The Green Parent

by Lisa Fahay

Lisa Fahay is a working mom with two kids and a Jack Russell Terrier. About a year ago, she and her husband founded the home energy efficiency company Both Lisa and Peter have been passionate about the environment for most of their lives.  In fact, through a recent Facebook connection, an old 6th grade friend wrote, “Of course that’s what you’re doing. I remember you yelling at me about cutting up six-pack rings when we were 12!” Lisa is no longer twelve, but she’s still doing her best to get us to think twice about the way we impact the environment in our daily lives.

Below is Lisa’s story about how it felt when her family’s electricity use went public (very public)

When we decided to starting on Earth Day, 2009, it was our hope that our small gesture might prompt others to monitor too, and discover some straight-forward ways to reduce their daily, as we have. We’ve been monitoring our electricity use using The Energy Detective (TED for short) for months, so we frankly didn’t expect to be stunned when all that changed was the way we viewed the data.

Once we put our electricity on the internet, two things changed right away. For one, we could actually see the spikes and dives – a virtual EKG of our family’s electrical usage. This felt remarkably different from a small digital read-out of numbers. Our kids started to monitor our use more closely, pointing out and noting the difference between the toaster’s use and the blender. Second, I was charged with annotating each one of those changes in rhythm for display on the web and on In other words, I had to actually know what was going on. And now, I do.  I know what the “standing heart rate” is for our house – when everything is off except the fridge and the basement freezer. I know where we’re at, all the time.

Over the course of the day, what happens is completely predictable. In the morning, coffee starts, the teenager de-wrinkles his clothes using the clothes dryer (for one shirt, on high! This is coming to an end),  the kids leave and there’s a nice homeostasis until the office wakes up. When I first started writing annotations on Twitter, I honed in on that easy, routine stuff. I went after the toaster, because it was so easy to isolate. But the truth is, it’s on for 1 minute and 20 seconds – not such a big deal.

So over time (and needing to keep that Twitter stream real and entertaining) I started to hone in on the bigger fry. Take the dishwasher; it shot that blue line up like a rocket. So now I run it every other day and only when it’s really full. (I’ve seen data showing that I would waste more water washing dishes by hand, and I believe it). So I am keeping my dishwasher.  I will also keep my dryer, even though it’s by far the biggest electricity hog in the house, hands down. But I am cutting way back on using it, and I’ve got to tell you, it feels great. This morning I put sheets out on my new clothesline, and I’m pretty sure they’ll be dry just as fast as they would have been in the dryer (they’ll also smell and feel better).

One of the things I’ve learned over time is that this wasn’t just an Earth Day gambit. Our electricity has gone public, and like an unexpectedly popular reality show, it’s staying up, in real time. We are all tuned into our house now – actually engaged in  our energy use, and I can’t really imagine being any other way. I try to keep my Twitters about spikes and dives interesting, but sometimes it’s hard to be inventive. It’s the every day stuff that’s keeping us burning coal and buying oil, after all. And maybe that’s the whole point. It’s the every day stuff that matters. Cutting back a little bit every day and getting our kids actively engaged in the process is how we can quietly, and really, make a difference.