Deconstructing Energy Bills
- Mar 06, 2009
- 20 comments
How much electricity do you use? Gas or oil for heat? Hot water? Other?
I recently did some math with my energy bills and came to understand something important: all my efforts to save electricity and hot water (while noble, and effective) pale in comparison to the energy we use to heat our home. But this fact didn’t exactly leap from my utility bills — I really had to work to understand why.
It’s hard to compare what you use for heating to what you use for hot water, or either of those to electricity (or gasoline, airplane fuel, or food energy). Are you concerned about reducing your energy use to help address energy independence? Or, perhaps you want to reduce your carbon footprint? Do you just want to reduce your bills? Accomplishing any of these goals in any measurable way is nearly impossible without some pretty serious math, and heck, even some understanding of physics.
The problem is, your utility bills smash everything together. They take energy from an entire month and then sum it up in dollars. With “even billing,” my gas usage is spread into twelve equal monthly payments. This doesn’t help me understand how much heat I “should have used” — was it colder than usual in February? Did I take long showers? Overheat the house?
Some information is on the bill. But I had to do some non-trivial math, and I had to understand a good deal of energy physics to be able to understand how it all added up. And in some cases, the bill is still too general: I get one gas bill that combines heat, hot water, and cooking. I built a special data collector to understand where my gas was going. Look, building a data collector device is just not … normal 
(Before you laugh, this kind of information would be available if our houses all were part of a truly smart power grid).
I did the math, and I did the mechanical engineering. And I learned a few important things. During February, I found:
- I used 11x more energy heating the house and water with gas, than electricity
- My electricity is 4x more expensive than gas
- I used 14x more for heat than for hot water
Um, wow!
I have spent a lot of effort saving electricity and hot water in our house. While I have done some work to conserve, heating is far and above our biggest energy user – and cost. Before I did this math, I simply didn’t know.
WattzOn has it right to help us all use a single comparable unit, the Watt (a measure of power) so that we can understand our overall impact. Our energy bills should use Watt-hours (a measure of energy) to help us get a handle on how much we actually consume so that we can begin to make informed choices about our energy use.
[Note from WattzOn engineering: to make such energy bill analysis easier and more accurate, we will be adding automatic online utility bill integration very (very) shortly! Stay tuned!]
Posted @ 7:07 pm by WattzOn
Categories Uncategorized
How about helping people understand the bigger picture, including both the local and global rebound effects, using the personal choices of your electric bill as a start. If you make a choice to live with extreme conservation measures it gives your environment the impression that there is suddenly a surplus that someone else can come to rely on. It's complex, but that may not be the message you want to sent either. Perhaps you need to do BOTH personal conservation and whole system conservation at the same time, to not have one effort undo the other…
I tell this to anyone who will listen. A housewife or the man of the house doesn't know a watt, from a what? A BTU from a BEE and will not exert himself to turn off the light. What we do need in an instrument that one can put in their kitchen that will translate watts, gpm,& btus into dollars and cents! Housewife sees her bills running up…whats on? She goes through every room in the house trying to stop the dollar meter from running up. Ok engineers, get on it! I think an electric meter that imputs usage into my computer which in turn will translate the usage into dollars and send it to the display in the kitchen via bluetooth or similar method is feasible and people will pay for it.
Great post
my inernet not working properly I have bookmarked ur story i'll read it latter
respect
katiz slop
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My wife is so poor in numbers, that's why everytime she attempts to deconstruct our energy bills, it's her head that gets ruined. (She gets terrific migraines). There must be a simpler way to do all this, right?
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It's realy nice i posted ur story on my blog
regards
jimmy banger
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I subscribed to your blog when is the next post
Have a nice day
mike hlower
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Just like in cleaning your home, it takes time to realize that the energy being consumed is more than the allocated budget. Time to sit down and list all the bills and its corresponding usage to “clean-up the mess”.
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Great post, what you said is really helpful to me. I can't agree with you anymore. I have been talking with my friend about, he though it is really interesting as well. Keep up with your good work, I would come back to you.
That Sounds interesting, I agree with you.Please keep at your good work, I would come back often.*
Great post, what you said is really helpful to me. I can't agree with you anymore. I have been talking with my friend about, he though it is really interesting as well. Keep up with your good work, I would come back to you.
whats on? She goes through every room in the house trying to stop the dollar meter from running up. Ok engineers, get on it! I think an electric meter that imputs usage into my computer which in turn will translate the usage into dollars and send it to the display in the kitchen via bluetooth or similar method is feasible and people will pay for it.
I'm from Yorkshire and intend to write one of those 101 lists for saving on your energy bills. Top of my list will be investing in a few warm jumpers from Oxfam, eating lots of porridge and spending weekends in libraries and shopping centers to keep warm
Yes we should be careful about the uses of your resources.Thus it helps to everyone.
You are right, . we just take energy from an entire month and then sum it up in dollars.
. I can't agree with you anymore. I have been talking with my friend about, he though it is really interesting as well.
Generally speaking, to prove your identity at a snap you'll want two utility bills from the last three months that display your name and home address,
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According to the DOE heating (Space and hot water) accounts for over 45% of your usage while cooling is only around 12. Pretty shocking since everyone seems to think summer cooling is where you take the biggest hit. It especially stinks if you have electric heating
There are so many ways to reduce energy but what are the appliances that use too much heat?