You're So Useful! That's...Not a Compliment...

How familiar are you with your electric bill?  Do you read it top to bottom?  Are you comfortable reading the many abbreviations and purposefully tiny print?  Are you friends with it on Facebook?  Do you set a place for it at your dinner table?  You do?

Well you better git familiar.  Because over the next ten years, your electric bill might start looking more like your mortgage.  Is that a literal statement?  Dude, I don't know, but it's at least figurative.  What's important is to start understanding your current use, and to know what comprises it.  If you use 100 units of electricity in a year (let's call the unit a "Tesla", because he's a pretty popular figure these days), how many Teslas does your lighting account for?  Your refrigerator?  Got central air?  That's a lot of Teslas right there.  Charging your cell phone?  Teslas.  Only take cold showers?  You don't?  How very Teslatic of you.  Oh neat, you drive an electric car?!  What, are you running a Teslatron in your basement??

[What's a Teslatron?]

Nice clothes.  And skin.

Well, in real life, we don't work with cool-sounding terms like "Teslas".  No, our unit of measurement is the kilowatt-hour.  And nicely-rounded numbers like 100?  Forget about it.  Start wrapping your head around "10,000".  Yuck!  Get your TI-83 handy!  Yup, ten large.  That's the average number of kilowatt-hours you're using every year.  Assuming you run a household.  And you do.  You so do.

Ten-thousand a year.  That's nine-hundred a month.  Thirty a day.  One an hour.  Go with my estimates here.  Why is it so critical to know these things?  Because you like candy.  And you can only buy candy with money.  And you only have money for candy if you haven't already spent it.  And an easy way to not spend it is to understand the crazy wasteful areas of your life where you're already pissing it away - and I guarantee you energy is one of those areas. 

Yours, if you get your damn head right.