Our First Energy Holiday!
So my original post about this somehow not only didn’t get published, but also didn’t save. I’m copying this post to wordpad in the event it happens again, so I don’t have to try to re-write the whole post again! 
We participated/experienced our first Energy Holiday last Saturday!
Register here to see what other people did or to post your own Energy Holiday stories
What did I do? As mentioned in my last post, my cousin’s wedding happened to coincide with the first Energy Holiday. My fault for not looking at the calendar before deciding the first energy holiday date. So my first energy holiday wasn’t spent as I had expected, but I see that as a good thing. After all, we can’t expect everyone to be sitting at home on the Energy Holiday every year.
Also as mentioned in my last post, it was a bit more effective (in terms of energy savings) at my own home because the energy saving ideas that I implemented stayed in effect through the long weekend. See my last post for details on what I did there. Honestly, it was really easy and I think I’m going to start doing this every time I leave for any extended period of time. The only bummer was coming home to a seriously warm home…but that’s a sacrifice I can make if it means one less shovel’s worth of coal byproduct sent into our air.
So this is what I was able to do while in Iowa for my cousin’s wedding:
- Carpooled to the wedding instead of each of us taking our own cars
- unplugged my computer power cord and shut down my computer
- turned my phone off when I wasn’t using it to conserve battery
- didn’t use air conditioning in the car to improve gas mileage
- didn’t speed to improve gas mileage
- opened the windows, and didn’t use air conditioning at the house
All in all, what I did wasn’t quite as much as I had hoped…I still used gas and I could have been better about getting my rather large immediate family and much larger extended family more involved, but it wasn’t my weekend…it was my cousin’s and I didn’t want to ruin anything for her.
I want to hear about what you all did for your energy holiday!
