solon_kitten | De-gassing, and reducing bills

Well, after talking it over with my mates, we're getting rid of the natural gas line to our house, which means no more central heating unless we replace the heater itself. That'll shed about $20 to $150 (or more) in bills for us, and we can put that toward other things. The winter months are leaving, and it's already fairly toasty here, but even with only using space heaters throughout the house, it's far cheaper than using the natural gas lines due to all of the fees. For about $62 of actual gas, there was just over $91 in fees and taxes. It's insane. Even the water heater will become electric once we put it in.

We don't have a central AC unit anymore (it was removed and had started leaking its coolant before that), but we do have window units. Even then, we'll still be using less electricity with those combined than a central unit most of the time.

That said, one thing we wanna reroute some of that money toward is a solar system to at least help offset a bit more of the house electric bills and get us some sort of backup before the stormy season. I also plan on trying to get some rain barrels for rainwater collection, mostly for use with some planter boxes and garden stuff we wanna set up. That'll help reduce our water bills a little when we get to the point of planting, at least. Plus, when we do move, we can take the solar panels and equipment with us.

Also helping a little with bills is that we're (slowly) selling off the old collectable bells and figures and such that my mom and grandmother had. Found an amazing lady at a local consignment shop who's been helping us, and she took interest in quite a few things. Not getting a lot out of it, but we were gonna donate the somewhere originally to get them out of the garage so we can regain more room in there for our own things. Maybe we'll get the woodshop cleared away enough to work with it again sometime soon...

For now, we can only wait and work our way though things a bit at a time.