The switch to time of use rates is on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.