The Bill Busters participants weren’t the only ones using meter reads to track their progress.

Here are some of our ‘numbers’ for spring (I’m a bit slow getting around to posting them). See here for how and why we’re tracking this stuff.

Average town water use: 58 litres per person per day
Average electricity used per day (total): 2.7 kWh
Average electricity generated per day: 7.8 kWh (for those interested in comparison, it's a 1.7 kW system)
Cost of electricity for the quarter: -$352.61 
(represents service fee and electricity used totalling $73.39, and income of $426.00 from the gross feed-in tariff ... note that even without a feed-in tariff, our generation would cover both our electricity used and the service fee)
Average gas use per day: 3 MJ
Av. petrol used in car per week: 14.4 litres
Percentage of car travel that was for work (excluding commute): 47%
Percentage of car travel – commuting to work: 20%
Other personal use car travel: 33%

We were interested to note that our electricity use was 15% less than the same time last year. Presumably our fridge upgrade helped, but we also used the solar space heater more and spent more time at home than last spring, so we were pretty happy with that outcome. The lower our use gets the harder it is to find more opportunities to reduce ... but we’re still improving, which is our goal!

Our town water use was a bit higher than last spring. Not much had changed in terms of our appliances or behaviours for water, so it seemed a bit strange at first. Then we realised that although we both worked from home last spring, it wasn’t as much as this year. That extra water use is pretty much extra toilet flushing. In the longer term, we plan to install a composting toilet that won't require water to deal with our toilet waste at all, but it's still a way off. Needless to add, I have implemented a plan to address it. I’m just working out where the line is before you tell me “that’s too much information!” so I’ll save the details for another time. Stay tuned!