A year ago, we started the BC Hydro Team Power Smart Challenge, with a goal of reducing our energy use by 10%. We did and our $75 reward cheque just arrived in the mail. We don’t consume a lot of energy to begin with, so we weren’t sure how we’d save 10% of our electricity bill. Our apartment is missing a lot of the big energy consumers – no laundry machine, dishwasher, hot water tank, or air conditioning. And yet, somehow we managed to reduce our use by 15% year-over-year.
How’d we do it? We only changed one thing – we cancelled our Shaw digital cable subscription and got rid of the PVR. That’s it. We still watch a lot of tv with Netflix and streaming tv shows, but we got rid of the PVR that was on 24-hours a day recording shows and sucking up electricity.
One year without cable tv and we saved $780 off our Shaw bill, another $20 of our electricity bill, and we got a $75 rebate cheque from BC Hydro. Easiest $875 ever.
Canadian Veggie 
Sat down to figure out how to a) cancel my cable TV and b) get hooked up with Netflix because we never watch cable and stream everything from laptops. Decided to take a stroll through WordPress before I got to cancelling cable. Great karma – thank you!
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[…] One of my “tasks” tonight was to cancel cable TV and figure out Netflix. We never really watch actual network TV, we download anything we want and stream it. It was a great piece of karma to come across this blog on saving money and energy by canceling cable from Canadian Veggie. […]
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