Hi, it’s Bruce here with news on our autumn electricity bill. This is the season when daylight saving stops, plunging us into darkness earlier at night. Also, the weather starts to cool, which means using the electric off-peak booster for our solar hot water system. We don’t rush to turn that on, waiting instead for cold shower complaints before flicking the switch, and if the weather warms up, we flick it off again. But eventually we leave the system on as cool becomes cold, as a result, our electricity consumption increases.
According to the bill, our electricity use for the 100-day autumn period was 1180 kWh (11.80/day), 14% less than the same period last year, and nearly 10% cheaper, which was pleasing. Given that the spring and summer quarters were both 15% down on the previous year, we are being remarkably consistent in terms of proportional reduction of our electricity use.
I was away for nearly 8 weeks during autumn, which would have lessened our electricity use, but as I was away for about 5 weeks the previous autumn, it probably didn’t contribute greatly to the reduction in use between the two periods.
As well as checking out our quarterly bills, I have been recording our electricity use on a weekly basis. This week, I decided to do daily measures at 8 am, to see if I could detect changes in use related to the previous day’s activities.
The results were intriguing. For example, we dined out on Friday night before going to see Becky perform in ‘Pig’, the school play — highly recommended! — so, no cooking dinner and little use of lights, and we used only 7 kWh for the day. Not so the next day, Saturday, with all of us home most of the day, and lots of cooking — including making several jars of green tomato relish from the tomatoes we salvaged after the first good frost —this pushed our energy use up to 18 kWh for the day, confirming our suspicions that we need to look at improving the efficiency of our stove, oven and microwave, all electric unfortunately.
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