I ought to know. Our family foursome went from using a third as much as comparable families in our area, down to one sixth as much. We measured our electricity use, and from there it wasn't hard to find and eliminate waste. Most of our neighbors are amazed when we tell them how low our electricity bills are.

We had a solar engineer do a site assessment back in 2006, when we were considering installing solar panels to generate our own power. The engineer told us we should really cut our energy use in half first, because it is always less expensive to reduce energy demand than to generate more of it from solar panels. But we only used 11 kilowatt hours (kwh) per day, I told him. Well, then, he said, you should cut it to 6 kwh.

This startled me - we already used much less power than our neighbors. Could we cut it by half again?

The engineer assured us we would figure it out, if we measured our electricity usage carefully. He sold us a Kill A Watt meter, which measures the power consumption of electrical devices, such as watts used for a light, toaster, or fan, or kilowatt hours over time, for a chest freezer or washing machine.

We measured or estimated the energy use of every light, home appliance, or other electrical device in our house. The furnace fan, the central AC, window fans, kitchen and bathroom fans. Laptop and peripherals. Television, DVD and VCR. To measure lights, you can just read the light wattage shown on the bulb, and estimate how many hours the light is on each day. For electronics, fans and the like, measure the wattage with the Kill A Watt meter and do a similar calculation. For the fridge and freezer, we used the kilowatt hours measurement of the meter over a three-day period, then converted that to kwh per day. For the washer and dryer, we checked kwh per load, and estimated number of loads per year.

Once we had our wattage information and could calculate estimated electricity use per year, we went to our previous year's bills. Amazingly, our estimates were bang on.

Our next action was to tackle the major energy users, and the many small devices that are continually running but may not be doing useful work.

The top energy users in terms of kwh per year were a wine cellar, chest freezer, fridge, and lighting, using a combined total of over 1,600 kwh/year. Electricity users that yielded little or no benefit included computer peripherals (cable modem, router, a printer used once a week or less); and a coffee maker, bread maker, and other devices with LED or LCD clocks, that stayed plugged in even when not in use. All told, these phantom loads used over 300 kwh/year.

Our first action was to switch off the wine cellar. We realized it wasn't environmentally sustainable to use the energy equivalent of 500 pounds of coal, to keep a wine cellar running, so we switched to letting the wines store at the basement's natural temperature. The second tip I learned about saving electricity is that you need to challenge yourself to redefine necessities as luxuries, so you can give them up. Other so-called necessities you might decide to treat as luxuries include air conditioning, basement beer fridges, and any appliance our grandparents got by perfectly well without.

A temperature check of our ENERGY STAR refrigerator revealed that someone had accidentally turned the freezer thermostat down, so the compressor spun continuously and kept the freezer temperature far too cold. We now check our fridge and freezer temperatures monthly, to avoid accidentally using too much electricity on our fridge and freezer.

Next we shut down the chest freezer, which we were no longer using that much. It was only half full, and much of its contents had been frozen for over a year. Once upon a time we preserved a lot of our own food, but had stopped a few years before, but we had somehow not kicked the freezer habit. By eating, throwing out, or moving food to the fridge freezer, we added 360 kwh per year to our electricity savings, which brings me to the third lesson I learned: Challenge your own ideas about what you consider necessary.

Lighting offers many opportunities to cut energy use. Here are two important points on how to save electricity on lighting: use lights less (turn them off, use fewer lights in a fixture, use dimmer switches, take advantage of natural daylight), and install more energy efficient lights such as compact fluorescents and LED house lights. We probably eliminated 40 kwh/year off our lighting by taking such actions.

The devices that used a few watts while doing no useful work were easy to fix. We put the computer and peripherals on a power supply bar, which was turned off when the computer wasn't being used. Five watts may sound like pocket change, but multiply that by a half dozen devices and by 24 by 365 hours, and it really adds up. We were wasting 180 kwh/year on peripherals, and reduced that to 15 kwh/year. The VCR, DVD player, TV, bread maker, and other devices with electronic clocks were using another 125 kwh/year. So here's my fourth key lesson: unplug everything that isn't immediately needed. Any device that requires an AC adapter, or that can be turned on by remote control, should be completely unplugged when you don't need it. Any device with a digital clock must be drawing a trickle of power to keep the clock showing. This may only add up to half a watt but typically it's in the 1-3 watt range (9-27 kwh/year). This category includes furnaces and AC systems when you're not in the heating or cooling season - switch them off at the circuit breaker.

As we tackled items big and small, our energy use fell from 11 kwh/day to 8 kwh/day, a quarter of the typical usage for our area. And as we cut out big energy consuming devices, addressing smaller energy wasters suddenly made a bigger difference.

For example, our stove only made up 5% of original energy use, but after our first energy saving actions, it accounted for 7.5% of the new total. So we changed our cooking habits. We started using our crock pot more often, and did less roasting and baking. We got careful about measuring water before boiling it for tea. No more opening the oven door every three minutes to check on cookies. And now it's time for my fifth and final tip on saving electricity:

Keep raising the bar. You can always cut your use further.

Keep setting more aggressive savings goals. You'd be amazed at how little electricity it takes to live a happy, pleasurable life. Do daily meter readings to confirm that your use is falling as expected, or holding steady, or starting to rise.

I can assure you, once you have started measuring, and eliminating waste, and seeing how low your electricity bills go, you'll be hooked, just like I was. Who said saving energy couldn't be fun?