If somebody told you that you were too lazy to conserve electricity, would that upset you? Maybe it should because there are a number of different ways to save energy that are based on the fact that we often waste it without thinking, or focusing. Take for example what happens when you wash your clothes. If, as is normal, there are several different people living in your household and they all have jobs or school to go to, then the chances are that they will all need to wash clothes on a regular basis. Yet is there any kind of schedule here? Normally one person would just wait for the other to finish before cranking up the machines once more to do their own laundry.
Get together and wash clothes in one go, waiting until you have a full load for the machine before you activate it. The water savings can be enormous and you will conserve electricity use as well. While we are on the subject, get used to washing clothes in cold water unless they are very dirty.
Do you get into the habit of opening and closing window blinds according to the time of day? You should, as you will restrict the amount of sunlight coming into the room and consequently will keep the internal temperature from rising too much during the middle of the day. Of course, your air-conditioning thermostat will kick in and keep the internal temperature bearable no matter how much radiation is striking the windows. But here again if you think about it and make a conscious effort to do so, this is one of those many different ways to save energy that we are just overlooking on a daily basis.
You might say that you are not always in the house to be able to “bother” with these window blinds. If it is true to say that the house is mostly empty during the work day then you need to invest in one of those programmable thermostats and set it so that the system is not automatically cooling the house when there’s nobody there.
Get used to looking for wastage and take action whenever you come across it. If you have any drafts around your windows and doors you should be employing a draft stopper to ensure that valuable conditioned air is not escaping.