Slashing Your Monthly Utility Bills #087

into this one with you, ma'am. Yeah, and water. Honestly, I'm I think that one is one that's Water rates across the country have been soaring, and especially here where we are in Atlanta, it's kind of gotten ridiculous. So even cutting your water bill, it's possible, and we're gonna talk about that as well. I'm excited about it. But first, Matt, I wanted to mention I saw this really interesting video

about this musician. His name is Mike Posner, and honestly, I don't really know his music, but he's doing something fascinating. He's walking across the entire country, uh, from coast to coast, and I like Forrest Gump style, right exactly, Like that makes me think of those are the next words coming out on and he he actually kind of looks like Forrest Gumps did when he with like kind of bushy

curly hair and like the beard and stuff. Um, but it made me think like he's doing something really intentional. For some reason. This was the task that he felt compelled to take on right now, And it made me think of two of a recent listener email that we got from listener Todd, and he talked about how he ditched his y membership in an email to us. Why

m c a membership? Yeah, in order to walk his dog every day in this beautiful part of the country that he's in in Roanoke, Virginia, and even send us a picture of kind of this beautiful mountain view that he gets with every walk with his dog. And I was like, I don't know if every walk is that beautiful. That was a particularly beautiful sunset. Yeah, but that's uh, it's like McAfee's knob. Did you look it up? I

did a little bit of research. No, I didn't. I just saw the picture and I was like, well, that's nice. I wish I could walk to their every day. It's a spot. It's on the Appalachian Trail and so there's lots of through hikers. But I guess you can just hop on there and do the hike sort to Alec cart right the quick tangent. Do you have any desire to hike the a t ever No, honestly a little too intense for me. But I don't know with the right in the back of my mind, all right, maybe

you want to do with me. We'd have to do it like sooner rather than later though, before we get too old. I don't know. I don't want to be doing it like seventy six or anything like that, you know, but you can. There's lots of old folks that do it, okay. I do consider seventy six old. By the way, if sorry to offend any seventy six year old listeners out there, well, that impresses me all the more people doing it at

that age, like that's incredibly impressive. And we had a buddy who did, who hiked the whole a T man. I think it's really awesome. It just honestly doesn't I don't feel a called to do it, but I just love that idea too, of of walking more and taking advantage of the natural beauty that's around you. To see that Todd decided to ditch a gym membership where he was walking on the treadmill or something like that in order to get outdoors. You know, I feel like that's

what biking is for me. It's like cool that I'm getting all my cardio in on my way to work. And at the same time, I do feel this like really amazing connection to our city, to nature on that bike ride that I wouldn't get if I was stuck indoors doing my workout. Yeah, man, that's great. You know, when I get out of that, I hear that, and I think what we should be doing is focusing on, you know, our lifestyle now, but just like enjoying our life right now and not getting too caught up with

the goals. And so, like our listener Todd, like his goal might be to be fit right and to get in shape, but you don't want to let that goal of being in shape overshadow of your life, and so why not do something you know with his dog, he's able to get out in nature, like enjoy life now you can. It's great to set goals, but I think sometimes when you overvalue those goals and maybe put too much weight on them, you cannot enjoy the here and now. And so yeah, maybe this is a little called our

listeners to. It's great to set goals, but to make sure that you're enjoying life the here and now, and we like to do that every Weegio by having a beer, craft beer. Matthew, that's right. Yeah, So today on the show, we are drinking a double Brute Citra in Galaxy I p A by Bear Republic Brewing Company there out of California. Man, they've been at it a long time since and they were kind enough to send this beer out to us. Yeah, this one is called Challenge Series eleven and we've never

had a Brute I PA on the show before. I don't think. I think I've only had maybe two of these in my entire life. Actually, it's like a really new style. There's like this new fad of trying to combine wine and beer, Like these hybrid style beers and Brute I p A s are kind of another way for them to get kind of the taste of like a champagne a little bit that kind of dryness I feel like into a craft beer. And so yeah, like there's no limit to what people are doing with craft

beers right now. Nice, Yeah, Joe, I'm excited to enjoy this beer with you on this episode. We'll talk more about this at the end of the show, all right, Matt, So onto the subject at hand. We're talking about slashing our monthly utility bills. Interestingly enough, I mean, we waste so much money on utilities that could be back in our pockets if we would be just a little more intentional about making our homes more energy efficient. And it's important for us to look at the payback time of

any potential energy saving steps we might take. And some of these steps that we're gonna talk about, they're a touch more labor intensive, and other steps that we're gonna talk about in order to make your home more energy efficient, well they're super simple and you could probably tackle them in an hour, not even a weekend, right, Like you

could do something really quickly. But it's really important because these are changes that we can make that don't just save us like five bucks today, but they might be able to save us five bucks a month for the coming years if we make that small change to our energy usage. And so, yeah, I think is an interesting

topic to cover. Yeah, Joel, Like you said, we're gonna cover sort of a range of different things that you can do to make your home more energy efficient, things that would be easy to do if you even if you lived in an apartment or if you're rented a house, like things that would have an immediate payback. And then also to yeah, like you said, like the bigger things

that that might take a little bit longer. But we're gonna kind of cover the spectrum of the different kind of projects that you can do to your home a little more energy efficient. But before we even actually dive into the tips, right, like, I think it's important to ask ourselves why does this even matter? It's not just

about taking care of the earth. And you know the money that you're saving right now, but Joe, like you said, like the money moving forward, right, and even beyond that, the potential for what that money could grow into if

you invested that money every month. Don't forget the rule of one seventy three right where you can take a monthly expense and multiply it by one D seventy three, And that's what you could have in ten years if you were to reduce a monthly expense and instead invest that right, So, say you are able to cut a monthly expense by seventy five bucks. You take that seventy five bucks every month, invest it in ten years, you're looking at a solid thirteen thousand dollars. Man, That is

a lot of money, that is, yeah, for sure. And and so even beyond that, so you're able to cut a bunch of bills, right, If you're able to reduce some monthly bills, some monthly utilities by two hundred and fifty dollars a month, in ten years, you're looking at forty three thousand dollars, that's like a whole lot of money. So just keep in mind that recurring monthly expenses have

a huge impact on your ability to say for the future. Yeah, And we talked about that rule of one seventy three in our just general cutting monthly bills episode that we did a while back. That's right, And so we talked about you know, cutting cable, internet, all these sorts of things that that can help you in how much you're

spending every single month. And that rule of one seventy three is just a great thing to kind of grab, grab onto and and kind of to do some basic math that helps you see how much money you could put back in your pocket if you invested that money like you said, as opposed to uh, spending it on whatever you're spending it on that month. And we talked a little bit about our monthly utility bills, but we didn't go into how you can actually dramatically reduce those bills.

And so yeah, let's get into that now. Let's first kind of talk about electricity, right, power, the power bill, the power bill, the dreaded power bill every month. And I want to say one thing real quick when it comes to the power bill. I know there are a lot of utilities out there who will let you sign up for something called budget billing, which kind of takes into account the way that you've used power over the previous year and then gives you a level bill every

single month. And I think you know that can be helpful for your budget. But for me, I don't like budget billing. And let me tell you why real quick. It's because I actually like seeing how much energy I've used, and particularly like in the summer months, if I have turned on the air conditioner more than I wanted to, I kind of like feeling the pain getting that bill in the mail and seeing that I'm spending more money than I want to. It changes my usage it changes

my habits. Uh, and so for me, that's why budget billing isn't as good because I don't feel the pain in the same way. I like seeing the exact amount I used and how much it costs me. Yeah, you know. Actually, in the research for this episode, I came across this thing called the Sense Energy Monitor. Have you heard of this thing or have you seen it? No? What is it? So?

It's this device that you clamp onto the the sort of the main cables that go into your circuit breaker box, which sounds kind of intimidating, right, but it looks super easy. And what it does is in real time, it reads the actual amount of electricity that your house is drawing.

And it's integrated with an app on your phone, which is crazy to see real time the exact amount that, say, when you're a c kicks on, you can watch it spike and then stay there, or you can plug everything in your house if you want to, and just with nothing else running, you can see how much power your fridge is actually drawing from from the system, how much it's costing you. Totally fascinating. It's actually it's kind of expensive.

It's like two or three bucks or something. Well, that sounds like a recipe for ruining my marriage because I would be like constantly on the app measuring how much we're using, being like turn off the I know, I know, but I don't know. It looks super slick. It had amazing reviews on Amazon, and I totally spent way too much time reading about it and kind of checking it out. I might ask for one of these for Christmas or something like that. I thought it might be something totally

up your alley as well. Yeah, I know they have like those individual things that you can plug into your outlet per socket, yeah, per socket. But yeah, it's something that's whold home overall the entire house. That's what I want to know. And I'm telling you that the interface was super slick and it looked like you can chart it and kind of keep track of, you know, your history,

don't know, like super cool. Basically, like I'm a big fan of running, and like I've got run Keeper that's what I use, and it kind of keeps track of your runs and stuff like that. And you've got this history and you've got your numbers. But to be able to do that with your with your home electricity, yeah, I was totally nerd and out on it and might have to add that to the Christmas list. Dude, that's awesome.

I love it all right. So let's get into some of the actual specific things that you can do to kind of keep that energy from spiking, the ways that you can cut back on your power usage in order to have a lower monthly bill. And you know, the number one thing that you can do is actually by far the easiest thing, and that is to change your

thermostat settings. Of the monthly costs of home utilities come from heating and cooling our home, and so the best way to get around that, right is to change your actual thermostat settings. And you know, most local utility providers say that you should keep your thermostat on sixty eight in the winter and seventy six in the summer to prevent overusing, and that's totally true. I try to go just a little bit beyond that more like see D four in the winter and seventy seven in the summer.

It's it's summer is a little bit harder. It could be difficult with the kids running around. Yeah, everyone's like sweating and piste off. I'm with you, though. We try to we actually push seventy eight, and we we rocked the ceiling fans pretty hard. But there you go. Yeah, seven eight in the summer for us, and then in the winter, I think we do sixty seven during the day, but at night that's what you got, big savings right there. May I drive it down to sixty one at night.

There you go. You're not gonna get frostbite in sixty one. I mean, come on, it's not gonna happen. Yeah, sixty one totally safe temperature to be at in the winter, but you know, for power again and in the summer months, utilize like your ceiling fans. Pretty much all homes have ceiling fans built in. If you have an older home,

that might be something worth actually installing. If you don't have a ceiling fans in your house, don't pull a jol and get one of those like ceiling fans with the with the tiny blades on the that are totally ineffective. Those things are worthless, man, and a waste of money. But even if you aren't super d I y you

can just get even a table fan. For me, if I get hot, I have a fan in that I can flip on and I've got that pointed sitting right there for me at my desk, because guess what, for maybe close to eight hours and during the day, that's where I'm sitting. I'm sitting there working and I'm able to keep myself perfectly happy and cool just with a little bit of air movement. Yeah, ceiling fans are awesome. Attic fans. If anyone has an attic fan, make sure

to use it. Matt Our first house had an attic fan, and it was freaking awesome, man, because let's say in the spring, where the temperature is eighty two during the day, but it is, you know, sixty two in the morning when you first wake up. You can open up the windows, open up the door, and turn on your attic fan and it sucks in all the cool air cools down your home like eight degrees in like three minutes. It's so nice, man. It just helps you to not have to use the A C nearly as much. I'm a

huge proponent of attic fan. Yeah, I've never lived in a house that had an attic fan, but anytime I've seen one of those in action, it kind of blows my mind. All right, So now we need to ask a question. I guess about thermostats. We just talked about setting your thermostat at different temperatures. Where do you come down on the smart thermostats that are kind all the rage these days. Man, I've got one. I'm a big fan of the Nest thermostats. You know, they were greats.

I think for a lot of folks who have a predictable schedule though, they cannot get the fancy or nest thermostat right like, they've got different levels. Now they've got the I think it's called the E Nest, and then they have the Nest learning. The Nest learning is the one that automatically will will learn from your behavior and sort of where you set the thermostat and will create

its own sort of schedule. But if you have a predictable schedule, you know that every day you're gonna leave, you know, this time of the day to go to work, you don't really need the learning thermostat and you can save yourself. I think it's a hunter Bucks cheaper to get the E thermostat, And so it's basically a programmable thermostat that you can change on your phone at any point, but it's not learning. That's all you need because you set the schedule, you said it and forget it and

you're good to go. Man. Plus, it's just awesome to be able to you know, turn down say you forget to turn down the heat, you know, in the winter, or turn up the A C in the summer if you go on a trip, and to be able to hop on your phone and do that and not basically be stress the entire time you're away thinking damn, I'm cooling my house for nothing or I'm heating it for nothing. I love that. Yeah, so I haven't made the transition to a smart thermostat. I just disciplined and actually turn

it off before you leave, right. Discipline might be one word I would say, probably anal. I'm like, really, you know, I'm not anal about many things in life, but about the thermostat setting, I kind of am. You're that roommate in college where you would you do the thermostat battles with? Yeah?

Probably I was that guy. Yeah, And so yeah, at home, I'm I'm pretty intentional about what we said it on and when we kind of create a little bit more of a comfortable environment when we're all at home versus you know, when I leave for work and we're kind of heading outdoors bumping it up so that the A C isn't running right. So I don't feel it necessarily

the need to get a smart thermostat. I think for a lot of people who aren't as diligent in setting their thermostat settings appropriately, then you know, one of those kind of smart thermostats could be helpful, and especially because, like you said, you can remotely change those settings, which is great. Speaking of that, Matt, So you know, we just talked about budget building, and that's something that a

lot of electricity providers offer. A lot of of power companies also give you the choice to do a time of use electricity plan, and they incentivize you to use your electricity at certain times of the day, pretty much like the off peak times that most people aren't using it. And you are on one of those plans. So how's that working out for you, guys? Yeah, it really has worked out for us. And what's good to mention there is that it's only for three or four months out

of the summer. Like, so it starts. I don't even think it starts in May. I think it starts in June. I think it's like June, July, and August, maybe September as well. Yeah, that makes sense, like the sort of summer hot, hot months, but it's only for those three or four months out of the year. And like you said, they, yeah, they incentivize you to use less electricity during the peak hours of the day. Uh. And that's basically like like from nine to six or something like that, or maybe

it's seven. I forget. I don't know because I've got a set's on my thermostat and I don't even really think about it, right, But so that means that your air doesn't kick on at all between those hours. No, it's on, but we keep it a little bit warmer, right, So so in the summer months it's a little bit warmer, and then once we break into that zone, that period of time when the cost drops, that's when it kind

of kicks on. So it's a little bit warmer. In her house, we're a little more dependent on ceiling fans, table fans and things like that. But then I think it's seven o'clock for for Georgia. Power Once that time hits our a c drops a degree or two and the house gets cooler, and for us, I think man it's saved us close to like ten of our power bill, and that's kind of average over the course of the year. But yeah, it is ten times less expensive in those

off peak hours. And so in particular, if you get home from work a lot later, or you know that you can do your laundry run the dryer in the evening, or especially say, if you work the night shift or something like that, right if you have a schedule that's reverse of most folks where you're kind of sleeping during the day and not doing much, but then at night that's kind of when you wake up and kind of start your life. But there are some big savings that

could be had there. Yeah, you know, it's interesting, Matt. My my sister just switched over to Google Fi from like a traditional cell phone carrier, and she's become so much more cognizant of the data that she's using. It seems very similar to one of these kind of time of electricity plans, because you're just way more thoughtful about the energy you're using when you're directly seeing the impact

a whole heck of a lot more. And she's kind of become that same way, Like she's very thoughtful about you know what. I can wait to look that up, I can wait to check my email, I can wait to watch that YouTube video because I know that I'm paying for every single tent of a gig of data. And we talked about Google Fi, you know, back in the day, about and still it's one of the best cell phone providers out there, but it's kind of one of those things where it's gonna help you realize how

much data you're actually using. And I think that that can usually typically be a good thing to kind of put that in front of our faces. Let's talk about L D bulbs. You've got these in your house, I know for sure, man. L E D bulbs are truly besides the thermostat settings, they're probably the next greatest thing you can do in order to kind of curb electricity usage at your house, And in particular, the first thing would be to replace the most used lights in your

house with ELI D bulbs. It's great to make it an eventual goal to have all of the light bulbs in your house as L E D bulbs, But if you just have a few lamps or a few overhead lights in your house that you use, you know, nine of the time that you feel like are usually typically turned on. Replacing those with l D bulbs is going to result in a major savings, especially because l D bulbs have become so much cheaper these days. You can even at times find them for close to a dollar

a bulb. Used to be like twenty bucks of bulbs right right when they first came out. It's like, man, those bulbs are on sale for thirty each, Like what a deal. And when they first came out, the light wasn't very great from l D bulbs, That's true. It was kind of that like tacky blue light or whatever. And and now there's much warmer colors available in l D bulbs as you can find out there at the stores.

And so yeah, especially if you're looking, I know you're not a fan of this, Matt, but buying the Costco and nothing against Costco, just haven't really joined the cult yet. So yeah, that episode still to come. Yeah, we'll make that happen. But buying in bulk from a warehouse club is a great way to to get a lower cost on those l D bulbs, and those typically use ninety percent less energy than a traditional bulb does, which which

is insane. That's big difference. Yeah, that's insane. Anytime you hear return on anything like that's something you want to go for, right and not available typically in the investing world. By the way, exactly and specifically, what that means is, over the course of the lifetime of that bulb, you're looking at on average, eighty dollars in savings, and each one of those bulbs, on average will last about fifteen times longer than a traditional incandescent bulb. All right, Matt.

Another big energy suck in a lot of homes is having old appliances. And I'm not the kind of guy that would suggest getting rid of your the fridge in your kitchen in order to get a new one that would quote unquote save you on energy, right, I feel we'll talk more about that later, but that's typically not a recipe that ends in you saving a lot of money, right. It's like buying that new pre is because it's going to save you on gas. You know. Usually that's a

flawed way of thinking about it. Um. But let's say you have a secondary fridge a beer fridge, as something I'd say, and probably how I would use a secondary fridge, not that you have one, not that I have one, but getting rid of that secondary fridge that's in the garage or whatever, and pticularly if it's in a garage and it gets warmer and it has to use more energy in order to stay cool. You're talking about like a lot of money every year that this secondary fridge

is costing you. And older refrigerators are notorious for for using a lot of energy. And you know what, your local utility company might even offer you an incentive to donate that fridge, to get rid of it, to give it to them, And so it's worth it too as you're thinking through some of these things to actually check out your local utilities website. There might be incentives to do a lot of these things. They might even offer a deal for you to get a new programmable thermostat

at a reduced rate. Jump on those rebates. Yeah, tons of those rebates on your local utilities website. So it's definitely worth checking that out. And while we're talking about fridges, Jole, you also want to make sure that you're taking care of your fridge. And what I mean by that is that you want to clean the coils on your fridge

or freezer to keep it working efficiently and properly. Most fridges, a lot of times there's like that little plastic grate at the bottom, and what you want to do is just pop that off and take a look up under there and tell me what you see. Because if this doesn't sound familiar at all to you, or this is something that you haven't done, you are in for a treat because there's gonna be so much junk up under there.

Typically you want to do this maybe close to once a year to kind of keep all the dust and junk and food whatever gets kind of kicked up under the fridge. It's gonna look like there's a squirrel limited beer fridge when you pop it off, like the sarious squirrel all time. So in the same way, cleaning the coils on your fridge is essential to that fridge running well. It's like changing the filter and which we're gonna talk about in your HVAC unit every every few months, right

to keep it running at optimum condition. And that's going to ensure that your fridge, you know, lasts for as long as it's supposed to and at the same time, you know, keep those cooling costs down. You know, there's other things you can do make sure you're cleaning your lint filter. When it comes to using your dryer, also use those dryer balls, you guys, use those the wool balls that you throw in there. Nope, dude again, I was reading about those and kind of geeking out. We're

totally going to get some of those. They cut down on how long it takes for your clothes to dry because they kind of spread the clothes out as they bounce around, and they evidently work as a natural fabric softener as well, so you can save money that way as well. You know what else they say about dryers, do your drying batches back to back to back so the dryer doesn't cool down and have to heat all the way back up. I like it, man, that's so smart.

And even consider air drying your clothes. Right, it's a little more old school, but you can also save a ton of money that way, and it's better for your clothes as well. All right. Another interesting thing to watch out for when it comes to your power bill is this thing called vampire electronics, which is kind of a cool name, but but really, keeping your computers and TVs plugged in constantly what can cost you? And even if your TV is not on, or your computer is plugged

in and charging. But whatever, it's a hundred percent charge. You don't think that it's actually costing you money to continue to have it plugged in. Well, in all likelihood it is. And so the best way around vampire electronics and them sucking money out of your wallet as they're plugged into the outlet is to have that on a power strip, and that way once your computer is fully charged or when you're not using let's say your TV. And interestingly enough, a culprit of this is often like

a cable box. So even if you're not like watching cable, if you don't have your TV turned on, it can be sucking electricity out even though you're not using it. And so a power strip turning it off when you're not using it and then powering it back on. It might be a little bit of an inconvenience, it might be a little bit annoying, but it can save you money. So vampire electronics. That phrase, you know what, it immediately made me think of for some reason, Vampire Weekend. No,

although that maybe would have been more hip. Great band, great band? What was Bunikula? Did you ever read that book as a kid? It was this. It was this rabbit that was like this vampire rabbit, and it sucked all the life or the blood out of vegetables that they turned white. It totally sounds like a book you would have predic Why not, Right, anyway, after the break, we're gonna talk about some more ways that you can save money when it comes to your utilities. We're gonna

specifically talk about your gas bill. All right, Matt full Back. We just talked about cutting your monthly electricity bill. Now let's talk about cutting your gas bill. And not everyone across the country use the same kind of gas. You know, we down here in the South use natural gas. Up in the Northeast, there's a lot of home heating oil that's used. But I think there are some common things that we share in ways that we can actually cut

those bills. Right, and so again, like those thermostat settings are important in the winter, and putting on layers and blankets are really important in order to be able to keep your your house at a lower temperature, therefore saving your money when it comes to the heating element that you're using. Yeah, and when we were talking about power, we talked about the low end of the thermostat right, how at night I set our thermostat at sixty one? And you know we've got little kids. Are you wearing

like three snuggies or what? No, I won't share exactly how I sleep, but it's pretty minimal. Okay, all right, But our girls, I think some folks might have heard what I said earlier about you know, it being sixty one. But we do keep an electric radiator heater in the girl's room. And the way that we're able to control and make sure that they are at a safe aperature in our sleeping well is that we actually have a thermometer that is in the bathroom that borders their room

with a little sensor that goes through the wall. I just drilled a hole into the wall. The little sensor pops out, and it measures the temperature in the girl's room. And so what that means, man, is that we're able to let the temperature in our house get pretty dang cold at night, like we're talking about, but we can check in on that and see where the temperature is

in their room without even going in there. And so that allows us to save a lot of money when it comes to gas and targeting that specific room all three of our girls are in that room sleeping, and we keep the temperature in the room at a solid sixty eight. You know, it ranges that safe temperature for us is between like sixty seven and like seventy two

is perfectly fine for the kiddos. Yeah, I feel like most people don't consider the prospect of individually heating or cooling rooms, And I think that's such an important thing to think about because most of the time we're spending a lot of our evenings in one or two rooms, or we don't want our kids to be cold, and so we bump up the temperature of the entire household so that we can so we can keep our kids

warm and their rooms. For me, I feel like I'm overheated if we keep the Tampa anything above sixty six. But I want my girls to be warmer than than I am because I just can't handle that much heat. Les's because they're kiddos, right Like, they don't know it's wake up and kind of pull the comforter up and warm themselves. We've got young kids, and so the thing is, though, once you get your house warm, you want to make

sure that that heat stays inside the house. So we're gonna talk now about some weather stripping and cock like when it comes to older houses in particular, man like, that is such an important step that you can take to make sure that you don't have actual drafts of cold air coming through your walls coming through your windows in the winter. You can buy this sort of ugly window wrap that goes over your windows and kind of

use the hair dryer to kind of shrink wrap. It looks a lot like saran wrap, but for your window. It's ugly, but from windows that you don't open very often, it can actually work and can save you money for Have you ever used that before? So I had when we bought our house. We had it on a couple of windows, and it made a huge difference. Yeah, we kept it on for that winter, but then decided that we don't really want to re put it back on every winter. But but no, it does make a big difference.

It's kind of unsightly. A similar option, though, is you can use this It's called seal and peel. It's like this removable cock And so if you know you've got old windows, like on our old house, there are windows that I can stand next to you and literally see the ground without anything obstructing my side. But like between the two sashes, like between the panes of glass and the ceiling peel cock, it goes on, but it's not

meant to be permanent. And so if you want to open the window in the spring, when the mature starts getting a little bit warmer before it gets too hot, you just peel that off and you can pop open your window. It's great stuff, that's nice, you know, Matt. I feel like a lot of people quickly go to replacing windows or doing you know, major renovations in order

to make their house feel more comfortable. And new windows are nice, but they're really expensive, and they also aren't going to save you quite as much energy, I don't think as you thought they would. And some of these kind of interim things, some of these smaller things that you can do, like the peel and seal cock, are a way to save a lot of money on your monthly energy bills to make your house feel more comfortable

without spending a lot of money. That's right. Like, yeah, new windows, even though they might be double or even trouble pained, it's still glass, and so the our value on those windows, it's significantly lower than the insulation in the wall that you have in the you know, the sighting, like all the layers that you have on a regular

wall are vastly superior to your window. So the fact is, if you have a window and you want to have a nice view to your yard and natural light coming into your room, like, fact is, it's going to be

less efficient than if you didn't have windows. But what's key here is that you remove drafts so that you can remove air flowing in and out of your house when you don't want it, in particular in the winter when that cold air I wants to get inside your house, and specifically blackout curtains like big things can have a major effect in in kind of preventing those drafts from

coming through and making your house feel uncomfortable. Yeah, it creates that insulating layer right there in front of the glass, So make sure you close those at night. Yeah, Matt. And one thing I've got some experience with is insulating an attic. That's huge. That's one of the number one ways that you can cut down on your heating and cooling costs is by having an attic that has proper insulation in it. This is something that you can d I y, you don't have to hire this out, and

even if you did, it's not terribly expensive. But it's not really that hard to do. In particular, like blow in insulation. I'm not talking about the spray and phone, but I'm talking about the blow in cellulos exactly exactly. But yeah, my buddy J and I did it in just a couple of hours, and you know, he was kind of feeding in the cellulo stuff and I had this long hose and I was up in the attic can spraying it and we would kind of go back

and forth and take the other person's job. It was kind of fun, uh and and really ultimately you know, cut down on the heating and cooling costs. So it's something you can do in just you know, a Saturday morning, and it's something that often, Like I said, we talked about how energy providers will pay you money to perform some of these energy saving techniques to your home, and that was something that my energy provider, I want to say, they paid for almost like the costs sweet rebate that

was going. Yeah, it was really good. So so yeah, it's something to look into as well. And while we're on the topic of insulating, you can instant your water heater and your pipes as well. That way you're using

less energy there. And if your house has a down attic, you know with like the stairs right that kind of allows you to walk up through the ceiling, those are notorious spots for energy leaks, and so you can insulate those with these big foam blocks that kind of go on top of it, or this thing called an attic tent where it's sort of seals the whole. You walk up the steps and then you unzip it et style, you know, like kind of go through the can, go

through the radioactive hatch. And that's a great way to to save on your energy costs, especially in the winter when it comes to your heat. Yeah, one interesting thing to consider is getting a home energy audit, and lots of local utility companies offer free audits in person and if not, at least lots of times, I'll have an online version. And if your local utility doesn't offer something like that, well, the U. S Department of Energy has some online tools that can kind of help you gauge

where your energy loss is coming from. Um, So that can kind of be helpful in at least seeing you know, where most of your dollars are escaping essentially out of these crevices in your doors and floors and windows and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, Joel, I mean that's one of the biggest categories of an energy audit, right, is to see where as air getting in or out of your house. And you know you can kind of

do that yourself as well. You can d I why it by closing all your doors, right, all of your extra your doors, getting a stick of incense or a few sticks whatever, but then flip on all of your into your exhaust fans. So if you have a hood over your range, you know, any bathroom fans that suck air out of the house. And essentially what you're doing is creating a vacuum, so that air has to get into your house somewhere, and it's going to come from

the path of least resistance. And so you take that stick of incense, you light it, and you go near the windows where you think you might have some air leaks, and anywhere you see sort of that's you know, that smooth line of smoke that should be going up. I can normally would you know, you start seeing that smoke kind of disrupted. Well, you know that, even though if you can't feel it, that's where you've got air coming in, and you can look for ways to to seal those gaps.

For me, I don't need to light a stick of incense in the winter, man. I can stand in front of windows and when the wind blows, I can feel it. So through our old crappy windows have a long wind

to go. Yeah, man, these old homes kind of drafty, right, all right, So another thing you need to consider is furnace maintenance, changing your filters like a few times a year at minimum, And if you have pets, you might want to consider replacing your filters like every other month, because you know what's expensive, What filters are a little expensive, but what's more expensive is your furnace not running efficiently.

And then on top of that, in all likelihood, the fewer years that you're going to get out of that furnace. So being able to kind of extend the life of your HVAC system by replacing the filters as often as you should, that's gonna be one of the best things that you can do in order to save energy. Every month. Yeah, Juel, you know another way that we can get our natural gas or energy costs down is by lowering the temperature

on your water heater. You know, by default it is typically sets at a temperature that will give you water that's about a hundred and forty degrees. But you can turn that down a little bit. You can take that down a hundred and twenty, which is still plenty hots for your dishwasher or the other needs you might have. And you know that can easily save you fifty bucks right there. Washing your clothes in cold tap water when you can, uh is the best way to save money

on water heating costs too. And speaking of water map, we're going to get two ways to reduce your water usage that are easy to understand and pretty cheap to implement right after the break, right, So let's round this thing out now with water Agua. The biggest way that you can save in your water bill is to choose to have a yard that doesn't require lots of water

or honestly any at all. So much of your monthly water bill can go towards watering the grass that's surrounding your house, when in reality that's something you can totally forego. And that the problem with water in your yard too. Is is that a lot of municipalities, the way they build water is that you get built a certain rate for the water that that you use, but you also get built for sewer as well, because they assume water

that you're using is going down the drain. So obviously when you're watering your yard, that water isn't going back into the water treatment plant, but you're paying but you're paying for it exactly. And so that's why water can be so expensive when it comes to watering your lawn. I will admit we've we have personal experience with this because after renovating our house a little bit here, we totally chewed up the backyard and we wanted to get

some grass, some rye grass, some clover. We wanted to get to get all that seated and started and going that way, we have a nice quote unquote lawn back there, you know, just we wanted to be green for them to play on. But that takes some water. And Joel I saw our water bell shoot from basically sixty bucks a month up to one eight, so basically three times what we've normally been paying just to turn the water

on for five or six minutes. You know, every other day in the back, just so that see you can get started each Yeah, that's thanks. Yeah, that's where rain barrels can come in handy if you kind of attach those two a down spout and and then you can water. Let's say you give a small garden or you are trying to grow some grass in the back, Like a rain barrel can be a huge way to to capture that water in order to avoid using, you know, a spigot or a sprinkler in order to water your lawn.

Another way to kind of save water, like a couple of really big ways are to install low flow toilets in your house. And and they make them of all different shapes and sizes, and they've gotten a lot better than they used to be. I think when low flow toilets kind of first came on the market, people were like, you have to flush them twice, Yeah, and it totally defeated the purpose exactly. They just weren't good that great. And now they've gotten actually pretty decent. Yeah, designs a

lot better on them. Yeah. And so in the same way where we talked about power companies offering you rebates for doing certain things to make your home more energy efficient. Well, a lot of local water companies will actually pay for the cost of an inexpensive low flow toilet if you'll install it, or in an expensive low flow shower head. So those are really good ways where you might be able to save water every single month and you're not even paying for the cost of the toilet or shower

head that actually helps you get there. Yeah, it just takes a little bit of elbow grease, and honestly, once you install a toil at once you realize it's not that complicated. It's one of those sounds hard, but it's really not that bad. Yeah, it really isn't so here

for us locally. Uh, the rebate was a hunter bucks and there were some select toilets that you could get for one hundred bucks, So literally they were paying for the cost of the toilet and all you had to do was just swap it out and you get that rebate, and all of a sudden, you've got a brain new toilet, white and shiny, and you're also saving a lot of money when it comes to your water belt. You didn't get the gold toilet, like you know, those are the

nice ones. That's what you should I prefer biscuit, like the whoever gets those right? Like white? But yeah, like the super off wide are like the kind of brown colored ones. They're like biscuit or biscue. I don't know, you know what. I'm not a fan personally, but maybe folks are. But another approach to if you don't have that rebate is to adopt the old saying, if it's yellow,

let it mellow. People are gonna think we're weird for saying that, but no, man, I've got three kids, and if they're all flushing the toilet every time the toilet is used, that is a lot of water that's getting flushed down that we're paying for. And so we we've trained our girls to not flush the toilet unless it's number two. I worry about my kids, like going to school. I'm like, are the teachers, Uh like, why aren't they plushing the toilet? I haven't got any feedback, but we've

had this discussion before. This is an ongoing discussion that you and I have of about our girls. But it makes me think about our conversation with Chris and Christie from Life opted Out about living in a van, and they talked about their experience of traveling to India and what it's like to kind of use the bathroom over there, and the fact that we have running water, we have indoor plumbing, we have toilets at our disposal. Oftentimes we have two or three in our house. It's at least

to quite the sophisticated genteel of life that we have, right. Yeah, And so like the idea of letting your p just sit there in the toilet and not flushing it down sounds ridiculous probably to a lot of people, but just think about it from a slightly different perspective, uh, and think about the way most of the world goes to the bathroom and how easy we have it, And then think to yourself, like, can I actually just like pe a couple of times in the toilet before I hit

the flush button? It's not that big of a deal. Think about See if you go to a festival or a concert, right, like, where do you go? Like it's the porter potties and you know, letting it mellow for a little bit in your own house, and a clean toilet is way way better than a porter potty. I mean, come on, like, if you can handle that, and if you can handle a porta potty or a Johnny on the spot or whatever you call them. Wherever you live, you can handle just letting it mellow for a little bit.

Another way that you can save water is to consider taking shorter showers. And this is one that's gonna be tougher for me, because I do a lot of good thinking when I'm in the shower, like something about my mind. It like deactivates and disengages from the normal things I'm supposed to think about, and I find that I'm honestly the most creative and I come up with fun ideas

and cool stuff when I'm taking a shower. But if you can take a shorter shower, you're gonna be able to save a lot of money, all right, So what

about them more expensive upgrades? We kind of talked quickly about how you're replacing windows is an expensive endeavor and it might make your house, you know, feel a little more comfortable, and it will also lower your energy bills, but it's one of those things that's really expensive to do, and so it's something that you should really only consider if you're doing it for you, not if you're doing it for the energy and money savings attached to it.

We'll take solar for instance. Uh, solar can be similar to a thought of replacing your windows. It can just be a really long payback period. You know, in some parts of the country, based on some of the government incentives that we have right now. In particular, the federal government is offering a thirty percent tax rebate on solar installations through the end of the year. Well, if you really nerd out on energy usage, then that incentive might be the thing that pushes you over the edge to

actually install solar at your home. But you have to realize that even with that incentive, even with that rebate, it's still going to be in all likelihood more than a decade, potentially close to two decades in order to see that investment payback. That's right, Joel. So you gotta keep that in mind, right, replacing your perfectly good appliances

with ones that are more energy efficient. Right, If you have a water here that works perfectly fine, or an HVAC or windows, and you're doing that just to save that money, well it's it's not really gonna work unless you're planning to stay there for maybe ten or twenty years. Really, the most impactful changes that you can have on your monthly utilities is by behavior modification. It's certain the cheapest option.

And that's because you can't always buy or purchase your way to fix a problem, right like you can't spend money to become more efficient a lot of the times. Often it takes being a little more diligent, being maybe a little more discipline, or changing your behavior to truly

save money. Yeah, I think it's important to make sure that we mentioned that some of these things you need to do on a regular cycle, like changing your filters or like that maintenance, right, cleaning those refrigerator coils, whatever it is, And so putting those things actually on your calendar, uh, in repeat fashion, so that you remember to do them, Because if I don't associate changing my filters with a specific date on my calendar, then the chances of it

getting done are pretty much not exists, not going to happen. Yeah, And so yeah, any way that you can kind of put it in front of your face, any way that you can help remind yourself that it needs to be done and to put it on a schedule, that's gonna help you actually take these steps, as opposed to just kind of hearing them in one ear and letting it go out the other That's right, Chel, I couldn't agree more. Man, Let's go ahead now and get back to this Beer

Challenge Series number eleven. This is a double Brutes I p A donated to us by Bear Republic. So thank you guys so much out there in California. Joel, let

me hear your thoughts on this one. Yeah. Bear Republic has been making beers for quite a long time and they make some really good ones out there, and this one in particular was man fascinating because, like you said at the beginning of the show, I think I've only had one brute I p A before, and it's kind of a newer style of I p A that, in essence tries to capture a little bit of what's going

on in a champagne and a brute champagne. And it really does have this really interesting for hot sweetness on the beginning that transitions into this dryness on the back end that you would get when drinking some sort of a brute champagne. And I love how beers can just taste completely different than anything you've ever tasted before. And this is an I p A like I've never had

so it was, yeah, fun to drink this one today. Yeah, I'm hoping some breweries around us start making like the style because I could totally see this working out well here in the South when it gets crazy hot in the summer. Like, what do you want? You want something that really hits you with a lot of flavor a lot of times? Or are you looking for something that's really clean? And to me, this drink is really clean, really dry. It reminds me a lot of sort of

a dry jin martini. You sort of got those floral maybe even like juniper notes, but there's not that sweetness there on the back end. It does finish kind of dry, all right, James Bond, extra fancy, nicely done. Well, that's gonna be it for this show, my friend. So hopefully this episode, Matt challenges all of us to be a little more thoughtful in in how we look to conserve energy in our houses. I think there are some easy winds that we can get and I think it's helpful

for us to think through these things. Not all of these things are gonna apply to you. Not all these things are gonna apply to everyone, and especially if you're living in an apartment, right you're not gonna install solar panels, you're not going to change out windows, but there are these little things that you can do, even if you don't own the house, in order to make these changes to save yourself some money when it comes to your energy bills. So, Joel, I think that's gonna be it

for this episode. Uh, you can check out our show notes over at how its money dot com and we'll have some links over there with some of the things that we talk it's about on this episode. Yeah, and if you have found this podcast helpful, man, we'd appreciate a review from you on Apple Podcasts. And you know what, if you think that we've got room to grow and get better, send us an email at how to money dot com slash do Better. That's right, we'd love to

hear from you, said Joel. Until next time, Buddy, best Friends Out, Best Friends Out,