The Footprint Report

After reading Scott-O-Rama's post and be shamed into finishing changing over the rest of our light bulbs to CFIs we decided to check out our energy usage now, compared to a year ago & see how we compare here to the rest of the USA. The only thing the PP&L electric website could recommend is my shower pattern... the is NO WAY at this point I will start with the Navy Shower routine. So after realizing we had done everything we could on the home front a year or two back I compared us to other Norteamericanos on our carbon footprint...

I was ready to gnash my teeth and buckle down to doing something more... I was surprised! The average Norteamericano family of 2 adults sheds between 7500 - 10,000 tons, yes tons of carbon each year for our bloated lifestyles. We came in at 1700 - 2,400... the numbers range because I used a few websites and the counts came out differently on national average & us. So it was a big surprise that we already use only 25% of the national average. And yes I was honest about our traveling. I think the main contributor to our low numbers was...

the Prius, and the Honda being a 4 cylinder stick. Contributing major factors were that we rarely use the clothes dryer (love the clothesline!) and try to heat with wood, and rarely use the air conditioning part of the heat pump. The garden & orchard will play a bigger part as time progresses. It was on the plans to have a solar water heater on the roof this year, but what with the Real Estate meltdown... it is on the agenda for next year...

So dear Readers... how are you doing?