Don't Waste Your Energy

Hydro bills you at off-peak rate if TOU data missing

2012-01-31T22:36:00.005-05:00

I got my first bill since TOU data stopped being available on the Hydro One web portal. My smart meter is still not sending data out. Hydro has confirmed that this is not an isolated problem in my area. Might be related to the recent roll-out of wireless internet in my area, perhaps on the same frequency that the smart meters out. I understand that the meter is only supposed to hold 30 days of data, so if it hasn't been downloaded, it's likely gone forever.

So, if you have a smart meter, and the meter data is ever not available for some reason, Hydro will estimate your bill since they can't read it remotely, and they don't have meter reading staff anymore. And they bill the entire missing data period at the off-peak rate.

I don't have the opportunity to enter my own meter readings anymore, since smart meters were supposed to make that obsolete. So I will have to start reading my own meter again to make sure I'm not being ripped off. Note the bill above does not mention any beginning and ending meter readings for the billing period, which is technically a Measurement Canada requirement.

The case of the missing hydro meter data

2012-01-02T20:10:00.004-05:00

For some unknown reason, time-of-use data is not available for my meter since December 17.

It will be interesting to see how my bill is estimated when it comes in.

Hydro Ottawa expands online updates for customers

2011-11-05T09:00:00.000-04:00

Hydro Ottawa expands online updates for customers

Now you can be notified if your power use gets out of control, before you get a nasty bill.

Power Vented Hot Water Tank Electricity

2011-10-06T07:11:00.002-04:00

Ever wonder how much electricity your power vented hot water tank consumes? My natural gas fired power vented hot water tank consumed 4.77 kWh over 756 hours, as measured with a Kill-A-Watt meter. This works out to about 0.15 kWh per day. This is a small price to pay for the increased efficiency that the power vent technology brings to the table.

Links to various news stories

2011-07-07T21:37:00.003-04:00

I don't have time to review and comment on them all, but here are some links to relevant news stories from Uncle Tim. Thanks, Tim!

Energy costs biggest hurdle for former minister Smitherman's Ring of Fire bid - The biggest hurdle former Ontario energy minister George Smitherman will face trying to secure a Ring of Fire ore processor for the northern town of Greenstone are his own energy policies, critics say.

Ontario's Power Trip - The end of FIT

Ontario's Power Trip - The Failure of the Green Energy Act

Ontario's Power Trip - Today's Forecast: higher power prices

The Gas is Greener - one thing I will say about natural gas based power generation in Ontario, is that Ontario only produces 2% of the natural gas it now consumes, and natural gas consumption for electricity generation is forecast to be at least 25% of current provincial demand! Enjoy sending money for natural gas resources outside the province forever.

Energy Diet Challenge

2011-07-07T21:31:00.002-04:00

Shell and Canadian Geographic Magazine are holding a contest called the Energy Diet Challenge. The premise behind this contest is to pit six different families against each other and see which entrant can reduce their energy use the most. And not only household energy, but also transportation energy. Good thing one can still ride bicycles in Canada during September!

The entry period has already closed, and the contest starts in September 2011.

Do you think your family could reduce its energy usage significantly?

The Ontario Clean Energy Benefit is hurting us

2011-06-15T17:32:00.002-04:00

Ontario's Environment Commissioner Gord Miller says in his Annual Energy Conservation Progress Report - 2010 (Volume One): Managing a Complex Energy System, "The 10 per cent rebate on electricity bills is an artificial subsidy on the price of electricity so it encourages consumers to use more." A study by energy analysts estimated that the OCEB could wipe out a third of the planned conservation savings over the next four years.

PC Power Management

2011-06-11T22:54:00.002-04:00

So I have power management installed on my home PC, set to go into sleep mode if I haven't used the computer in a while. But what if I don't want it to go into sleep mode? For example, I'm downloading a bunch of large files that make take hours, or doing a backup over the network which can take all night. I could manually adjust the power settings on my computer to deactivate sleep mode, but I can guarantee you that I'll forget to reactivate it again.

There is a free software solution that I found, called Coffee. This is funny because I don't even drink coffee, but it does work for me. Coffee keeps a computer from going into power saving mode if there is network activity over a user-defined rate. So as long as the downloads keep going, so will the computer. When downloads are finished, then the computer will be, too.

Hydro One's Retail Contract Tool

2011-06-06T22:52:00.003-04:00

Unlike the Hydro Ottawa portal's contract comparison tool, Hydro One's adds the cost of the Global Adjustment to the graph. The correct amount of Global Adjustment is automatically chosen for you, so all you have to do is input the contract rate from the third party electricity provider. In this case, I would have to find a retail contract for 2.84 cents per kWh to break even with the time-of-use rate equivalent.

A Tour of Hydro Ottawa's TOU Portal

2011-06-02T21:09:00.011-04:00

Hydro Ottawa is slowly and finally starting to roll out TOU to its customers now, and here is a sneak peek at what their Internet portal looks like. (Click on the images for a larger view).
In the upper right corner of each data page, are buttons to print, or download the displayed data in Excel or PDF formats. This allows the customer to store long term data or run other analysis.

The home page shows some quick overview graphs, including the last recorded day's usage.

The hourly page shows an hour-by-hour view of electricity usage, color coded to match the off, mid, and on-peak periods. The high contrast option, turns all the graphs into an unpleasant black and white scheme, which must be an accessibility function.

The daily graph shows a summary of each day's electricity consumption, along with user selectable total daily cost or consumption.

Much like the daily graph, the monthly graph shows each calendar month's total data.

The billing period graph shows a breakdown of usage for the period covered by any of your previous bills. You can compare one month to the other using the drop down boxes above the graph.

The TOU calculator is interesting, as it allows the customer to use the mouse and pull the three bars up and down to play "what-if" scenarios, then shows the results on the right hand side.

The tiered-vs-TOU page allows you to see what you would pay under the old regulated price plan, vs. Time-of-Use, vs. any arbitrary third party contract. This customer, as an example, is paying slightly more under TOU than the old regulated price plan. If an option becomes available in the future for customers to opt in or out of TOU rates, this page is a valuable tool to determine which is the better deal.

The blue bar showing the value of a third party contract entered at 8.0 cents/kWh does NOT include the Global Adjustment, which is currently running 4.3 cents/kWh!

Here's what happens when the central A/C fires up.

2011-06-02T20:07:00.002-04:00

We had the A/C programmed to start in the late afternoon, since nobody was home during the day, and then programmed to shut off at 8pm. Setpoint was 25C and the outdoor temperature was in the 30's with a high humidex.

Got the TOU letter

2011-06-01T23:16:00.001-04:00

Our home is being transitioned to time of use rates on June 10. Just in time for the summer.

Server Energy Consumption

2011-05-24T20:44:00.004-04:00

So I have been blessed with a new computer, which begs the question, what to do with the old one? It's a decade-old Pentium 4 1.6A desktop on an Asus P4B266 motherboard that doesn't owe me anything, and is probably worth even less than that on usedottawa.com. I have wanted a home server for some time, mainly to do backup duties, for which I had been using an external drive to date. It worked fine, but it was getting a bit small and it only worked when I dragged it out of the closet. With almost 20GB of family photos among other things, we don't want to lose any of them. I set the old computer in the basement next to the freezer, connected only a power and Ethernet cable to it, and used Windows XP Remote Desktop to access it from the comfort of my desk.

Of course, the idea of a server is to have it run 24/7, but that also means paying for the resulting electricity bill. So I took that old computer and plugged in to my Kill-A-Watt meter - 96 Watts at idle! The cost to run that is about $142 a year, which is more than we pay for a whole month of electricity now. That kind of utility bill increase isn't acceptable to me, so I thought about how to reduce energy consumption. I decided to pull all of the expansion cards and disconnect power to the optical drives that I wouldn't really need with the computer in its new role. I got the power consumption down to 65 Watts.

Pretty good, but could I do better? I wondered if it would boot without a video card. The video card I had was a victim of capacitor plague. While the card's lifetime warranty was useless as the manufacturer went belly up, and although it still worked without any apparent ill affects, I didn't want to keep using it in a production environment. So I pulled the card out, and it still booted right up! Now the power consumption dropped to 46W.

Next, I set the hard disk to spin down after 20 minutes of idle. Now the idle power draw dropped to 36W.

Next I managed to get this server to go into the S3 sleep state during longer periods of inactivity, for example while we are away from home or asleep or just not using another computer on the network. That brings it down to 3W. This page offers comprehensive instructions on how to set this up, using Windows XP anyway.

Oh, in case you're wondering, the new computer, an Intel Core i5-2500, draws 52W at idle. That's quite a power saving right there over my old computer drawing 96W, especially considering it has exponentially more processing power.

Always a day behind

2011-05-24T20:43:00.001-04:00

So far, the Hydro One Time-of-Use Portal data is still one day behind, every day. I have to start keeping a journal of what I've done because I can't remember what I did the day before yesterday.

Ontario has an electricity oversupply problem

2011-05-17T20:19:00.001-04:00

This graph from the Independent Electricity System Operator's website says it all:

Honey, I left the light on

2011-05-17T17:26:00.002-04:00

In our garage, we have three 60W incandescent light bulbs. I have chosen not to change these bulbs out because there is no economic reason to do so, since they are on so rarely and for such short periods, and switching compact fluorescent (or any fluorescent for that matter) is a sure way to promote premature bulb failure.

But one night, those lights did get left on overnight. And sure enough, the time-of-use graph told the tale. Since there's 180W of lighting, leaving it on for 10 hours cost us 30 cents, because we're still paying flat rates until the time of use gets activated! Time to get that motion sensor installed in the garage like we had at our previous house.

The ugly truth about wind and solar: $

2011-05-17T17:23:00.002-04:00

Parker Gallant has an excellent blog called "Ontario's Power Trip" hosted by the Globe and Mail that is a definite read for the lay person who wants to get to the bottom of and try to understand the energy mess that Ontario is in.

He writes this letter to the Meaford Independent, rebutting a previous editorial that was published in the paper.

Dryer deathmatch - electric vs. natural gas

2011-05-03T21:50:00.005-04:00

In our home, the electric clothes dryer is by far the greatest consumer of electricity. So naturally, in any energy audit, we target the largest consumer of energy first, because usually it offers the best return on investment, the biggest opportunity to save, and the biggest impact on the bottom line.

Before we can determine which energy source is better and by how much, we need to first figure out how much energy does it take to dry a typical load of laundry? We can't use a plug-in type meter on a dryer because there aren't any for 220V loads, but we don't need one because the Hydro web portal gives us that information.

Let's take another look at a laundry day in the graph. On this particular day, my wife starts the dryer just before taking the kids to school. Then again later in the afternoon at 2pm, and finally in the evening around 7pm. Notice here is that it takes about 4kWh to dry a load of laundry. Your consumption per load might vary depending on things like the ability of the washer to extract water from clothes, the size of the dryer, the amount and type of clothes dried per load, how plugged the lint filter and dryer vent are, etc. It's going to take more energy to dry a load of towels and jeans than it would for some socks and t-shirts. Regardless, the outcome of this exercise will allow us to see the order of magnitude of savings, and then consider the cost of procuring and installing a gas dryer over the electric one currently in service.

To make this fair, a spreadsheet was used to break out the true cost of energy and exclude the fixed monthly customer charge from each utility, since that amount is not affected by the amount of energy consumed. The spreadsheet allows us to run various scenarios depending on how many loads are dried in a week. The average TOU line gives a rough idea of what it would cost to dry clothes if dryer use is somewhat random during waking hours.

The results aren't even close. Gas wins by a wide margin. In this scenario, a gas dryer handling six loads a week would save $143 to $188 annually. On the other hand, a single person running one load a week would only save $20 to $31 annually.

Now let's consider the cost of a new gas dryer, supposing the old one has reached it's end of life and a new one must be purchased anyway. Most gas dryers carry a $50 cost premium over the electric model. A 120V receptacle needs to be installed for the gas dryer, since the electric one uses 240V. An electrician can do this work for something in the order of $200 unless you are able to do it yourself or there is a spare receptacle nearby. And a gas fitter must run a new gas line to the dryer location. Count on $350 to $500 for this work depending on length and difficulty to install. Let's assume your venting is already metal and suitable to vent the lint, moisture, and products of combustion. So total cost premium for gas is in the order of $550 to 750. At a savings of $143 to $188 mentioned above, payback for this is three to five years. This payback will decline rapidly if electricity prices continue to rise rapidly, or you can get the work done cheaply.

So the bottom line is that gas wins, but only if there is a lot of dirty laundry. With smaller laundry demands, electricity, despite the painfully difficult to swallow electricity prices, may still be the better option for you.

Or just put up a clothesline and fight the relentless rain and birds. Hmmm. Maybe $200+ a year to dry clothes worth thousands of dollars isn't such a bad idea after all.

The cost of careless dryer use

2011-04-30T22:22:00.003-04:00

Here's a great example of what happens when you run a large load during on-peak and mid-peak periods, like say, the dryer.

If I download this data in Excel format, which the HydroOne portal offers, I can rearrange the numbers to see the result of different scenarios. Let's suppose the three dryer runs had all been done during off-peak instead. The savings amount to about 53¢. Repeating this "mistake" every week would cost us an additional $27 per year.

Doesn't seem like much to one person, but consider the impact if everyone in Ontario ran their dryer like this. How many more powerplants, windmills, or solar panels do we need?

Next we will explore the savings of gas dryers vs. electric.

Consumption thus far

2011-04-30T22:14:00.004-04:00

So now that I've had access to this data source for the last two weeks, I've noticed that the data typically lags two or three days behind. Today is April 30 and I don't have April 29 or even the 28th available to me yet. This makes it harder for me to see the results of little tweaks I do in the house because after a few days go by, I tend to forget about what exactly I did and when I did it.

PS, it's obvious when we did laundry, and also obvious which days there wasn't really anybody home throughout the day. Keep in mind we aren't paying TOU rates yet, so we aren't taking care of when exactly the dryer gets run.

$ and ¢ - Saving with TOU

2011-04-22T08:45:00.003-04:00

Let's look at this graph again, this time with dollar amounts included. At this point, these numbers represent what I would be paying under Time-Of-Use rates. On April 15, we had twice as much on peak consumption as April 14, yet the total amount of energy consumed on each day is about the same. The cost difference between the two is a whopping 10 cents.

One of the huge challenges with Energy Management and saving money is that it takes a long time to see results. Saving 10¢ a day doesn't sound like much, but multiply it by 365 days a year and it totals $36.50, which is 3% of a $1200 annual electricity bill. If I told a commercial client they could reduce their annual electric bill by 3%, I think they would be interested in hearing more. Unfortunately, these graphs do not put that into perspective.

TOU Rates are here - for me, again, that is.

2011-04-20T22:32:00.005-04:00

After moving last June, I've missed being able to see my daily and hourly consumption trends that I had at my previous home. Now, I have this data again as Hydro One continues their province-wide roll out of TOU rates to those customers that are within reach of data collection points.

I've been anxious to see what my night time base load is, what with even more electronic devices in a larger home. So far, looks like I'm at around 260 to 350 watts. Not much worse than my previous home which was around 200, especially considering we added a chest freezer, but I definitely think there is room for improvement.

Manitoba Hydro invades Ontario?

2011-02-08T22:17:00.004-05:00

I'm surprised it hadn't ever happened yet, but Manitoba Hydro finally decided to collect some guts together and apply for an electricity wholesaler license in the province in Ontario.

http://hydro.mb.ca/regulatory_affairs/electric/noah_ew_manitoba_20110203.pdf
http://www.rds.oeb.gov.on.ca/webdrawer/webdrawer.dll/webdrawer/rec/245889/view/

What this essentially means is that any hydro customer in Ontario could buy their electricity from Manitoba, although the customer would be on the hook to pay the provincial benefit AKA global adjustment, making any such venture most likely financially disadvantageous.

Is Hydro Quebec next?

OEB Consultation on Time Of Use Rates

2011-01-31T23:14:00.002-05:00

Not to steal any thunder from the massive storm surrounding UBB, but I thought you should all be aware of the other pending Ontario rip-off. The Ontario Energy Board has undertaken a consultation process to determine if changes need to be made to the time-of-use rate structure for electricity so that some of the Board's and the Government's goals can actually be accomplished. They started by having some consultant write a report about it, then asked for comments. BOY, did they get comments! Here are the highlights:

Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario: The Board should not proceed with the roll-out of TOU pricing to low-income customers before a comprehensive examination of this vulnerable sector’s energy use characteristics and the most effective ways to reduce their energy use without putting these individuals in financial or physical risk

Consumers Council of Canada: Moving all of the solar and wind costs, for example, to peak is not consistent with how those resources are run. The Council is concerned that arbitrarily increasing the peak price would unfairly increase the cost burden for those that cannot shift their load.

Direct Energy: To successfully implement time of use pricing and achieve targeted demand reduction goals, Ontario must first, integrate all generation costs into the wholesale price, and then, match the time of use cost with individual consumer loads....Without such a reform, time of use rate setting will not be able to fairly allocate the costs of peaking generation to peaking consumption; exacerbating existing consumer inequities and making the Board’s mission to guarantee just and reasonable rates impossible to accomplish.

Just Energy: mid-peak and peak periods are too close in price

London Property Management Association: The Board has no comprehensive, long-term, province-wide data upon which it can evaluate the impact of the current TOU pricing structure.

Ontario Non Profit Housing Assoc:The report did not specifically examine or report on the potential impact of TOU pricing on low-income households in any of its case studies.

Pollution Probe: While Ontario’s peak demand occurs on hot summer afternoons on a province-wide basis, it is important to remember that northern Ontario actually experiences its peak electricity demand during the winter instead

Ontario Power Workers Union: The policy decision that embarked Ontario on the smart metering and TOU pricing path was made in the absence of any robust research on the costs and benefits of this undertaking.....the increase in intermittent renewable supply that requires fossil-fuelled generation back-up for system reliability...has narrowed the RPP TOU price ratio and the increase in intermittent renewable supply contemplated in Ontario’s Long Term Energy Plan will exacerbate the problem by further reducing this differential.

School Energy Coalition: the Report proposes that certain costs be assumed to arise only in the summer (wind and solar), when it is clear that is not actually the case

Vulernable Energy Consumers Coalition: since consumers typically need to make investments in either equipment or lifestyle changes in order to affect load shifting, if the TOU differentials overstate the benefits then the cost of the investments made to achieve load shifting are likely to exceed the associated benefits, resulting in a loss in economic efficiency.

Mr Honey:...nearly half of my annual consumption is for heat

Mr Reynolds: Delivery, regulatory, and debt retirement charges on Ontario electricity bills are based on cumulative consumption during the billing period, and are therefore are not affected by customer efforts in shifting demand.....This means that residential customers are able to impact less than one-half of their electricity bills by leveraging TOU rates.

Mr Weir: TOU pricing will not reduce electricity use and this is evidenced by the Brattle Group stating there is no pricing that will benefit anything unless more studies/pilots are completed. We are now entering the 7th year of "Smart Meter/TOU" roll-out without a definitive answer.

All the respondents brought up great points that I think have left the OEB scratching it's collective head because it's just another example as to how messed up things really are.

Why Wind Energy is Hopeless

2010-12-08T19:06:00.002-05:00

Ontario's screwed-up energy policy explained in 4 minutes

2010-12-08T17:51:00.001-05:00

The real cost of TOU

2010-11-24T17:23:00.003-05:00

The utilities and the government are nonchalantly brushing off claims that hydro customers in Ontario can't save money by shifting their consumption to off peak hours. The reason for that is simple, the TOU rates quoted don't include the fixed base charges, which include delivery, regulatory fees, and debt retirement charges. And the HST.

Once you factor in those added costs, off-peak use only has a 33% advantage over on-peak. Also consider that under the old system, the cost of electricity at any time was about 5.5 cents, it's no wonder that TOU is a losing proposition for the consumer.

How to tell if you're on a fixed-rate gas contract

2010-11-23T20:25:00.007-05:00

What your Enbridge bill looks like if you're purchasing your natural gas from Enbridge at regulated market prices approved by the Ontario Energy Board. These prices are subject to change every three months.

What your Enbridge bill looks like if you're on a fixed rate natural gas contract. In this particular case, the name and contact information of the company you are purchasing your natural gas from appears in the gray box. The customer charge and delivery charge go to Enbridge, while the gas supply charge goes to the company you're under contract with.

Note that this bill does not include the gas cost adjustment. That's because you forfeit that privilege under a fixed rate contract.

If you're still not sure, call Enbridge to confirm if you're on a contract or not.

The new reality of electricity prices in Ontario

2010-09-06T17:13:00.002-04:00

I've said many times to my friends, family, and colleagues that the price of electricity in Ontario is going to be the biggest issue in the next provincial election.

Case in point, I received my bill for the month of July. Now understand that July was one of the hottest July's on record in Ottawa, and extremly humid, too, with 150.8 cooling degree days. Compare that to all of 2009 that saw only 180 cooling degree days! So the air conditioning was humming for sure, and given we are in a bigger house with a slighly older air conditioner and less efficient furnace fan, it was the most expensive hydro bill I've ever paid at $124. But it's not the amount, it's the aggregate kWh rate.

Now the popular definition of the kWh rate are the rates set by the Ontario Energy Board. Right now, those are 6.5 cents/kWh for the first 600kWh, and 7.5 cents/kWh for anything above that. But that doesn't help the homeowner understand the total amount of the bill, which beyond the kWh also includes delivery, regulatory, debt retirement, and taxes. So by aggregate rate I mean take the total amount of your bill, and divide by the number of kWh consumed to get the REAL $/kWh rate.

In 2004, my aggregate rate was 12.8 cents. In July 2008, my aggregate rate was 13.1 cents. In July 2009, my aggregate rate was 14.5 cents. Now in July 2010, it's 16.6 cents! And we're not even talking about TOU rates yet at my new home; this is still regulated price plan. Regulated indeed.

Use a timer for bathroom fans

2010-09-02T14:43:00.000-04:00

Here's an idea to conserve energy. Install a hard wired timer for bathroom fans. Wait, these aren't your dad's mechanical-turn-past-15 timers. They're electronic and almost silent.

While it's important to get rid of humid air before it can cause damage, There's no sense in running bathroom fans longer than necessary; not only are you consuming energy from the fan motor, it's also exhausting valuable conditioned air from your home, that your air conditioner or furnace has already treated.

This idea was such a hit in my previous home, that my wife asked me to put one in right away in the new place.

Use a motion sensor in your garage

2010-09-01T17:48:00.000-04:00

It never fails, you're in the garage and you've got your hands full - with garbage, tools, materials, groceries, kids, etc. So a motion sensor makes good sense for convenience and energy savings. I use incandescent lights in my garage because they're still the best option for cold weather in my opinion, and unlike fluorescent, you can turn them on and off rapidly without premature failure or worrying about warm-up time. This timer is set at a low interval, so the light shuts off after the garage has been vacant for about three minutes. Easy to install as a replacement for an existing switch.

How much more will you pay under TOU?

2010-08-22T17:33:00.002-04:00

Looking back on my electric meter's historical data downloaded from HydroOne, I have done a quick analysis to see how much more I would have paid under the new structure compared to the old.

Taking data from March 16 to March 29, I used a total of 254 kWh. At a cost of 6.5 cents/kWh under the old pricing scheme, this amounts to $16.51. Under the new TOU structure which came into effect as of May 1 2010, I would have paid $18.64, which is 12% more. This isn't taking into account other additional charges, such as the smart meter charge, delivery, regulatory, and debt retirement charges.

I also did another hypothetical analysis, where I took each hour of extreme high consumption during peak periods and moved it to an off peak time. For example, I ran my dryer, dishwasher, or other major appliance. Hypothetically speaking, if I had run major appliances only during off peak times, then I would only pay 45 cents more under TOU. A more modest increase, but still an increase none the less.

Summer update

2010-08-22T17:31:00.002-04:00

So I moved in late June, just a few days before I was scheduled to be switched to TOU rates. My new home is also in HydroOne territory, but the meter is not yet being read wirelessly, and therefore HydroOne is not in a position to bill me under the TOU rate structure, or even give me access to my hourly meter reads. So no more cool charts and graphs for a while.

The switch to time of use rates is on

2010-05-27T16:51:00.002-04:00

I received the inevitable letter today from HydroOne informing me I will begin paying time of use rates at my current address on June 26. Good thing I'm moving and the house closes on June 25! I hope the new owners will be able to cope. I applied the two reminder labels with the TOU charts to the dryer and fridge that are staying with the house.

One interesting thing I noticed is that the letter and labels have the Ontario government logo on them. I guess HydroOne wants to remind you who's behind this whole scheme.

Smart Meter Data Collector

2010-05-25T16:12:00.000-04:00

Here is an example of a Smart Meter data collector that was installed by Hydro One. In this particular neighbourhood, all the power lines are underground, so Hydro One does not have a utility pole of its own to attach a data collector to. This particular installation piggy backs on the meter serving a Bell Canada DSLAM for high speed Internet. This is a good place to install this since there is no homeowner to complain about this ugly thing attached to the side of their home.

This data collector relays all data via standard cellular telephone technology, and it supports almost every cellular technology, so Hydro One isn't tied to a particular cell phone provider. Must be some kind of cell phone bill!

Vampire Loads

2010-05-23T22:05:00.008-04:00

I've been looking at the base load of my electricity consumption. The base load is the sum of all the things you have running continuously in your home. Most of this load is the refrigerator/freezer, but the rest of it can be comprised of what are popularly known as vampire loads or phantom loads. Many of these loads can be only one or two watts, but add those up and they can be significant.

Presently, my base load is 0.19kWh per hour, which equals 190 Watts. So even when we're sleeping, we have 190 Watts worth of stuff in our house running, which is like having two 100 Watt light bulbs lit 24 hours a day. To put this in perspective, 190W of stuff running 8760 hours per year will cost the average Ontario rate payer $233 a year! In this graph which shows one weekday of my electricity usage hour-by-hour, the base load is 40% of the daily total. The base load is the easiest thing to reduce and offers the most "bang for the buck" since these aren't typically user controlled things like lights.

To determine what makes up this 190 Watts, I decided to go through my home with a Kill-A-Watt plug-in meter and measure the draw of every device when it's plugged in but powered "off." I only listed devices that had an idle draw of at least one watt. Here are the results of my findings:

Interesting to note that the Bell TV receivers use the same amount of power whether they're on or off, since they are constantly updating the programming guide or looking for new software updates, both of which only occur when the unit is "off." The price we pay for convenience. I guess it beats buying a copy of TV Guide every week. I wonder how much power nationwide Bell's receivers are consuming...

So, out of the 190 Watts I've only been able to track down 135 so far. There are other things in the house that are directly connected to the power supply or run off 220V that the Kill-A-Watt can't connect to:

Dishwasher
Stove
Dryer
Furnace
Central Air Conditioner
Doorbell Transformer (rated for 5 VA)

So to determine the load for each these, I will shut them down on alternating nights and see what the difference is on the TOU portal page.

55 Watts to go - that's as much load as my refrigerator!

No update on the portal discrepancy

2010-05-08T22:03:00.002-04:00

No word from HydroOne on my inquiry regarding the TOU discrepancy. I checked the old numbers and graph I quoted originally; they haven't changed. However, newer graphs seem to be accurate, within a fraction of a killowatt-hour or two. Not sure when the change was made - or if it was a daylight savings time thing all along, and still is.

TOU Portal Link Removed

2010-04-10T14:46:00.002-04:00

Today I noticed that the link to view my TOU portal on the HydroOne secure website is gone. Hopefully they've taken it down to fix it and it will be back soon!

TOU Portal Discrepancy

2010-04-09T23:30:00.006-04:00

I've been having a lot of fun playing with the HydroOne TOU portal. I can even download all the raw data directly into Excel. I've been doing some analysis and will post it here in the coming weeks.

It would be nice if I had this level of data available for some of the commercial buildings I manage energy in! It would make my job a lot easier.

Unfortunately, I noticed the daily graph appears to be incorrect, because the period totals of the hourly graph don't match the totals of the various periods throughout the day. Oops. I think it might be a daylight savings time issue. Good thing they aren't billing me based on TOU rates yet. I sent an email to HydroOne about it and somebody did acknowledge my message, and forwarded it on to the webmaster. Stay tuned.

First look at smart meter TOU Data from HydroOne

2010-03-24T20:33:00.005-04:00

So here is the first look at the data for my own home courtesy of HydroOne's webportal - for yesterday, actually. I'm quite surprised HydroOne got this working before Hydro Ottawa did! As per the graph, the biggest draw we have is the electric dryer, and you can tell by the spike exactly when that was in use, and how much it would have cost under TOU. We are not on TOU rates yet; still paying the flat per-kilowatt-hour rate. You can see this data by day, by month, or download data directly into Excel. This should prove very useful for some of the smaller buildings for which I manage energy that aren't large enough to justify a phone line for reading meters.

So if there is going to be any mercy with time-of-use (TOU) rates, it's that you'll get to see a minimum of one month of hourly use data, so you can see how much extra you'll be paying, or how bizarre the changes you'll have to make to your lifestyle will be to try and minimize the damage. To be fair, for something running 24/7/365, the cost will not be much more, perhaps 2 or 3%, as the current TOU rate structure averages out. But if you consistently need to run equipment during peak periods (oh, like the stove), then you're in a very unfortunate situation. This is especially troubling for the poor and retired folk. I wonder if Dalton McGuinty's mom has electric heat...

We're putting up a clothesline when we move into our new home in June.

2010-02-25T16:29:00.003-05:00

Looks like Hydro One finally is starting to use smart meters for automatic meter readings. As per my bill: "This bill was produced using your actual electricity use with an automated meter reading from Hydro One's smart metering system, eliminating the need for estimated bills."

Great, so now I don't have to trudge through the snow to take a meter reading anymore. And hopefully no more $1488 hydro bills, either. I guess time-of-use rates aren't far behind, either.

New Electric Bill Received

2009-08-22T08:25:00.000-04:00

Received a new electricity invoice today via online banking from HydroOne, now for a more reasonable amount of $66. Not too far off from my $65 estimate.

Now if only I could handle the shock to my grocery budget of buying cat food, cat litter, two packs of diapers, a box of baby wipes, and water filters all in the same week...

Meter reading errors

2009-08-21T08:12:00.002-04:00

Received my latest monthly electricity bill via online banking this week. Boy, was I in for a shock (pun completely intended). It was for the princely sum of $1488 and change! The meter reading used on my bill, in the 25,000 kWh range, wasn't anywhere close to the current 14,000 kWh showing on my meter register. I guess somebody messed up big time. Even though my meter is in a bank with five others, none of the other meters has a reading anywhere close to 25,000. Maybe somebody is in for another shock because their electric bill is too low!

I took a current meter reading and called HydroOne. To their credit, they instantly cancelled the invoice and agreed to send me a new one based on my meter reading. This is more than I can say for some companies, including Bell, whom insist that you pay the full invoice amount no matter how many errors the invoice may contain and wait for a bill credit in a subsequent invoice.

This is a perfect example of why it's so important for any utility customer, no matter how large or small, to read their own meters on a regular basis and use those readings to verify the invoices are accurate. It's an even better reason to never allow any company to suck money out of your bank accounts via "pre-authorized payments" because you essentially give up your right to review the invoice for accuracy before you pay it. I can't begin to imagine the headaches if what I expected to be a $65 bill was instead approaching $1500, and the utility had attempted to take that amount from an account that only had a balance of a few hundred dollars.

Submit your own meter readings

2009-06-18T07:41:00.003-04:00

HydroOne, my electric utility, offers a secure site where customers can view their account history, make account changes and the like, and submit their meter readings.

Now I've submitted my meter readings before for each utility, but never actually saw them used on an invoice, even in a month when there is no actual read by the utility, and instead only an estimated meter reading. While searching for something else for work, I stumbled across a schedule explaining when a customer needs to submit thier meter reading in order for it to be used on the next invoice.

I'm going to start doing this each month at the appointed time, and see if it actually gets used on a future invoice. According to the secure website, the next actual meter reading for my home is scheduled in October. So there should be a few months where my reading might actually be considered.

Saving Energy At Home

2009-03-22T14:10:00.000-04:00

Because of my professional background in mechanical building systems and commercial building energy management, I've had plenty of requests for advice on saving energy where it matters most - in your own home. To date, I've been happy to post snippets of advice, some short and some long, throughout forums scattered over the Internet. So, it's time to start assembling this mass of knowledge in one place, here in this blog that I've christened "Don't Waste Your Energy" after a slogan on a T-shirt that my wife found for my three-year-old son.

My hope is that you'll be able to use the information presented to understand, conserve, and optimize energy use at home. While I don't intend this blog to serve as an end-all, be-all to residential Energy Management, at the very least this may start your own creative juices flowing to put some of your own ideas into action.