Because this is an ongoing “post” that I will be re-visiting from time to time, I’m going to make a page that will be visible on the top navigation that will serve as a space for this “meta-topic”.
The main goal of this is to hopefully provide an overview of how from the time I really became aware of my energy use (with regards to electricity, gasoline, natural gas, etc), I have been trying to lower that total usage anytime I see easily trim-able amounts.
Now, please, don’t misunderstand. I am NOT saying I’m going to lower my footprint to zero (at least, not anytime soon), and I’m not saying I’m going to give up comforts for the sake of energy use. What I am saying is that with very little extra work, the average person could probably cut a non-trivial amount of energy use from their day to day life, and afterword be no less comfortable in their home (in some cases, more comfortable). What this does take is some time, and in many cases, money. But, in my mind, this money isn’t wasted. It will pay for itself in comforts, or just in long term savings.
The page will be up and running in the next few weeks. At this point, consider what you have around your home that could be replaced/upgrade that would save your money throughout the year, and would have little to no negative impact on your comfort.
It’s been a while since I posted much of an energy post (other than my TED anniversary post on the 1st of April (here)). So, here we go.
First, for those that don’t know, a heat pump is just what it sounds like. It “pumps” or takes heat from inside (cooling) or outside (heating) and moves it to the other side. Basically, it’s an air conditioner that can “reverse”. See wiki page. When people just say “heat pump” they generally mean an air source heat pump (outside air is the source, or sink/dump for the heat). There are also “ground loop” heat pumps that use the ground as the source or sink/dump. Ground loop heat pumps are more efficient than air source ones, but they are much more expensive, and require more room to install (there are lines that run in the ground, either horizontally or vertically, which takes space/money to install). In my case, I have an air source heat pump.
Read more…
Today marks the 1 year anniversary of me collecting electrical usage data. April 1st of 2009, to April 1st of 2010.
Here are some interesting numbers associated with that time period:
- Highest energy use day (amount): 2009-12-09 (98.02kWH)
- Highest energy use month (amount): December 2009 (1612.39kWH)
- Lowest energy use day (amount): 2009-06-18 (9.62kWH)
- Lowest energy use month (amount): June 2009 (564.88kWH)
- Mean (average) energy use per day: 29.15kWH (~ $1.35/day)
- Functional Median energy use per day: 53.82kWH (this is a bit high, given the mean).
- Mode (most common) energy use per day: 18kWH (had to round this)
- Highest energy use at a given time: 16.11kW (registered on 2009-12-29)
- Lowest Voltage Recorded: 112.6v
- Highest Voltage Recorded: 125.3v
- Average Voltage: 121.4v
- Number of rows in DB: 525,512
Of interest in all these numbers is first, my lowest use month (Jun) is about 1/3rd the energy used in my highest month (Dec). June in the Willamette Valley is generally pretty mild. Where this December, we had some pretty cold days. Second, I’m only missing 78 minutes worth of data (there are 525,600 minutes in a year, and I have 525,512 records) over the whole year or less than 0.015% of data. Not too shabby.
My voltage is pretty good, at an average of just 1.4v over 120v.
And lastly, I pay an average of $1.35/day for power (at $0.0463/kWH). So, my actual cost per month for power is about $40. Considering I have no gas service, so all my HVAC, hot water, cooking, etc come from electricity, that isn’t bad at all. And given where power largely comes from in this part of the country (Hydro-Electric), my general carbon footprint is actually lower using all electricity than it would be if I was using gas.
Pretty cool. I love the TED, and it’s great having this data. It should be interesting to see numbers a year from now… see how they change, or stay the same from this year.
September 19th, 2009 staze So, just a quick note. I just updated the code for the power summary (which is on the left), and fixed the “current meter reading”. There were a couple issues, one of which was a bad sql query (not sure why the previous one didn’t work, but oh well), and for some reason, 2 days of data were missing (which you’d see if you clicked the “history”, and saw two “0″ graph points.
Anyway, after fixing those problems, it turns out the “current meter reading” is dead on. I’m not sure how… and maybe it’s just a coincidence, but the meter reads exactly what the webpage says. Not too shabby. That means the drift for about 33 days is less than 1KWH, or less than about 300W per day, which given a 30KWH day, that’s less than 1% inaccuracy.
So, that’s it. Just thought I’d share. =) More actual interesting info later today, or tomorrow.
Friday I came back to work. It was fairly uneventful. The weekend proved to be hot, and resulted in a lot of indoor work on the laundry room, the garage, and the shed. Everything looks pretty darn good.
Today, I’ve been making more progress with Apple (AFP has been acting worse the last few days, but they’ve given me some things to try), and we’re starting to lay out plans for our summer work. It should be a fairly steady summer, I’m hoping.
This is a rather short post because I can’t really think of much to say. Oh! Comparing my TED to my Utility bill pretty much was dead on. Since I’m not tracking total KWH/day by the hour, and I don’t know when the utility meter reader was at the house, I can only assume that anything within about 1-2% between the bill and the TED is pretty darn close. Great to know! Now I just wish they had a “TED” for water usage.
Here’s hoping for some Thunderstorms this evening!
Have a good week. Hopefully I’ll post more.
