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An earlier column emphasized understanding the numbers on your electric bill. Understanding what the bill means, however, doesn’t help much in understanding why you’ve used that much energy, nor does it help you reduce your energy costs. For that, you need to understand how much each of your electric devices contributes to the meter reading.

Electric devices have wattage ratings. Multiply the wattage by the amount of time the device is used to determine how much energy that device is using. For instance, turning a 60 watt incandescent lamp on for ten hours a day uses 600 (60 times 10)...