Even more conservation
Our electricity rates in Ontario I believe are the highest in Canada.
We use time of day with 8.3; 12.8 and 17.5 cents/kwh at offpeak, midpeak and onpeak demand.
The problem is, that is only 50% of the price.. delivery and other charges double that to
16.6, 25.6 and 35 cents/kwh.
This breaks down as 12 hours of offpeak, 6 hours of midpeak and 6 hours of onpeak, average out as 23.5 cents/kwh (12*16.6+6*25.6+6*35=663/24=23.5) for 24 hour use for weekdays.
Weekends are all offpeak, so 16.6 cents/kwh
For 1 week it would average out to ((16.6*2)+(23.5*5))/7 = 22 cents/kwh
1 hour = $0.22
1 day = 0.22*24=$5.28
1 month = 0.22*24*30= $158
1 year = 0.22*24*365 = $1,927
Every bill that comes through the door says to conserve! change your ways! replace your incandescent bulbs! Do dishes and laundry in off peak times!
Well, we do all of that, and have done all of that for 15 years. And the advice does not change.
So, incrementally we find other ways to conserve more. This weekend an old fluorescent light (that did not work very well… lots of flickering and 5-10 second time to on) was replaced with a 16′ LED rope light that we mounted around the inside frame of the pantry. It takes 3 watts! The old Fluoro was at least 40 watts. That will help a tiny bit. Not that much as the light is not on a lot. Maybe 1 hour/month
We also replaced a spinning hard drive in a computer that is always on with a solid state drive (SSD).
The spinning drive takes approx 10 watts when in use or idling. The SSD takes approx 0.2 watts.
The computer logs data 24/365 so in total that drive would use 10watts*24*365=87.6watthour=0.09kwh in a year.
That would cost $1927/kwh*0.09kwh= approx $173/year
In addition we have been slowly replacing compact fluorescent bulbs around the house with LED bulbs. A couple of reasons for this. The old CF often take a lot of time (1-2 minutes) to come up to full brightness. They also put out Radio Frequency Interference… a bad thing for our radio telescopes and SID systems.
The LED bulbs also use less power than the CFs.
One day we will put the killawatt meter on both and calculate out the differences.
The last big idea is to replace some of these data logging computers (that still take approx 50w) with smaller more energy efficient raspberry pi systems (maybe 2 watts).
50w/hour=0.05kwh/hour * 24 hours * 365 = 438 kwh/year * average price of $0.22 kwh = $1927*0.4= $423 per year