I am rarely given to hyperbole, so you can believe me when I say our local utility company is turning my husband into a raving lunatic. No, really, he’s gone crazy! The utility company has a new program which, at first glance, seems like a great idea. Each month they send us a letter comparing us to 99 of our neighbors in similar sized houses and give us a ranking based on energy use. The letter is complete with graphs and charts showing us how our kW/H (kilowatts per hour) usage stacks up against others in the community. The first one we got showed that our house was 34th most efficient among our 100 comparable houses. Not great. At first, my husband seemed only somewhat interested in this news. Then I noticed some changes.

It started off slowly. First, he could be seen wandering around the house with a notepad. I later learned he was adding up the wattage of every light in the house. One evening, my husband took our daughter out to run errands. When they got home, I found out that they’d taken a trip to the home improvement store and he and his little helper got to work replacing light bulbs in one of our bathrooms. In each of our bathrooms, there is a strip of round, incandescent bulbs above the sink. They look nice, but they are very inefficient. Slowly but surely, they had been burning out in various bathrooms. He bought enough high efficiency bulbs to redo one bathroom, and we took the surviving incandescent bulbs into the other bathrooms to replace dead ones. I thought that was great! Our bathrooms are really the only places in the house that don’t have high efficiency bulbs yet, mainly because of the shape of the bulbs. But now, high efficiency bulbs come in all shapes and sizes, even for fancy light fixtures. Thus far, my husband was making responsible choices to save energy, which I am all for (and he got our daughter excited about it, which is a great bonus!). And he said “That should help out our rating.” It did- last month we were #26. He was not satisfied.

Two days ago, when my husband got home from work he undertook another project- something we’d been talking about for a long time but hadn’t gotten around to. He vacuumed out the dryer. It was a major undertaking, but he got out a lot of lint! The next day he vacuumed out the refrigerator coils. Again, something everybody should be doing but we hadn’t gotten around to. It’s filthy work, but he seemed very satisfied. And he’s confident that both will run much more efficiently now and improve our rating a little more! Still, nothing I was concerned about.

Last night, he went off the deep end. He has a mental list of projects that will put us on top! For example, he wants to build wind turbines into the top of the roof. Then, he went on and on about how, if we only waterproofed the basement, we could fill it with ice in the cold months then use the ice to cool the house in the summer and water the yard when it melts (something about Yugoslavian ice caves used to chill beer?). This would involve a complex system of pumps and tubing. And if we build solar collectors out of old satellite dishes and hook them to batteries in the house, we’ll save even more. He said “We can go completely off- grid!” and grinned at the thought like a toddler on Christmas. Help!

Really, I think our utility company is on to something and I’m happy about the new information they provide. People are so competitive, it seems like a great idea to pit us against each other in the name of energy conservation. If everybody makes small changes, we’ll make a big difference in community energy consumption. On the other hand, if everybody waterproofs their basements for giant blocks of ice my husband will never be number one! If you decide to go that route, just remember you heard it here first.

(Photo credit: AZAdam on Flikr)