Now that the Coronavirus is plaguing our world and impacting us on day-to-day bases, many of us have resorted to working from home. As you might expect, this will cause our energy expenses to go up since we’ll spend the vast majority of our time indoors.
Cutting unnecessary energy expenses is probably one thing we’d all want to do now. Many people have been asked to take pay cuts, but the company owners are forgetting that our expenses will increase.
So, to help you solve this problem, here are our 6 tips on how to cut unnecessary energy expenses when working from home.
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1. Work Shorter Hours
Source: entrepreneur
Many of us are either asked to work longer hours or we want to do that ourselves.
Regardless of which, this is advised against as you’ll end up putting in more hours towards your electrical bill. No doubt that you’ll save valuable time by eliminating the commuting issue, but working anything longer than 7-8 hours is advised against.
How would you do that? Well, even an eight-hour shift can put a lot towards your monthly energy bill. This is why you should try and do all the work you can as fast as you could.
Here are a few tips on how to achieve that:
- Avoid using social media as it can distract you from your work
- Avoid using services such as YouTube that do an even better job at it
- Check only the emails that are important to you, and don’t open any promotional emails
- Take your lunch break away from the laptop / PC to get the much needed short rest.
While these aren’t all the ways you could eliminate time-wasting while working at home, they are the easiest ones to do.
2. Natural Light as Opposed to Artificial
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If you happened to be working in a room that has natural lighting, then you need to make the most of it during the day. This is something that only half of the globe can use to their advantage, while the other will experience shorter days and longer nights.
For those of the better end of the table, make sure to use natural lighting as opposed to artificial while working. If your home office doesn’t have access to natural lighting, then make sure to relocate to one that has.
This is a tip that we heavily advise as to the less you use artificial lighting during the day, the more you’re saving on your monthly energy bill.
3. Get Comfy
Source: venturebeat
If you’re cold while working from home then you can turn up the heating and get comfy.
However, this will negatively impact your monthly energy bill. While heating isn’t seen as an unexpected expense, you can still make the most out of it by wrapping yourself nice and comfy in a blanket or two.
This will drastically eliminate heating expenses and give you the much-needed financial time out that we all need during these hard times.
As we mentioned earlier, half of the globe will be nice and hot while the other half will experience winter in some form. This tip, as you can imagine, applies to the northern hemisphere.
If you’re interested in knowing your daily energy rates, then make sure to head over to EnergyBot and easily compare commercial and residential energy rates.
4. Unplug Devices
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On the topic of unnecessary things, we have so many devices that we don’t use and they’re all sitting plugged in.
If you want to do the sane thing, but also the easiest in terms of cutting energy expenses, then make sure to unplug any device that you have no use on a daily bases.
Not only are these devices a distraction from the important things, but they’re also quite devastating for our monthly bill. This can include stuff like your printer, phone chargers (when not charging your phone), coffee maker, and any other device that you don’t have any use of or use one time throughout the day.
Furthermore, if you don’t want to do that, then you can plug all of these into a specialized power saving strip that will do god’s work in lowering energy expenses.
This power-saving strip works in a way that it regulates the amount of power that goes into a particular device based on how much power it needs.
This means that you can use your personal computer while your printer will be put on a sort of standby while not using it.
5. Update on Equipment
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As you might imagine, using an old PC or laptop, or any other device for that matter tends to mess with your monthly bill.
That’s because old devices aren’t energy efficient at all. And while your old PC might need a 500 W PSU to operate while a new one would need a 700 W PSU, both cannot be compared in terms of energy efficiency.
Even if the numbers put the new PC at a 300 W disadvantage, it is still advised against using old equipment because they’re not built with the modern standards of energy efficiency.
This will particularly come useful when working from home. Not only will you be working with the best equipment, but you’ll also save a lot of money.
6. Get a Better Energy Deal
Source: rocketlawyer
The last thing you could do is cancel your current tariff and go with another company in a bid to score a cheaper deal. These times can be very hard for everyone, and we have to make sacrifices to make it through.
This is precisely why getting a better deal is seen as a smart move when working from home. You might think that $700/year isn’t much, but they will be once you start to notice that your salary is 20% less than what it was.
While remote working is definitely something that should be tried even if there was no pandemic plaguing us, it still needs time before it can become the norm. Luckily for us, remote work is seen as a success in many parts of the world and we can use their experience to make the most out of it while trying to perfect it.
