07/16/08 — SAEGERTOWN — As fuel prices remain determined to head nowhere but up, “energy efficiency and conservation have taken the front seat again in the consumer’s mind,” Saegertown resident Mary Mulligan-Haines noted in her Pay It Forward proposal.

Unfortunately, she added, even though efficiency information abounds, bringing it to life for the consumer is still difficult.

Mulligan-Haines would know. As communications and marketing manager for Northwestern Rural Electric Cooperative Association Inc., an organization that’s in the history books as the first electric distribution co-op in Pennsylvania, she spends her days passing on the latest energy-saving information available. One of the lessons she’s learned along the way is that showing can be more effective than telling.

Enter the Kill A Watt electricity monitor.

“I would like to receive a grant to purchase a home-use device to help consumers understand their energy use better,” Mulligan-Haines wrote in her proposal. The device, she continued, would then be made available — together with energy-efficiency and energy-conservation information — to the county’s senior centers to loan to their clients.

“This effort would help seniors and their families immediately see the cost of using an appliance — and thereby make wiser choices to be able to use energy efficiently and to successfully conserve energy,” she wrote.

One of those choices, for example, might involve supplementing a home-heating system with portable space heaters. “People have a hard time believing how much energy they use,” Mulligan-Haines said of the portable devices.

Her goal is to purchase enough Kill A Watt monitors to give two monitors to each of the county’s seven senior centers.

Equipment designed to monitor an appliance’s energy use is nothing new, Mulligan-Haines explained. In fact, it’s been around for years and years. “In the old days, we had a meter we built into a container we could carry around and people could plug them in.”

With modern electronic monitors the size of hand-held calculators now available, however, monitoring has become a do-it-yourself project. Consumers not only learn what different appliances use in kilowatt-hours, the device also translates those kilowatt-hours into dollars and cents.

Refrigerators and room-unit air conditioners as well as smaller appliances can be monitored, although ovens and clothes dryers can’t be plugged into the device.

For someone considering the purchase of a new appliance, “this would give them a basis of comparison,” Mulligan-Haines said. “A refrigerator that’s 10 to 15 years old isn’t performing to the standards the new ones are.”

She also had a word of advice for anyone considering a refrigerator purchase. “If you’re going to get rid of a refrigerator, get rid of it,” she said. “Don’t put it into the garage.” When a refrigeration unit is surrounded by the ambient temperature of an unheated garage, she explained, “it takes too much energy to bring it up or down to where it needs to be.”

Those — and other tips — are included in the Mulligan-Haines plan, which goes a step beyond simply supplying monitors. Printed hints, tips and general information to take home are also part of the plan. For example, a brochure produced for the U.S. Department of Energy by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory notes that sunny windows can force an air conditioner to work two to three times harder than necessary. Installing white window shades, drapes or blinds will reflect heat away from the house, as will closing curtains during the day on windows facing south and west, according to the brochure. And while awnings can protect south-facing windows, the angle of the sun makes trees, a trellis or a fence the best options for shading windows facing west.

As for why her project deserves public support, “Energy efficiency and conservation are known as the low-hanging fruit for solving future energy needs,” Mulligan-Haines wrote. “This would be a positive step for our seniors in Crawford County.”