Saved by the bill (a first hand tale)
It wasn't all bad. Well actually it kind of was.
If being 25, married with one child, living in a 6 bedroom double story home, and being a sales manager in a job you love sounds like a dream…let me re-align that train of thought for a second.
Bills. More specifically Electricity bills. My wife had just handed me my 4th electricity account since we were married. And yes it hurt. And by hurt I mean in excess of $1700.00. For one quarter. This is it I thought something has to happen.
“This is it” I thought, “Something has to happen”.
At that stage I didn't know what exactly, but I’d read up a lot on Solar Panel installation in recent months so I sat down to do some calculations.
I worked out that a 5kw solar installation was going to cost me about $12k. This calculated out to me paying about 30% more for my electricity for around 5 years then after that my electricity costs would come down about 20%. Don’t ask me about the details of those calculations, just know that I spent hours on them and figured that electricity wasn't going to get any cheaper, so long term, I’ll always be in front.
On 2nd of Feb 2013 AGL Solar installed a 5kw solar generation array on my roof (20 x 250w panels) and for the next two weeks I took great delight in running out to the inverter beside my garage and taking note of the daily and cumulative totals. Then I realised there has got to be a better way to keep track of the electricity I’m generating, using, and saving.
I realised there has got to be a better way to keep track of the electricity I’m generating, using, and saving.
So the hunt was on for an energy monitoring system. After a week or two (and about $300.00 off my credit card) a shiny new energy monitor with clamp on meters arrived in the mail. I had an electrician install it at the back of the meter box the same week. I set up the wireless LCD display in our kitchen and connected the gateway to our network so our energy usage could be collected and sent to the cloud.
Then our lives changed.
The curtains had been lifted and our lives as energy wasters was laid bare before us. Every time we walked into the kitchen we could see how much our electricity was costing us per hour. All of a sudden I was making frequent trips to other parts of the house to turn off lights, bathroom fans, heaters, computer screens. The race was on to get our home “Standby power” figure to a new record low. It seemed a little obsessive at the time. But then in 3 months our next bill arrived.
For the first time ever I suffered bill shock of a positive kind.
Our quarterly bill had dropped from just over $1700.00 to aprox. $900.00 a saving of $800.00 !!!!
My first thought was that the solar panels on our roof had generated a wealth of power and I must have a huge credit applied to my bill. So I turned the bill over and got my second bill shock… our solar feed ins had netted me a ground breaking credit of…wait for it…$58.56. So where had the savings come from?
I checked my online solar generation reports and figured out that by using what we generated rather than feeding it back into the grid we had saved approximately another $150.00. In all our solar panels had netted us a saving of $208.56 which was great but I was still baffled.
There was still an amount of around $590.00 that we had saved, and for no apparent reason.
Then it dawned on me…the energy monitor.
By knowing how much we were using in real-time and reducing our usage on the fly we had saved ourselves close to $600.00 in 3 months.
Yep that’s right, the $300.00 energy monitor had saved us $600.00. In the same period the $12,000.00 solar array had saved us about $250.00
It began to slowly dawn on me. That yes, it was possible to save the planet and do great things by installing solar. And Yes you can save some money while you are at it. But really the easiest way to save energy is to not use it. The best way to reduce your usage is to have it there staring you in the face everyday.
Spurred on by this epiphany my wife and I strove hard to keep the bills on the downward. By November that year we had reduced out usage costs to around $750.00 that’s right in less than a year we had reduced out quarterly electricity bills by over $1000.00. Of that amount $800.00 was thanks to a $300.00 energy monitor.
If I had my time over again would I still get solar installed? Probably, but that’s because I am addicted to data, and I enjoy watching the relationship between solar electricity generation and the seasons. But now when people ask me advice on should they install solar to reduce their energy bills.
The first thing I say is “solar is great, but I think you will find investing in energy monitoring a far better return on investment, so do that first”
Note: All images are clips from real energy bills. PDF copies of full bill are available on request. tweet me @intellisocket for more info
