Last week I learned that we spent $13,457.99 on electricity for our house at 100 Prince Street over the 11 years since July 2000, or about $1200 per year.
Today I asked Coop Energy, where we buy the oil that heats our house and our hot water, for a similar summary. What I learned was that from January 2002 to May 2011 we’ve consumed 37,989 litres of oil for which we’ve paid $26,258.23, or about $2900 per year.
That means that our total energy cost for our home is about $4,100 per year.
Coop Energy doesn’t have an online customer system yet, but they tell me that one is currently in the works.
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Comments
Out of interest - how many
Out of interest - how many square feet is your home?
I asked Island Petro how much we’d consumed - ours worked out to be around $1500/yr for a 900 Sq/foot place.
Wow! I guess that’s the cost
Wow! I guess that’s the cost of a heritage home. We spend around $2000/year on oil for a slightly larger (much newer) house.
That seems like alot of money
That seems like alot of money for 1 year. We spent close to 2300 last year and we have an older home also
Our house is – fortuitously
Our house is – fortuitously for my occupation – 32 feet square and has two floors; so ((32 x 32 = 1024) x 2) = 2,048 square feet. Or over twice the size of yours, so makes sense that our energy bill would be higher.
Also, the house is largely non- or under-insulated, has drafty windows.  It scored less than 30 points on the home energy audit.
There’s work to be done, in other words.
For comparison, we spend 130
For comparison, we spend 130*12=1560,- Euro/yr for gas (used for heating, cooking, warm water) and electricity combined. Including all taxes (energy tax, fixed costs for the grid, VAT etc). The house is 150 square meter. Works out to 1605 sq. feet. and 2130,- CAD. We don’t get much winter though.
This generous sharing of
This generous sharing of comparative usage has me wondering whether a web service that turns energy usage data into a “social object” and adds game mechanics to the network might be an interesting way of spreading information about our collected usage as well as incentivizing reductions.
If I’m willing to go to the trouble of checking into my local café just to move up on the Foursquare leaderboard, surely I’d be willing to turn off the lights or lower the thermostat to move ahead on the global energy leaderboard.
It wouldn’t be hard for
It wouldn’t be hard for utilities & energy providers to have their system automatically send you an email if your usage is abnormal or above the neighbourhood/house your size average. They have most of the data already, it’d take very little to change it. When the electric meters finally get upgraded to smart ones, and when water is properly metered too, there’s no reason they couldn’t tell you right away if they suspect some sort of leak or problem.
As for energy reduction tips, they could use the same technologies to find likely culprits and send you tips on how to fix them.
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