I'm playing on a PC with all DLCs and only unofficial patches. This is a very clean game with no mods installed ever - just straight up vanilla. I've also maintained a fairly clean play style...

- Most of the time if I see a "generated" item on the floor, I put them in respawning containers or corpses
- As far as I know, there are almost no stray ash piles around
- No active quests - just unfinishable entries in the Misc section (mostly quests that were forced upon me... this is a strictly RP character so no, I will not visit Aretino)

This save is around 200 hours. It's currently sitting at 14 MB.

At this moment, I haven't noticed any negative effects yet... I don't feel that the game's performance has degraded or anything like that (for now). But I'd really like to trim the file size down if possible because I keep several versions of the save file and it just concerns me that each save file is that huge.

Wasn't there a story back then in the Oblivion days where a user had a 60 MB save file and Wrye Bash managed to trim it down to 2 MB? Does such a thing exist for Skyrim yet?

...That's normal.

And there is no REAL WAY to reduce file size to a comfortable level. None yet anyway.

Please do not worry about it unless you have 30mb suddently with only 300 hours. (which should only be around 18ish with your posted setup)

Cleaning up after your self is one way to keep the save file size down. I tend to play a tidy game, but I am not obsessive about it. Mostly I close doors that I open and sometimes will pick up a stray weapon and put it on a corpse. However, even then my file size is about the same as yours after the same amount of time.

The biggest issues with saves is the Autosave features, although they do seem to be better this time around and adding and removing mods from a save. If you avoid those two things, then your saves will generally stay stable.