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Excellent advice! All my Windows look out into a bunch of Doug fir trees so even in the afternoon I get maybe 20 minutes tops of direct sunlight. We're supposed to have a pretty hot week up here in the Portland area; I may take down the ac unit and try a poor man's swamp cooler using a box fan, towel, and a large pan of water. I want to drop my average kWh/day into the single digits and I think the best way to do that is reducing climate control. I'm hesitant to block the windows since they dont get much direct light and I've got quite a few house plants that may not appreciate that choice!
As for the water heater, I've been doing research on the safety of lowering the temperature. My concern is bacterial growth, specifically legionella. It's currently set to 140 f and at that temp all bacteria is killed within a couple hours. I have looked in to tankless water heaters to bypass the system since the places where hot water is used are all very close to the heaters current location.
Like with eco driving, the biggest improvement comes from adjusting your own behavior. I think if I can get my girlfriend to only have one light on in the evenings instead of several a lot of progress can be made. Similarly, if my little swamp cooler experiment is a success we can probably eliminate the ac all together. In the winter we try to minimize heater usage. Looking at 3 years of bills (from when we moved in until now) winter is consistently the time of greatest power usage. I'm sure a lot of it is the heater, but the short days probably don't help either.
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