What Our Household Energy Audits Are Actually Finding in Donholm

As an extension of our sustainable living sessions, a few households volunteered to let us walk through a simple, informal energy audit: noting appliances, lighting, and cooking methods, and flagging where obvious waste was happening. The findings have been consistent enough across households to be worth sharing more broadly.

The single most common issue was lighting left on in unoccupied rooms, particularly compound security lights running all night regardless of actual need. Switching to motion-triggered options or simply enforcing a stricter household habit cut visible usage noticeably in the households that tried it.

The second common finding was inefficient cooking fuel use, particularly charcoal burned in open jikos rather than improved, enclosed stoves that retain more heat. Several households who switched to improved jikos reported using visibly less fuel for the same cooking tasks within weeks.

Phone and small appliance chargers left plugged in continuously, drawing a small but constant trickle of power, showed up in nearly every household we looked at. Individually tiny, but multiplied across every outlet in a home and every home on a street, it adds up to a real and entirely avoidable cost.

None of these fixes require money we would need to fundraise for; they are habit changes any household can start immediately. We are now looking at whether to formalise this into a short, repeatable checklist households can run through on their own, without needing us to walk through it in person each time.