Cheaper By The Dozen?

How many families regularly receive notices from their electrical company informing them of their excessive use of electricity?  We do!!  I wondered if we were the only ones, but we have some friends who have eight children who have received similar notices.  Every couple of months we receive another one, and today was the day.

We were told via informative little graphics that we use three times as much electricity per month as our most efficient neighbors and a little over twice as much as our nearest one hundred neighbors.  It's kind of funny that we are being compared to neighbors, many of whom have only two people in their household, both with jobs so they are often out of the home during the day.  No one else on our street has 9 people in their household who live, work, and go to school in their residence.  We were also told that we could go to their website to find tips on how we could reduce our electricity usage.  I checked out their tips tonight.  To be honest we are already doing a good majority of their suggestions.  I don't like large electricity bills, but with 9 people living in a home, homeschooling, and running a business out of our home…using a lot of electricity is just going to happen.

I am not complaining.  In fact, we get a big kick out of it whenever another one of these letters arrives.  We laughingly open the letter to "see how we did this time." 
 
 We do approximately two to three giant loads of laundry per day.  Our dishwasher runs about three times a day.  We bake bread twice a week, I hate to think how many showers and baths are taken.  (In our house even using water needs electricity because we have a well, and the water is pumped using electricity.)  My husband has computers for his home business and our children use computers for school.  We really do not use many lights during the day as we have lots of natural light from windows.  So that is one area where we are doing "well." 

We have never figured out how many kilowatt hours we use per month per person  in our family.  If we did do that, I think we'd come off looking pretty good.  After all, we always do full loads of laundry, we always fill the dishwasher to capacity, and having a light on in the family room for one person or nine, still costs the same amount of money.  I'm sure we could cut our usage if we washed fewer clothes, took fewer showers, and washed our dishes less frequently, but I can't imagine the mess and the smell!!

Using more electricity is just one of the "side effects" of a large family, but  I wouldn't trade even one of our precious children for a smaller electricity bill!!!!