OVER FIVE YEARS OF RIOT!
This is the Riot for Abundance for the month of December 2013,  for the two of us for half of the month, and one for the other half (DH was in Europe for the whole month, Amie and I joined him there in the middle, and as of then we had a friend live at our house). Edson fixed the calculator: all go tither to crunch those numbers! And here’s another fun website for the mathematically inclined: Do the Math.
Gasoline. Â Calculated per person. DH was away, and our house sitter is a die-hard biker, so one of our cars sat idle for the entire month, and the other for half of the month. Car-wise, then, we used up 6 gallons pp. Â But we did fly: three round-trips to Europe. The Riot calculator doesn’t have air travel in there, so I don’t know how to reckon this in.
6 gallons pp.
14.6% 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 11918  kWh since the system was turned on in August 2011 and 70 (seventy!)  kWh over the last month (you can follow our solar harvest live here). That is the least we’ve ever produced. We make that much in two days in Summer! So, December was dark and gloomy and when there was sun it was cold enough to keep the snow and ice stuck to the panels.  As a result, we’ve had to buy 313 kWh from Nstar: our biggest bill yet. The good news is that apparently, the chicken’s water heater, which I installed at the beginning of November and which has been going non stop (and doing a good job), doesn’t seem to make a big dent in our energy consumption.
313 + Â 70 = 383 kWh per month
21.2 %Â of the US National Average
Heating Oil and Warm Water. This too is calculated for the entire household. It’s been cold. While our house sitter was at work the oil furnace worked to keep the house at 59F. Since also the solar hot water panels (installed in February) were ice-locked, the furnace also took care of most of the hot water. SunReports, which monitors our solar hot water system, reports that we generated only 53,414 BTUs in December (compare to 440,660 BTUs the month before!). Still, due to there being fewer of us and our house sitter being a kick-ass frugal environmental guy, we used only as much as we did last month, which wasn’t’ too much.
 16 gallons of oil / month
26% of the US National Average
Water. This is calculated per person. We did great!
404 gallons pp. per month
13.5 %Â 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 %Â of the US National AverageÂ