As a land-owner renting out an appartment to tenants, how do you convince these people who, usually, you barely know, to live in your home by your environmental standards?  Or should you even bother?

My wife and I have been struggling with just this problem for a while now and when we decided to move out of our home and rent out both our basement and main floor units, we started to see our electricity bills soar.  From around $100/month to $250/month!  We started thinking about imposing a cap on the daily Wattage consumed and if they didn't stay under the aloted amount, we would charge them extra.  But since our whole house was on one meter we ran into the problem of how to differentiate energy consumption from the basement and from the main floor.   Not to mention that imposing a penalty is really not our style. 

Instead we decided that a positive incentive might be a much more successful tactic to reduce the house's energy consumption.  We've introduced a 'game' to our tenants that can save them $50/month on their rent if they keep the house's daily consumption average below 10 kwh.  To help them get started we printed out a list of energy-saving tips for their fridge. 

Here's that list:

• Turn lights off when not in use and when you leave the house.
• Keep your entertainment set-up (tv, dvd player, stereo) on a power-bar  and turn off power-bar when not using those items.  Why? Cause even when things are ‘off’ they’re still drawing power for digital displays and remote-control sensors. 
• Unplug coffee-maker and other kitchen appliances with ‘stand-by lights’ or digital displays when not in use. 
• Hang dry your laundry whenever possible (on clothes-line or indoor drying tree).  Dryers draw the most wattage of any major appliance in the house!  About 3000 watts!  That means if you dry clothes for an hour you’ve just used 3 kwh (kilowatt hours) of energy. Almost a third of your average daily goal!
• Conserve hot water.  Have shorter showers, do your laundry in cold water.
• Only wash full loads of laundry. 
• Turn off computer when not in use. 
• Keep motion lights on ‘motion-detection’ mode.  FYI WHEN POWER GOES OUT YOU HAVE TO RESET MOTION LIGHTS BY TURNING THE SWITCH OFF FOR 2 SECONDS AND ON AGAIN. 
• Unplug phone chargers when not charging
• Keep fridge and freezer on lower setting (higher temperature setting) and try to keep full of stuff.  The more stuff you have in there the less air there is to cool and re-cool when the doors are opened and that air escapes.  If you don’t have enough food to fill both compartments, stuff the empty spaces with used bottles full of water.

An important part of this 'game' is that it may or may not work and if you get attatched to it working and become a pest to your tennants, you might get dissapointed and you might loose your tennants!  All you can do is offer the incentive.  In our case the game didn't work.  Even though both tennants seemed eager to save money at first, the power bills keep coming in very high.