I now see, has no provision for solar hot water).

18.5 gallons of oil

30% of the US National Average

Trash. After recycling and composting this usually comes down to mainly food wrappers, though this month there was some unfortunately not-recyclable packaging of holiday gifts, so I’m adding a pound per person to our usual.

7 lbs. pp per month

5.2% of the US National Average

Water. This is calculated per person. We used more than in November and October, but still, this is about our usual.

481 gallons pp.

16 % of the US National Average

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