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Do You Really Understand Your Electricity Bill?

Written by Elly

When you get your electricity bill, how closely do you look at it? Honestly, do you really look at all those charges? Do you know what any of them really mean?

The Cost of Electricity is Only Half Your Bill

It might surprise you to know that your usage only directly affects half of the charges on your bill. You could even say that you only actually control half your bill. MIND BLOWN, amirite?

To really wrap your head around this idea, we need to closely examine the charges on your bill. I recommend taking a look at the handy interactive bill Hydro Ottawa has on their site. There are examples for both tiered bills and time-of-use bills. You just hover over different parts of the bill and a short description appears. 

As with many other bills, the first line on a Hydro Ottawa bill is previous charges and payments. Pretty self-explanatory, I think. Next, we have the charges one might expect to see on an electricity bill: the cost of the electricity you used during the billing period. This is one charge over which you have full control – usage directly correlates to cost (obviously). Depending on how you are billed, the charges might be listed by time-of-use (TOU) period or by season and threshold. Either way, you should be able to see how many kilowatt-hours (kWh) you used and how much per kWh you are being charged.

Then there’s HST which is, again, pretty self-explanatory. Following the HST line is one line everyone loves – a CREDIT! Yes, this is the Ontario Clean Energy Benefit, folks. It takes 10% off the cost of your energy usage (up to 3000/kWh). It’s always nice to get money back, in my humble opinion.

The Charges You Don't Control on Your Energy Bill

But that is nothing compared to the second, or more interesting, set of charges. These are the charges over which you have little to no control. At least one of them (the delivery charge) is partially percentage-based, so technically you can control how high or low it goes based on how much power you use, but you can never get rid of it entirely. According to the interactive bill, “a portion of [the delivery] charges are fixed and do not change each month. The rest are variable and change depending on the amount of electricity that you use.”

I guess if you’re having electricity delivered to you, you can't really get out of the delivery charge. Anyway, on top of delivery charges, you also have to pay regulatory charges, which cover the cost of grid administration and maintenance, and fund the Ministry of Energy, infrastructure conservation, and renewable energy programs. And then there’s more tax, calculated separately for this set of charges. There is also another 10% credit (yay!) – takes a little bit of the sting out of all the charges over which you have no direct control.

There are other points of interest highlighted on the interactive bill, but they’re all pretty obvious. In my experience, the charges are the most misunderstood section of any bill. And I think it’s so interesting how we have to pay for the electricity itself, and then to have it delivered to us, and then to make sure that it will continue to be delivered to us in the future, and then to make sure the rates are fair, and then to make sure that we won’t destroy all our natural resources while we’re generating all that electricity.

I understand the reasons behind all these charges, it’s just annoying that my consumption only impacts about half of them directly, if at all!

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Calculate the Energy Cost of Your Christmas Lights

Written by Elly

Every neighbourhood has one – a house bedecked and bejewelled from stem to stern in Christmas lights. There are a few in mine and every time I go by one of them, I can't help but think, “How much is all this additional electricity costing them?!?”

Well, apparently this question bothers me enough that I’ve decided to figure it out (approximately) using the equations found over at Christmas Lights Etc.

I’m going to try to estimate how much those Christmas light might cost.

How Much Energy do the Griswolds' Christmas Lights Use?

Now, because I don’t want to creep out my neighbours by loitering on their lawns and counting light blubs, I’m going to use the original Christmas Light House, the one that caused a (fictional) power outage in (fictional) Chicago in (nonfictional) 1989: the Griswolds’ house from that Christmas classic “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”.

Here's a clip to jog your memory.

Clark Griswold used “25,000 imported Italian twinkle lights,” which were most likely (read: most definitely) incandescent.

So, 25,000 bulbs x 5W per bulb = 125,000W.

Now we need to find the kilowatts, which is 125,000W x 0.001 = 125kW. Let us assume that someone as … enthusiastic about Christmas as Clark Griswold would want those lights on as soon as it was dark enough to see them, around 5, and that his neighbours would demand that the lights be turned off when they want to go to bed, around 11.

Five pm to 11 pm is 6 hours, 2 at on-peak and 4 at off-peak. So, 125kW x 2 hours (at on-peak) = 250kWh, and 125kW x 4 hours (at off-peak) = 500kWh. With our current rates, on-peak would cost 250kWh x $0.118/kWh = $29.50, and 500kWh x $0.063/kWh = $31.50.

For 6 hours of Christmas lights, at 2012 TOU rates, Clark Griswold would pay $29.50 + $31.50 = $61.00. $61.00 EVERY DAY! Holy smokes! For the entire month of December that would be $61.00 x 31 = $1,891.00 only on Christmas lights, and that’s not including any other regular electricity use or delivery charges/tariffs (which would effectively double that $61.00). Good grief!

Calculate the Cost of Your Christmas Lights

Obviously, Clark Griswold is an exceptional case. Even the most decorated houses in my neighbourhood probably only have an eighth of the lights that he used, and they probably know better than to turn them on during on-peak periods.

So, they probably spend $31.50/8 = $3.94 per day. But still, cumulatively, $3.94 x 31 = $122.06 for all of December – that’s not cheap.

But this is all for incandescent bulbs. LEDs use 86% less energy – an LED bulb uses less than 1W, as opposed to the 5W I was using in my calculations. So, let’s try that again with LEDs: 30 strands of lights x 100 bulbs per strand = 3000 bulbs. Three thousand bulbs x 0.96W = 2,880W x 0.001 = 2.88kW. If these LEDs were on from 7 pm to 11 pm, or 4 hours, that would be 11.52kWh x $0.063/kWh = $0.73 per day. For the whole month, that would be $0.73 x 31 = $22.63. That’s a ridiculous difference.

Clearly, there is no question about it: if you want to save energy and money, use LEDs.

Personally, I prefer the look of incandescents, but I have switched to LEDs because of the calculations above (and because you can’t find anything but LEDs these days). I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to the blue LEDs; however, I have definitely gotten used to the price!

P.S. Don’t forget to use timers on your Christmas lights – like programmable thermostats, these will help you conserve and save even more.

P.P.S. Also, don’t do this:

That’s just a bad idea. Haven’t the Griswolds ever seen that PSA about Christmas lights safety?

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Household-Level Information Survey: New SwitchHop Feature

Happy Friday SwitchHoppers. We're pretty excited to announce a new feature we released – household level information. If you provide this information (which is totally optional), your peer comparisons will be more precise (since you'll be compared to homes with similar characteristics).

Why is this important? Well, lots of reasons. Let's say your house is heated with baseboard (electric) heat. Wouldn't it be nice to be benched against other homes using electric heat?

You might look like an energy hog compared to gas-heated homes but you're actually pretty efficient when compared to other houses heated electrically.

Or, if you've got 10 people living in your household, would you want to be compared against a single-person dwelling? An apartment vs. a mansion? Central air vs. no cooling? You get the point.

The information is also going to be useful down the road in other features like giving you customized energy efficiency tips.

How to provide your household-level information

The next time you log in to your account, you'll notice a floating box asking if you want to fill out a survey.

If you're interested, you can follow the prompts and start providing your info. It's completely optional. You can skip any question you don't want to answer or just hit the 'x' in the top right corner to get rid of the survey altogether.

Don't worry – it's all easy multiple choice answers.

Obviously, the more information you provide, the more precise your peer comparisons will be. Hope you enjoy this.

Please send us any and all feedback on this feature.

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Friends Are Better Than Power Meters

Rick thought his power consumption was pretty average...until he added some friends on SwitchHop and realized that he's a power hog. It's not his fault – how was he supposed to know that a baseload of 1 kWh was unusually high?

It wasn't until he compared himself with friends that he realized his home was consuming about double the power of everyone else.

Lots of people who want to understand their home energy consumption start by using a power meter or other device for measurement. They wind up with lots of information but no context. This is what Rick had done. He knew exactly what his house was consuming but was missing a key element – context.

Were these numbers good or bad? Above or below the norm? How much did his neighbour across the street – who's got the same model house as him – use? What about his friends?

For Rick, the SwitchHop friends tool helped him understand that he's actually a pretty big power hog. It also gave us (his friends) something to poke fun at him for :)

Here's a couple easy ways to use the tool to get that 'aha' moment:

1. Compare Your Power Consumption With Your Neighbours

You'll notice an orange bar on your friend graph. That's the usage so far this month of your typical neighbours. It's a good starting point to understand whether you're using more or less than people who live close to you.

2. Invite Friends That Have a Similar House to Yours

As more and more of us move to the 'burbs, we're in a perfect position to compare ourself with friends that live in similar houses. In lots of developments, your house is virtually the same as many others on your street. If you want insight into your home's power consumption, invite your neighbours to join SwitchHop and add them to your friend graph (you can send invites from your friends page). This is a quick way to identify whether you need to step-up your conservation efforts.

As a real-world example, one SwitchHopper named Phil moved into a brand new house and thought his consumption was a little high this summer. He invited his neighbour - who lives in an identical house right behind him – to join so they could compare usage with one another.

Phil saw that he was using roughly 20% more power than his neighbour despite the fact they had the exact same house, exact same appliances and pretty much the same lifestyle. The answer? The huge bay windows in Phil's house faced the sun during the afternoon while his neighbour's bay windows were shaded. The heat this generated made Phil's air conditioning work extra hard. Phil installed blinds to keep the sun out of his house. Since then, he's noticed a considerable drop in his consumption.

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Historical Home Energy Data Has Arrived

We've just made it much easier for you to get your analytical geek on! You can now use SwitchHop to look back historically at your energy usage. It's a useful feature that gives you insight into where to focus your energy conservation efforts. It also helps you measure past efforts to determine whether or not they were worth your while.

How Does It Work?

SwitchHop lets you look back historically at your home's energy usage. You can go backwards day by day, by month (which shows each day of the month on the graph) or by year (which gives you a high-level view of your usage month-over-month).

Wherever we have enough historical data, we'll show you any point in time you choose benched against that same time point historically. So, for example, if you're looking at your usage for the month of May, 2012, SwitchHop would also display your usage from May, 2011 to give you some context.

Why would you want to do this? Aside from the pure joy of discovery, there's lots of uses for this feature:

1. Benching yourself against historical data is really the only way to know if your home energy management efforts are paying off.

2. You can use it to see / test the effect of a new appliance on your energy consumption (e.g. you'll finally be able to understand your ROI on that high-efficiency air conditioner you bought).

3. Understand seasonality and when to expect a much higher bill (pro tip: if you have central air conditioning, you'll easily be able to see the months you're using it in the yearly view)

4. Use the monthly view to understand your Monday-Friday usage patterns versus weekend usage patterns (you'll be surprised at the difference) and troubleshoot how to reduce them.

There's dozens more use cases that we haven't even figured-out yet but hopefully, as you continue to use the tool and discover them for yourself, you'll share them with us in the comments.

I'll share with you the major "aha" moment I had as soon as I fired-up this new feature late last week.

The picture above is a screen-shot of my monthly historical energy consumption (since my smart meter was installed in June, 2011, that's as far back as the history goes).

The blue line is my usage by month so far this year. The grey line is my usage by month from 2011. Right off the bat, you'll probably notice that huge spike you see in the middle of the year (which happens to be summer). That's my highly inefficient central air conditioning unit eating my wallet!

I always knew that my A/C unit was slightly undersized for my house (thus the compressor kicked in more often than it should) and that it was an older, inefficient model. But what I didn't realize is that during peak summer months when it's being used all the time, my home's energy usage more than doubles! Wow!

Now, I have a baseline to be able to calculate whether installing a new air conditioner is worth the money and a basic idea of what the ROI would be.

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New Features: Buddy System and TOU Indicator

Woohoo! New Features! We just rolled-out some awesome new features that are really going to improve your SwitchHop experience.

Friend System

You can now buddy-up to see how your power consumption stacks-up to your friends. On your personal page, you’ll notice a link to “see your friends”. That’ll take you to your friends page (go figure).

Once there, you’ll see a graph that compares your usage this month with your friends. It also benches the average usage of your friends to give you some context.

On the right, you’ll notice a list of your friends and a search box that lets you look for people. The on/off switch beside each friend lets you toggle them on or off the graph.

Be careful – this feature can lead to obsessive competition with your friends! While we were testing the buddy feature, I was the most efficient guy on our team in terms of energy usage.

One of our devs got really jealous competitive and started swapping his light bulbs out with LEDs, unplugging electronics and showering bi-weekly (ok, that last one was a joke). Before long, he was experimenting with turning off appliances and now obsesses over the timing of his laundry loads.

So where are we taking this feature? Well, we’re working on allowing you to overlay a friend’s daily usage graph on top of your own to facilitate helping each other find ways to reduce consumption (and create more friendly competition). And we’re building a competition and ranking system in to SwtichHop complete with leaderboards and incentives to save more.

Time of Use (TOU) Indicator

For those of you that are being billed on a time of use rate structure, you’ll notice a small, multi-coloured line beneath your usage graph. That line represents the price of energy (red is high, green is low).

You can use this to understand when the best time to do things like laundry or running your dishwasher is (hint: it’s generally not during ‘convenient’ hours in the day).

Thanks for using SwitchHop – we're really excited to keep the features rolling for you guys as we expand our user-base!

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Why Did We Build SwitchHop Home Energy Management?

As you start to use SwitchHop, you might be thinking, “Why did these guys build this amazing service?” (at least, we hope you’re thinking that ☺ ).

The way we consume power and pay for it has been virtually the same for a long, long time. We blindly consume energy then get a bill for it a month after the fact. That’s kind of archaic considering the technology that’s out there today.

So, we think it’s time for a new experience – one where you can see what you’re consuming and what it’s costing you in real-time. It's an experience where you can take action mid-month to ensure your bill doesn’t give you a heart-attack when you open it.

And we think home energy management should be social! We’re building tools to let your peers help you identify and achieve opportunities to save energy and lower your bill.

With that in mind, here are some of the guiding principles behind SwitchHop.

You Have a Right to Your Home's Energy Information

We see a fundamental flaw in “the Smart Grid”.  As taxpayers and utility customers, we’ve shelled-out a lot of money to install smart meters en masse. There were promises of real-time information, the ability to see your bill mid-month and lots of other pie-in-the-sky value statements. Can you hear the crickets chirping?

So far, the promised value hasn’t been delivered.

Sure, utilities have gotten value out of smart meters. The “smart grid” has enabled them to introduce fancy new fee structures like “Time of Use” and it lets them save considerable money through features like remote meter reading.

But wasn’t the point to give us – the customers – some value? We paid for the things through taxes and/or higher rates. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to actually use the tools we bought? After all, power is a basic necessity these days. Can’t live without it. Isn’t it our right to see our power usage information when and how we want?

We think so. So we built SwitchHop to be the experience we want from our utility. We want to see our information in meaningful ways and use it to lower our bills. We’re also in the process of building a buddy system that’ll let you help each other save some coin. There’s also a budgeting system with alerts in the works.

This is how we think a modern utility experience should be, so we’re delivering it to you. Enjoy!

We Want to Make Power Sexy

Yes, we’re serious. Why should dealing with your power consumption and energy bill be such a drab, boring experience? Maybe if it was fun and easy, you’d be more into it! One of our main goals is to make you WANT to look at your power usage and reduce it.

That’s why we’re making a very conscious effort to ensure our design is fun and – more importantly – our interface is easy for you to use. We’re not going to bog you down with overly complicated reports or facts and figures that need to be interpreted by an electrical engineer.

Not everyone’s an analyst. Most people don’t have extra time to waste tracking their energy use. We get that. We’re here to make that as simple as possible for you and create a community of people who will help you out.

Just like you, we’re people with personalities. We embrace that – you’ll notice our quirkiness sprinkled throughout our tools.

Conserve Energy & Save Money – That's It!

Our goal is to help you understand your power usage, conserve energy and save some money in the process (and hopefully have some fun while you do it). That’s really all there is to it.

We’re using the tool everyday at our homes to do the same thing and are committed to sharing everything we learn with you as we go along.

We’re not aiming to save the world (although we would like to make a dent in the universe). We’re not claiming that we’re going to help lower greenhouse gases and we certainly aren’t going to post ridiculous tickers showing all the fictional CO2 we’ve abated.

SwitchHop is just here to help you be conscious of your energy use. If that’s achieved, you’ll naturally use less power and save yourself some money too.

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Infographic: What Are Your Appliances Costing You?

Check out this infographic to see what some of your appliances are costing you in power consumption each year. Might push you over the edge to go buy that energy efficient fridge you've been eyeing...