Online tool shows how to save energy

Brighten Personal Energy Advisor delivers personalized home energy audits, DIY tips, HVAC and insulation guidance, thermostat and water heater settings, and smart meter insights to cut electricity usage and lower monthly bills.

What’s up with your home? If it’s energy usage, TXU Energy’s latest energy savings solution can help you bring that back down to earth.

The Brighten Personal Energy Advisor is an interactive tool that helps you see your at-home energy habits and household details that affect how much energy you use. Based on your own real-world details, the tool provides personalized tips that can help you save energy – and, ultimately, money on your electricity bills, including TXU Energy's Beat the Heat efforts for summer savings as well.

The new, enhanced Brighten Personal Energy Advisor is a simple and straightforward tool that provides a comprehensive solution for reducing your energy consumption at home. Its recommendations are provided as online tips and how-to videos that can help you avoid wasting energy via things like air leaks, faulty thermostats, insufficient insulation, water heater settings, HVAC inefficiency and more, as smart home electricity networks continue to evolve across Texas today. The free tool is accessible 24/7 for anyone, and TXU Energy customers can use it as a guide for making energy-saving changes at home, saving project status, and returning later for updates.

You can access the tool at txu.com/energyadvisor and answer a series of household energy questions, including options for home heating help, that take just a few minutes to complete. After reviewing details like the size of your home, number of thermostats, the age of heating and cooling units and appliances and other details, the tool delivers customized recommendations that can help you conserve energy during peak and off-peak hours as well.

The Brighten Personal Energy Advisor allows you to create a personalized Energy Savings Plan, similar to an energy planner program many utilities offer, for your home or multiple homes and provides how-to guidance for the changes it suggests. For each do-it-yourself task, it shares useful details like the skill and effort levels required for each project, the tools and materials you’ll need to complete them, and information on choosing and purchasing needed materials. It also provides useful DIY videos that walk you, step-by-step, through how to make the suggested changes at home.

You can choose which recommended activities you want to add to your working “To Do” list. And, for TXU Energy customers, it stores the ongoing plan — and any changes you make to it along the way — so you can, with helpful monitoring tools, track your progress over time.

“The Brighten Personal Energy Advisor is another way we are helping our customers better manage their energy consumption and save on their electricity bills,” said Michael Grasso, chief marketing officer, TXU Energy. “Combined with the security of our fixed-rate electricity plans, we’re helping our customers realize their energy savings potential today, tomorrow and for the long haul.”

Complementing the DIY efforts made based on the suggestions they receive, TXU Energy customers with smart meters can also track their actual energy usage every week through the personalized TXU Energy Electricity Usage Report. It’s a free, weekly email that includes easy-to-read charts and graphs to show your actual electricity use. Customers can opt in to the report for free via txu.com/myaccount.

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