GeekPi

Most people don’t give a second thought about their electric utility meter, other than just taking a look at it to make sure it’s still spinning. The same goes for their utility bill. It’s just another, likely ever increasing bill to dread each month.

The Bill

My inbox this morning held my latest electric bill from Puget Sound Energy. Another $99 to pay to the utility company. Yay! As an owner of a small, under insulated, baseboard electric heat home, I’m wary of my winter time bills. The summer is typically in the $40 range. The winter? Typically $250+ a month. Ouch.

Benchmarking

I’m pretty comfortable with the ‘Energy Center’ on my utility’s website. I input the size and details of my home: baseboard electric, 1 bathroom, dishwasher, age of appliances, etc. and they give me a description of where my electricity is going. Not surprisingly a vast majority of it is used to heat my house. It’s not a 100% accurate system, but it gives a pretty good idea of where my money is being wasted, and even gives suggestions on how to reduce my bill and what incentives are offered for improving my home.

The system also gives a number of handy graphs to compare my use month-by-month and year-to-year – along with average temperatures and how that affects energy usage. To my surprise, I’ve now discovered that they now track and report my usage on a daily basis. Again, as a geek, I’m all about aquiring and analysing as much data as I can, and this is very enlightening (see above left). In the middle of this billing cycle, my wife and I went on a vacation and turned down our heat to 60.* Each of our baseboard heaters have a programmable thermostat. For the most part, they’re defaulted to keeping everything at 60 degrees and heating up to 70 for an hour and half in the morning, and from 6pm to 10pm. Even with that, our average consumption was 35 kWh – which is about $3.50 a day. In the dead of winter, we rocket up to twice that amount.

So what can I deduce from that graph? The lowest point on that graph was on May 2nd, which according to my weather station, had a 24 hour average temperate of 58 degrees; which should be high enough to keep the heaters off. That means our non-heating baseload is about 8 kWh a day, which includes our water heater, refrigerator, DVR, outdoor motion lights, and phantom loads thoughout the house. The average US home consumes 30 kWh a day, the average European home uses 13. That means, my 960 sq/ft house, sitting empty consumes nearly as much power as a Euro home does occupied. Something is messed up with that.

New Goals

I’m setting some goals. Over the next year, I’m going to lower my energy bill. Not just by a little bit, but by a lot. I’m thinking a minimum of 50% and a goal of 75% in annual kWh reduction. I never want to see another power bill over $100.

How am I going to do this? Luckily I have a lot of tools in my arsenal. Blower door testing, thermal imaging, understanding of incentives, a decent knowledge of building systems and carpentry. I already have double pane windows, mostly CFL and LED bulbs, so I’ll start elsewhere.  The biggest wasters of energy in my house has to do with heating. Baseboard electric is one of the most ineffienct ways to heat a home. Also my house doesn’t have any insulation in the crawlspace and the attic is *maybe* R-10.

As an added difficulty: I’m not going to change fuels. I’m going to stick with 100% electric. The rates are still some of the cheapest in the Nation (~now $0.09 a kWh) and it’s almost all from hydro electric, so unless you’re a salmon, it’s pretty clean.

I want to maintain my current quality of life. I don’t want to be cold in the winter, I want to watch my plasma TV and still play xbox, and for the most part, not change my typical habits. As I embark on a new project/improvement, I’ll detail them here, and post my monthly bill updates. Do you think my wife and I can do it?

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