household energy update

It's been a few months since I updated our household energy use.  The first chart if natural gas which we use for domestic hot water, cooking and sometimes heating our home.  We're entering into our forth calender year of tracking this data.  You'll see January is down considerably from last year which was down remarkable from the year before.  In Jan 2012 we had 4 extra days in our billing cycle compared to the previous year but the average local temperature was 9 degrees warmer.  Still I was impressed because we are primarily heating our home with wood so the outdoor temperature shouldn't have had that big of an effect in terms of reduced NG use. 

Here's our electricity use.  After using slightly more in October 2011 than in October of 2010 we saw decreases in November, December and January.  December reduction was probably primarily due to my wife's more judicious use of Christmas tree lights.  Hopefully by June, July and August- our three high use months- we'll have our new HVAC system in place.  Also we will likely have a new clothes dryer by then.  We dried clothes much more out on the line last year than in the past and that will continue but we will continue to sometimes dry inside and we have quite an old machine.