It’s been almost a year since I went change-diving around my house–you know, that activity where you reach down into the bowels of your furniture to find loose change. I realize that searching your home for change makes you sound like a real cheapskate, but why let perfectly good money sit around when you could be doing something with it?

In our house, we have two jars where we dump our change at the end of the day. These are old-fashioned mason jars that I think we picked up at an antique store along the way. Anyway, one jar is for silver change and the other is for pennies.

I noticed this morning that those jars were looking kind of full, so I figured it was time to count my loose change. Also, I have a reason for wanting a little extra spending cash in my pocket: tonight is my friend Jen Miller’s book launch party for her book about the Jersey Shore. (The actual title is “The Jersey Shore, Atlantic City to Cape May: Great Destinations: A Complete Guide.”) The party, which Jen has deemed “lean and green,” is in Center City, Philadelphia.

Unfortunately, public transportation to Philly isn’t a viable option from where I live, which means I have to drive. So not only do I have to pay for gas (there goes my hope of making a tank of gas last for two weeks) but I’ll also have to pay for parking.

Luckily, a few years ago, when I was a contributing beauty editor for Philadelphia Style magazine and had to go into Center City on a regular basis (and the magazine wasn’t reimbursing me for my travel expenses), I discovered a cheap parking garage. I could park there all day for $6 (hope it’s still true). The only downside was the garage was a bit out of the way, meaning that if I wanted to get to University City or Rittenhouse Square, I had to hoof it. But knowing how much I love to walk, you should know that I didn’t mind the hoofing-it part.

I plan to park in that garage again tonight where I hope I’ll find parking still to be dirt cheap. Even so, that cost along with filling up with gas earlier than I’d hoped in the week, are the two reasons that I figured it was high time to count my change.

Boy am I glad I took the time to do it–in about 30 minutes time, I rolled $62 worth of coins. If you translated that into my hourly rate, it was worth $124.

I’m getting ready to go walk to the bank during my daily dog walk, where I’ll exchange my rolled coins for some greenbacks. Then, I’ll probably drop off some extra plastic bags at the nearby grocery store that collects them for recycling. But the best part is that I’ll be heading home with 62 bucks in my pocket that I woke up this morning not realizing I had.

What about you? When was the last time you counted change around the house? Why not take some time today to round up your change. How much did you come up with? I’d love to hear about it.

One of the pieces of advice you’ll often hear for lowering your electric bills is to use more electricity when rates are lower. Some people use “smart meters” to help gauge when power prices are down. Unfortunately, this advice has never applied to me. You see my electric company is PECO (also known as Exelon), which currently “caps” electric rates so that customers pay one rate across the board.

Despite this inability to use more power when power costs less–because power always costs the same–we’ve managed to lower our power bills nonetheless: we’re down to about $150 a month. Not bad with two preteens, two Tivos and three computers.

Yesterday, I found out that PECO’s cap on electric rates will expire in 2011. That’s sort of like how my oil company’s cap on oil prices expires next month–we’ll no longer be able to lock in a per-gallon rate next year. No surprise given how the price of oil has gone up in the last year.

Long before those caps expire, though, PECO will be giving its power customers a chance to “gamble” with electric rates. Call it day-trading, if you will, on power costs, but PECO will allow 2,000 families in the Philadelphia region to do a test run of being able to gauge when PECOs prices have gone down that day–and then they can up the juice on all of their electronics and, hopefully, pay less.

Considering that my husband and I used to day trade, and loved that rush of daily buying and selling, we’re thinking this might be an interesting experiment to try. Customers will be able to view PECOs ever-changing rates via the computer or a recorded phone message for the following day, and then make their power-usage decisions accordingly. Since we’re online all the time, this may not be such a huge hardship for us to endure.

The only downside? By enrolling in this program, which begins in October 2008, we take ourselves out of the capped rates almost three years earlier than everyone else. Then, if the variable rates don’t work out to our liking, we may end up paying more for power in the end.

Anyone here have had their power company offer a similar deal? Did it work out for you? Inquiring (and power-conscious) minds want to know.