Is it too soon for New Year’s resolutions? Thanksgiving isn’t even here yet, but you’ll find it easy to find something to work on for next year with personal-kyoto.org. Register with this site, enter your ConEd account # (apologies to the New York impaired) and view your own personal energy usage. My usage is 1.2% above the average for New York. I think this makes sense as we tend to have a lot of doodads and doohickeys sucking up juice around the house. The water-cooled PC and aforementioned Xbox 360 aren’t really helping any. In any case, the goal for next year is to reduce usage by 25%. The site kindly tracks my usage and compares to the goal.

One of the first things we’ve done is replace our incandescent bulbs with compact flourescent bulbs. Being the lazy lump that I am, I am happy to say I’m not only replacing 60W bulbs w/ 13W bulbs, but also extending the amount of time between bulb changes by three-fold at least. The incandescent bulbs we used to use apparently blow out after about 2400 hours. These CFLs are rated at 8000 hours. “Huzzah” go the lazy lumps. No more sitting in the dark while contemplating whether or not the bulb should be changed.