Energy Efficiency
Energy Efficiency is a summary term for all the technical installations you could either install or place in your house to either increase electricity efficiency or increase hot water use efficiency.
Most of these can be thought of as “investments”, because they save you large money in the medium or long-term are more expensive in the short term (make sure you do your research beforehand though).
For example, LED light bulbs are much more expensive than regular lightbulbs. However, they use a whopping 90% less energy, and last considerably longer. Another example is a solar water heater- this might be an upfront cost, but it will strongly decrease your water heating bills (one of the largest electricity sources for your house).
The best investment is solar panels- these cost money (although you can often get them with a green loan and a government rebate) but sell energy back to the energy grid and will often pay themselves off within around 4 to 5 years, and then start generating revenue you for, depending on a variety of factors listed here: economyandproductthoughts.com/savings/adapting-renewables
However, it is really important to ALWAYS do your research beforehand and to please spend 2-4 hours doing online research what solar panels look like on other homes (some look great and some look terrible), what your specific solar panels will look like, and being really, really, really specific about where they are placed on your roof, for your house’s selling value.
What are other investments you can make to reduce your electricity bills?
Here are some examples from Project Drawdown, one of the world’s best resources for reducing climate change emissions:
https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions
While these are organized in order of the methods that will reduce electricity use and the six climate change gases the most, the large majority of these will also help to reduce your electricity bill, some of these by a lot.
Please note these are linked to their respective Project Drawdown resource pages- the best way to read these are to read the mini-summary, introduction, and the discussion at the end:
