Saving Money on Food, Electricity?

As for saving on electricity, remember that anything that heats, i.e. stove, dishwasher, dryer, etc. will be the biggest energy eater. Make sure that you are only heating the oven when necessary, maybe making two meals at once or baking a cake in the same heated up oven, right after taking your dinner out. Also do your laundry drying with back to back loads so that you capture the previous load's heat. Better yet, hang your clothes to dry, if not outside then on a line strung in your bathtub. Check with your electric company to see if they offer reduced rates at certain times of the day and then only do these types of chores at that time, such as running your dishwasher (full load only) after you go to bed.

Good grief ! Have Your electric company come out and check and see whats going on. Unless You have a welding shop You are running too , it shouldn't be that high for anything.

Hi! If you can afford it...you can get an insulating top put on the roof of your mobile home. My mother lived in an older home, and did this and got replacement windows and she saved a bundle.

What the Power Company told me was, to unplug everything that is not being used. Even if you have your TV off, and it is plugged in, it still is using electricity.

So I unplugged everything, and only plugged things in when I needed to use them. My electric Bill went from 90.00 a month, to 35.00 a month!!! It does work!!!

Helmut

October 1, 20040 found this helpful

$250 is way too high for a trailer. Get an energy audit. Also, turn off everything that is YOURS and watch the meter. If it still turns, somebody else is plugging in.

Depending on where you live, $250 should be good for a quarter year to a third of a year for a standard trailer.

Many years ago I lived in a mobile home. To save on electricity and heat, we insulated the floors from out side the trailer. underneath the skirting. my husband used rolls of insulation . We ran the insulation length wise under the trailer. Wear a mask if you do for safety. Also buy the plastic sheeting for the windows.Walmart sells the window kit.

I also live in a 1973 mobile home. My utilities are high also. My gas runs about $50.00 and electricity runs $125.00 per month. I did unplug a fan that we ran every night. It was an old cast iron one from the 1950's off of an old navy ship. I will see at the end of this month if that was our culprit! I sure hope so. But the bad thing about our mobile home park is we are on a sub-meter and the park is the "utility customer" on a master meter.

My culprit for my high electricity bill was our chest freezer. It is hard to keep it full when on a budget and the emptier it is the more it runs. I started rinsing out milk jugs and filling them with water and sticking them in the freezer so the freezer is always full of something. It has significantly reduced my electric bill.

I lived in a trailer last winter and it was always cold, drafty and utilities were high. One morning my furnace stopped working. When I got a new furnace all of a sudden the place was warmer and my utility bills went down.

Also, we were not allowed to hang blankets over our windows, so I made window coverings from fleece fabric. This worked great at blocking the drafts and keeping the house warm.

Check around your electric outlets and see if drafts are coming in there. You can insulate around the outlets and that will help.

Older trailers start to twist and all kinds of holes develop where drafts can come in. Check around for those and seal them up.

Good luck!

Buy a house. I don't know where you live, but where I live in TN there are plenty of houses for sale with house payments that are $500 a month or less. (We have been doing a little house hunting lately.) Then you would be paying less for electricy and putting your money into real estate which would increase in value over time instead of depreciate. (People who we have talked to who live in houses seem to pay $100-150 per month for electricity.)

As far as groceries, I carry a small calculator in my purse so I can figure out the cost per unit at the grocery store if I have a coupon. Sometimes brand name items are cheaper than generic if you have a coupon and they are on sale, so do the math before buying.