Kilowatt Cost Survey

[Giant Communist Robot]

My bill here in Honolulu works out to 34 cents per. What's yours?

[DavidS]

The equivalent of 14 cents US.

[Shapley]

I'll have to look mine up when I have time.

[BigJon]

10.5 cents and going to drop about 7% next month. Time to go Solar GCR. It might actually pay for you.

[dai bread]

Controlled: 19.975c NZ. Uncontrolled: 27.478c NZ. That's including GST (value-added tax).

"Controlled" is the hot water. The power company can turn it off when they want to. Doing that cuts their peak demand, which is what the cost of electicity to them is based on. The higher the peak, the higher the charge. On top of that, there is a supply sharge of 35.29c per day, just for being connected to the grid.

Solar hot water is grossly expensive. I would need to spend about $8000 to save $30 a month. P-V cells are even dearer, though I should investigate them more closely. If I put a system in, it would cost me about $30-50 000 and I would save $200 a month, more or less depending on the time of year and how much home heating I do, i.e. payback period is about 16 years. The price will rise, of course, as prices always have since the people in charge found out how to do it (around 1918, I believe). That's why I need to take a closer look at P-V cells, batteries and inverters.

[Selma in Sandy Eggo]

SDG&E has a tiered pricing scheme - my first 348 kWh are priced at 14¢, additional kWhs cost 16¢ up to 452 kWh, then 29¢ per up to 696 kWh, and 31¢ above that usage level. My actual usage was 293 kWh, so I only got charged at the 14¢ rate. It was a cheap month: I didn't have to use air conditioning or heat. Either of those would kick me up into tier 2 or 3

[dai bread]

I looked briefly at P-V cells. One of our power companies will allow reverse metering, so that power generated in a solar system can be fed into the grid and be deducted from the monthly usage. That gets rid of batteries, unless you want a pure solar set-up. Batteries are also hugely expensive in the quantity required for serious storage.

The saving in electricty charges just about equals the interest lost by cashing in an investment to pay for the solar installation. It's now a question of whether electricity prices will rise faster than interest rates. I await developments.

[Shapley]

Ours is $0.1375 for the first 500 KWH
$0.0890 for the next 1000 KWH
$0.0849 above that

Our last bill averaged at $0.10 per KWH for 5300 KWH.

[Giant Communist Robot]

Our last bill averaged at $0.10 per KWH for 5300 KWH.

Maybe that's 530 kilowatts. If not, your bill was $530? Is that a per month figure? I saw a story online that said Honolulu paid the highest in the nation, but the figure was 18 cents. Obviously that's before taxes and fuel surcharges. Dividing my bill by the KW I get 34 cents. My usage has been running at ~600 KW per month; a typical bill is about $250. Talking to my neighbors I find mine is the lowest--theirs run $300 to $350 a month.

[Shapley]

Maybe that's 530 kilowatts. If not, your bill was $530? Is that a per month figure?

It was 5300 KWH, and the bill was $530. We have a large house, and it is all electric. We have no gas bill, no water bill, no sewer bill, just electric. I said that was the last bill, but I'm not so sure. I think the last one was about half that. If we run heat or the air conditioning, the bill is usally $400 - $500. We did not have to run either last month for long.

We have a hot tub, which has run our bill up by about $100/mo. It's an annoyance to me. I like it, but it's expensive. I try turning the heat down, and that's when the rest of the family wants to use it. Leave the temperature up, and no one wants to go near it (except me). All it takes is a little planning, if you think you want to get in it, turn up a couple of hours beforehand. They never do. Arrrr....

I do need to upgrade our Heat Pump. The one we have is over ten years old, and needs to be replaced. That may save us some usage.

[Giant Communist Robot]

It was 5300 KWH, and the bill was $530.

Yeow!

[dai bread]

Ow! indeed. Your house is insulated and double glazed, surely?

[Shapley]

Ow! indeed. Your house is insulated and double glazed, surely?

oh, yes. 6" walls at that.

We used to have to read our own meter, but they installed an auto-reading one a while back, and our bill rose markedly. Of course, there were three things that occurred almost simultaneous with that, making it difficult to tell which is the culprit: We bought the hot tob, replaced the shingle roof with a standing-seam metal roof, and replaced a leaky coil in the heat/AC units air handler. I can't imagine the coil being an issue. The metal roof shouldn't be, since the insulation is atop the ceiling, and the attic is vented both ends and through the cupola anyway (although the colour of the roof may mean a cooler attic in the winter). That leaves the hot tub and the meter as the primary suspects. The hot tub people say it should add about $40/month to the bill. Methinks it's adding more than that.

I also think the rates went up simultaneously with the new meter install, but I don't have the old bills handy to compare. I try to recall the KWH usage when I read them to pay the bill, and it seems to me 1,500 - 3,500 was normal, but that's based on my somewhat shaky memory. Our bill used to run about $125 - $300 before the new meter install.

[Giant Communist Robot]

That leaves the hot tub

My local electric company gave me a booklet that says the water heater is by far the largest part of electrical usage. The tub would make sense as it is even more water and not insulated.

[Shapley]

It's actually quite well insulated. The cover is particularly efficient. It is made in two halves of vinyl-covered dense foam with some sort of solid core (probably plywood) for rigidity. The snow and ice do not melt off it any faster than off the surrounding structures, except at the seam. The cats often rest along the seam to take advantage of the escaping heat.

Most of the heat loss occurs, I think, around the outer rim of the tub. The cover has a vinyl 'skirt' that drops about three inches down around the perimeter, but the wind can still catch and lift the cover.

[jamiebk]

Gas is cheapest for heating water and clothes dryers...they draw a lot of energy.

[BigJon]

Did you install your own standing seam roof? I'm thinking of putting one on my shed.

[Shapley]

BigJon,

No, we had it professionally installed.

[Giant Communist Robot]

Kilowatts now cost .37 per


...they say it's the oil.

[Haggis@wk]

$0.094 per KwH, some of the highest in the country