Now for the energy-saving experiment. Begin by taking a meter reading. Then have the family avoid using all the appliances in the “Very Easily” column. After a week, read the meter again and enter the reading on the chart. Do you see a big drop over a normal week’s usage? Probably not. The appliances in this column are likely to be the ones that don’t get used much anyway.

     So for the next week, ask the family to avoid using appliances in both the “Very Easily” and the “Easily” columns. Take your meter reading at the end of the week, log it, and see if there’s a drop. And for the third week, ask the family not to use the items
from the first three columns of the list. And so on.

     By the end of the experiment you should see some reduction in the amount of energy used per week.