Know Your Energy Use?

Electricity use varies widely across the United States, and across the urban, suburban and rural environment, but averaging out all those differences gives us a month's energy use of 920 kWh. When you see a claim about the amount of homes able to be powered by, for example, a new wind farm that's probably the stat being used.

More: Make Your Home More Energy Efficient - Check Out the Living Zero Home Tour

Indoor lighting amounts to 11percent of the average US home's electricity usage. It's simply math from there.

Check out these tips on how to reduce that: How to Go Green: Lighting

Compact fluorescent lightbulbs can reduce the amount of electricity you need to get the same amount of lighting by up to 75 percent, knocking your electricity usage from lighting down quite a bit.

More: Will a Broken CFL Bulb Kill Me?

Believe it or not, in the US on average the amount of energy required for heating a home far outpaces that used to cool it. In fact, over the course of a year nearly one-third of a typical utility bill goes to heating.

More: How to Go Green: Home Heating

According to the Department of Energy's energy saving tips, the average clothes dryer uses about 900 kWh a year of electricity. That's just about equal to a month's worth of electricity savings just by being a bit more patient for your clothes to dry.

More: How to Go Green: Laundry

Again, EnergySavers.gov tells us that the typical refrigerator in the United States consumes 1200 kWh of electricity in a year -- pretty much the highest single use of electricity in your house.

More: 5 Easy Ways to Green Your Fridge

There's a bit of abstraction in this one, to be sure: According to US government stats the average driver travels about 15,000 years; the combined fuel economy average for the US car fleet (old and new vehicles of all sorts) is 20.3mpg. It all works out to about 62 gallons of gasoline per month. In case your curious, that's a bit over half a ton of CO2 emissions per month.

More: How to Go Green: Cars

Yup, of all the things to worry about in your energy usage, unplugging your phone charger or and other wall-warts is, shall we say, nearly nitpicky. Do it -- if everyone did it the reductions in vampire power consumption does add up -- but frankly unless you've already made the rest of your life as energy efficient as possible and reduced your energy use to the minimum already, you've got bigger things to tackle.

More: Another Stake Through the Heart of Vampire Power

When you hear the term embodied energy it refers to the amount of energy required to make a product -- including all the component parts -- and then dispose or recycle it at the end of its intended lifecycle. Even though different energy sources go into making products, embodied energy is still expressed in a standard unit, such as watts.

More: ETech 2009: WattzOn Embodied Energy Database

Assuming a 15 year lifespan, the embodied energy in a steel frame bicycle turns out to be be about half a watt per year. For a carbon fiber bicycle it's about 3.66 watts. An aluminum frame has about 1.78 watts of embodied energy. Although the stats aren't handy, a bike made from bamboo probably has even lower embodied energy than all those.

More: No Recession for Bicycle Makers