YESSS! Being an Electricity Hitler Pays off BIG TIME! :D

I am PUMPED!  Remember how last month, my electricity bill was $195 (the highest it's ever been), and I decided to become an Electricity Hitler as an experiment to see if my wacky energy-saving ideas would help lower my next-month's electric bill?  Well, who's crazy now, because all of my weird efforts TOTALLY WORKED!  I got my electric bill today, and it's down to $142!  That's a savings of $53!!!  SIG HEIL!

To recap, all I did was the following:

• Keeping the thermostat on 66 (we have an electric heat pump), and using our gas logs along with the heat pump during the day, so the heat pump doesn't have to work as hard.
• Keeping the doors shut to rooms we're not using at the time.
• Closing all the window blinds in the house when the sun goes down in the evening, and opening the blinds back up again when the sun comes up in the morning.
• Keeping all lights in the house off, unless they're absolutely needed.
• Keeping everything unplugged that is possible (within reason), until needed, and then unplugging again after use.  Even if the item you have plugged in isn't turned on, it still uses energy.
• Turn off and open the dishwasher when it is just going into its drying cycle, and let the dishes air-dry.  This saves electricity, and adds warmth and moisture into the dry, wintertime air in the house.
• After using the oven, leave its door open to allow the heat to come into the room, instead of being wasted.
• Not using the clothes dryer very much; hanging up our laundry on the clothesline instead (luckily, our clothesline is under our covered porch, so we don't have to worry about the rain).  We also have one of those wooden drying racks that we use inside the house, too.
• Washing the clothes in Cold water instead of Warm or Hot.

So now that I've saved all that money, maybe now I can afford to buy myself a new pair of socks!  :/

(Please note that these socks will NOT go into the trash can, however; I will put them to good use as cleaning rags).

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT.

So I'm ecstatic that I saved a lot of money on my electric bill.  But with every success comes failures (and if you're me, you usually have nothing BUT failures).  So I finally got around to trying out the recipe for liquid hand soap that i saw in a Kindle book.  But since I didn't have a big enough container to hold it all, I halved the recipe.  I finely grated 1 1/2 bars of soap, added 3 cups of water, put it all in a pot, and cooked it on the stove until it was all dissolved, just like the recipe said to do.  And then i poured the concoction into a small plastic coffee can, to allow it to cool and set up for a couple of days before pouring into the pump liquid hand soap dispenser, again, just like the recipe said to do.

Great, right?

DING-DONG, YOU'RE WRONG.

EPIC FAILURE.  Now I'm stuck with a giant, cylindrical brick of soap, and I have no idea how to get it out of the coffee can.  (It's OK, you can laugh).  GEEZ!!!  What a disaster!

Well, ya win some, ya lose some.  :/

LOL!