Hey guys,
The other night I went around to my parents’ house for a weekly catch up and I overheard my Mother complaining about her monthly power bill.
Her bill was around $300 for the month, $100 more than the average electricity bill of $200 per month in her area (She also has a solar water heater so doesn’t need to pay too much for hot water).
Sure it is now winter but was her bill really as high as it should have been?
The answer is no!
Turns out the reason why her bill was so high was that many electric blankets had been left on in unoccupied beds during the day. This not only worked out to be fairly expensive but could have also caused a fire to errupt in her home.
This leads me to my question? How can the average electricity user save on electricity costs?
I’ll have a look at five different ways.
#1 The best time to use electricity
Having a look at the plans that Genesis Energy provide, there are nine different ones to chose from, these range from plans that are aimed towards low usage and high usage, and also plans that aim towards customers who use electricity at a certain times in the day.
The electricity companies in NZ split the cost of electricity into two categories, day rate, and night rate. Day rate is more expensive because there is higher demand for electricity during the day. Peak hours are generally breakfast, lunch and dinner.
So how much do you actually spend on power at different times of the day?
Using data from http://www.powershop.co.nz, the average price for day time electricity is $0.2877kw/h compared to the night rate which comes in at $0.1265kw/h.
This data shows the best time to use electricity is night time, obviously annoying because we are all sleeping.
To take advantage of this cheaper rate be sure to have your showers at night rather than in the morning, put washer/dryer on at night time, and be sure to turn your electric blankets off when you get out of bed.
If you think you may be over paying your electricity bill you can compare your electricity plans with all the other NZ electricity plans on http://whatsmynumber.org.nz
#2 How economic is your lighting?
Lights don’t use as much electricity as big appliances but the amount of power they use sure does add up when every light in the house is on.
Lights probably not even ten years ago in NZ were mainly incandescent (Average 50W) bulbs which produce a lot of heat and require a lot of power to do so.
If we take 10 incandescent lights and leave them on for an hour they use 1KW of power per hour (10x50W). Using our average day time rate that’s $0.143 to keep 10 lights on per hour.
$0.14 isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things but it all adds up, remember that’s just an hour of leaving your incandescent lights on. If your out of the house for 7 hours that’s a dollar in electricity, if you do that every day, that’s $30 you could spend on something else.
One way we can save money is by using LED light bulb (Standard Edison screw or bayonett cap). These are extremely efficient and produce little to no heat. LED light bulbs can be purchased for as little as $10 from your hardware store. According to http://www.consumer.org.nz an LED bulb comparable in lumens to a 50W incandescent is only 5W, that’s a 10th of the power usage and they last up to 10000 hours.
The downside to LED bulbs is their price, however their price far outweighs the cost in time that it takes to replace the standard bulbs time and time again.
#3 Use less power to keep your freezer/fridge cold.
The fridge and freezer are both fairly large and require a lot of electricity to keep them cold, however if you keep your fridge/freezer fully stocked then there is less warm air that has to be removed from the fridge.
#4 Recycle the heat generated from your dryer and other appliances.
A year ago I talked to an electrical engineer who designs heat pumps. He explained that to make a room colder the heat is extracted, the same goes for a fridge. So could we theoretically harness the heat from the back of a fridge?
The answer is yes, but it would be quite tricky.
I did however find an article written by Christopher Supprock at http://hackaday.com/2011/10/06/reclaiming-waste-heat-from-appliances/
The article talks about how he recycles the heat from his clothes dryer and pumps it around his house during the winter.
#5 Insulate your hot water cylinder.
By insulating your hot water cylinder you decrease the cool down rate of the water in the cylinder, decreasing the time between turning off and turning on the element thus saving electricity.
An article I read written by Condo Blues, claims that the insulation jacket around the hot water cylinder can save up to 10% on power usage. http://www.condoblues.com/2009/01/easy-way-to-save-energy-how-to-insulate.html?m=1
That’s the last tip on saving electricity for this post, that’s only five tips and there are just so many more to share with you!
Thanks for reading guys, keep an eye out for more awesome posts,
Braeden.
The Budget Diary 