With the war in the Ukraine, energy prices in Europe reached new record levels. This initially affected the gas price. It had a big impact on the price for electrical energy too.

MCU on Eclipse looks at how to reduce energy use in the home:

In my village, the price for electrical energy is now at 0.45 CHF/kWh, starting October 1st 2022. It is twice as much as what it used to be, and three times more what it used to be the price for the energy at night time.

Saving energy always makes a lot of sense, now even more, both for the environment and directly saving money. Luckily, I started thinking about optimizing the electrical energy used in my house back in 2021, and now in 2022 it really pays off: The daily average of 16 kWh/day (including heating and cooling) came down to 7 kWh/day, or from 4.5 MWh/year down to 2.4 MWh/year, or a reduction of 47%.

The building used 4.5 MWh electrical energy in 2021, and this was the baseline to optimize. Optimizations have been started end of 2021 and were implemented during 2022, with the goal to reduce energy consumption by more than 30%.

The following main approaches were used:

Standby: Reduce stand-by consumption, turn off devices if not in use.
Lights: Replace lights with LED based ones.
Devices: Replace older energy hungry devices with newer ones.
Building: Reduce energy leaks, optimize heating and cooling system.

Read about all the improvements in the detailed article here.