Day Five was hot and muggy, with sporadic showers.
Great, now I sound like a weather forecaster!
The point is, though we had the air conditioning off for most of the day, there were still a few hours where it needed to be turned on. Dinner was, again, short on the stove, with just a veggie stiry-fry and some rice being cooked at the same time on it - so, all told, about 30 minutes of stove use.
The main use of the stove came not from cooking food but putting up food - a batch of vegetable broth simmered on the stove for about 3 hours, and a boiling water bath was needed to put up tomato sauce that had been simmering for about the same length of time. So, overall, the stove usage wasn't so great, though we made an effort to actively control it.
The deep-fryer was on for about 15-20 minutes as I cooked chicken in it (anyone else hungry yet?), though it had been on for lunch too, as I took care of that with about 20 minutes' work.
It's starting to sink in to us just how much and yet how little we use various appliances and lights. For example, even though we have a lamp in our bedroom, of course it is unplugged right now for this current family project. Therefore, when we walk into the room, we think that it's maybe not worth it to turn on the lamp for the one little thing we need - so we end up groping around for it in the dark (thankfully, no one's been hurt yet), and/or turning on the lights in the attached bathroom to find it. Since the room itself is relatively standard-size (not too small, not too big) and not a suite or some cavernous mausoleum, we've considered ourselves all right thus far, and see no reason why it can't continue that way.
Overall, other than computer usage and possibly gaming console usage (looks over at teenager on charging laptop and sighs), it really has hit us how little some appliances in this house are actually in active usage. We're still careful not to have the television on (much) when on the computer, and everything is shut down and unplugged if someone has to walk away from it for more than 10 minutes, so that's not a problem.
I wonder if we'll beat that 948 kWh we used last month and use less? One can only hope!
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