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Ontario Energy Grid: Destined for Unreliability

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:22:18 -0500

Written by Elly

I have a confession to make: I am terrified of (post-)apocalypse movies. Not because of the zombies/plagues/large-scale natural disasters, but because of the complete collapse of civic infrastructure. That is my nightmare scenario, folks. No running water. No electricity.* No laws. No law enforcement.

And the fact that, according to these movies, we’re all going to turn into terrible, awful people who will destroy each other for the basic necessities of life.

Needless to say, I think, that I can’t watch “Doomsday Preppers” without getting legitimately paranoid that these people know something I don’t, and that I would not survive more than 2 days after any kind of disaster, and that I need to start hoarding canned goods, and how do you purify water?

And I don’t know how to use ANY weapons so I won’t be able to defend my stores, and what do you pack in a bug-out bag?

And – I’m starting to get a bit anxious just thinking about this stuff so I should probably stop. You get the idea, I think.

So when my computer was on the fritz and essentially inoperable for a few days a couple of weeks ago, I had a bit of a freak out because of, you know, my WORK that was on there, but also because my thoughts were tending towards “HOW CAN I SURVIVE WITHOUT A LAPTOP AND THE INTERNET?”** and then “THIS IS WHAT LIFE WILL BE LIKE IN THE POST-APOCACALYPTIC HELLSCAPE.” I will admit that I have since calmed down a bit – we are currently trying to switch Internet providers at home and have consequently been without internet (or cable!!!) since last weekend.

Mostly, I just end up going to bed at a respectable hour. So that’s what life will be like in the aforementioned hellscape; 8 hours of sleep a night, except with more night-time raids by the people eking out a living in the ruins one set of ruins over from your ruins.

Anyway, to assuage our (because I’m not the only one who thinks about this stuff, right? RIGHT?) perfectly rational fears, I looked into how the provincial government intends to avoid, or at least stave off, this obvious and looming problem.

So, we have Ontario’s Ministry of Energy and Ministry of Infrastructure ensuring grid reliability. They seem like they’re somewhat on the job, keeping everything running smoothly and in a state that will keep working for a little while, even after all centralized government has collapsed on account of the zombies.

The Ministry of Energy just published a comprehensive report on their electricity infrastructure renewal plans in December of last year. Seems legit.

Also, according to this funding opportunity, the Ontario Centres of Excellence and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council Research Council of Canada are looking to integrate Ontario’s electricity and natural gas infrastructure. They’re on it too, guys. That’s good news.

Unfortunately, Aegent Energy Advisors Inc isn’t so positive. This article details how some recent pieces of provincial legislation create counter-productive grid mandates.

Bottom line: the grid is reliable (for now) but we’re paying more than necessary for it. All of which seems annoying but not really surprising until the final paragraph, and then BAM!

“…if the costs of the first two waves [of cost increases] now have the effect of making it unaffordable to tackle necessary infrastructure renewal, then Ontario will end up with an electricity system that is both expensive and unreliable.”

This is not helping my anxiety, Aegent Energy Advisors! In other words, our grid is currently so expensive to maintain, it’s cost-prohibitive to renew and therefore, will likely be unreliable in the future.

I hope that helped! I’m not sure it did, though. Depending on who you trust – government of private industry – your worries should be somewhat lessened or terribly magnified. Sorry about that!

There is, of course, one way to mitigate this looming disaster. Use less energy!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to figure out where to store a pallet of canned beans in a two-bedroom apartment.

* I am aware that this is in fact the current day-to-day reality for many people around the world; however, as a solidly middle-class individual living in North America, it is not MY day-to-day reality and that is what terrifies me – the complete and utter destruction of my reality. So selfish, right?

** Again, I know people survive without this stuff everyday, everywhere. Just look at the first note, okay?

Germany Puts Canada to Shame on Solar

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 14:09:01 -0500

Written by Elly

This article came across my Facebook news feed last weekend. Germany was able to meet 50% of its electricity demand with solar energy. It’s from last year so it isn’t totally current. I still find it interesting, though, given the generation theme that’s been going on here for a couple posts.

My first thought was, “Where do they find the space?!? Germany is so small compared to Canada. If they can find space for large expanses of solar panels, then shouldn’t we be able to as well? We have so much wilderness!”, which is obviously only one VERY SMALL part of the issue. First of all, most of that wilderness is inaccessible, inhospitable or, you know, actually lived on by people who might not want acres of panels on their property. Secondly, I have heard, anecdotally, that Ontario’s gird apparently can’t handle a lot of small scale, “feed in” generation projects; a business here in Ottawa was looking to put solar panels on their roof but, in the end, they weren’t able to because the grid here somehow couldn’t handle it. And thirdly, given Ontario’s biodiversity, there is the possibility of something like this happening.

(Crazy, isn’t it? I try not to be defeatist but sometimes it feels like you just can’t win. You try to do something good for the planet, like expanding and promoting renewables, but then that project interferes with an already endangered species. Is it too much to ask that the world be less complex? Get on that, world. Yeesh.)

Regardless of my “BUT THE SPACE!” issue, I did find it interesting to read that Germany has decided to close all their nuclear power plants. The German government is to nuclear plants as the Ontario government is to coal plants. Except that the Ontario government is replacing coal power with gas and wind generation. Which actually brings up a whole different issue surrounding gas power. So does “only half the carbon emissions of coal” outweigh the issues associated with fracking?

Is it okay to compromise (somewhat) on your principles for less-than-ideal, short-term gains in the general direction of those principles? I have no idea. It’s that dang complexity again. Argh!

Um, well that got out of hand pretty quickly. Sorry for the existential post, everyone! I feel like I should end on a more upbeat note… Uh, okay! Here’s some good news: even with my baseboard heating I’m spending less on electricity this winter than I did last winter, so I got that going for me. Our apartment has a lot less light bulbs than the house did, I guess. And fracking is a funny word, so just have fun with that, okay? Heh, fracking…

The Most Energy Efficient Way to Cook Bacon

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:27:00 -0500

Mmmmmmm…Baaaaaaaaaaacon. We all love it. It’s the most delicious cut of meat on Earth and that’s not really up for debate.

Every year, more than two billion pounds of bacon is consumed in the US alone. If the average piece of bacon is 1 oz, then that’s about 32 billion pieces of bacon or roughly 107 slices per person. That’s a lot of hog. We love bacon so much, a recent survey found 43% of Canadians would choose it over sex. We literally love bacon.

It got me thinking – since we’re so infatuated with bacon, what’s the most energy efficient way to cook it?

Three Ways to Cook Bacon

There’s three ways people generally cook their bacon: on the stovetop in a frying pan, in the microwave or in the oven on a cookie sheet. Taking those three methods into account, lets figure out what the most sustainable method is.

There’s really only one metric needed to judge this: kWh/slice cooked. In other words, how much energy does each method use to cook one slice of bacon? Here’s hoping we can create a new sustainable bacon movement.

Stovetop

This is probably the most common way people cook bacon. You heat up a frying pan and watch those puppies sizzle, trying to avoid the smouldering grease every time you flip your strip.

Here’s the assumptions I’m using to calculate the stovetop:

- you can cook 6-slice batches in a frying pan

- you’re using an electric stovetop (on a 2000w element)

- you cook the bacon for 5 minutes at medium-high heat, which uses 80% of the 2000w element’s max output (1,600w)

Keep in mind, the way to calculate a kilowatt-hour (kWh) is as follows:

kWh = watt x hour / 1,000

Here’s how I calculated the energy used to cook one batch of bacon on the stovetop:

1,600w x 0.083 (5 minutes is 8.3% of an hour) / 1000 = 0.133kWh

In other words, it takes 0.133kWh to cook six slices of bacon on a stovetop, or 0.022 kWh per slice. Not bad.

Microwave

Perhaps a lesser-known method of cooking your bacon, microwaving is actually a pretty good option. It works even better if you get specialized hardware to help yourself out.

Assumptions for microwave cooking:

- you’re cooking in 6-slice batches

- you’re cooking for 5 minutes on high heat setting

- you’re using a 1,500w microwave and drawing all its output

Using the same methodology, cooking in the microwave looks like this:

1,500w x 0.083 / 1000 = 0.123 kWh

So, it takes the microwave 0.123 kWh to cook that same batch of six slices, or 0.021 kWh per slice. Not bad, not bad.

Oven Cooking

Oven-cooking your bacon is the best way to run large batches and also get it perfectly cooked every time. Just throw some tin foil on a cookie sheet, then slap down your hog strips and throw it in the oven. Easy-peasy.

Here’s the assumptions:

- you’re cooking in 15-slice batches

- you’re cooking the bacon for 15 minutes at 400 fahrenheit

- you’re using a 3,500w oven (which is drawing 3,000w at the cooking temperature)

Back to our trusty methodology, here’s what our formula looks like:

3,000w x 0.25 (fifteen minutes is 25% of an hour) / 1000 = 0.75 kWh

Whoa! A batch of bacon in the oven uses 0.75 kWh or 0.05 kWh per slice – more than double the other methods.

Conclusions

The table below sums up our findings.

It’s pretty much a wash between stovetop and microwave cooking, although I didn’t factor heating-up your frying pan on the stovetop so microwave cooking is still the better option. One thing that’s clear is oven-cooking your bacon is by far the least sustainable method.

Well, there you have it. Please enjoy your bacon responsibly.

Another Reason to Avoid On-Peak Energy Usage

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 11:06:03 -0500

Written by Elly

Since my last post about Ontario’s generation mix, I’ve been wondering about the interplay between time-of-use and power generation. We all understand that, under a time-of-use pricing scheme, on-peak hours are the most expensive. And we understand that they are the most expensive because on-peak hours are when demand is highest.

Charging more for electricity at these times is an attempt to encourage conservation, or, in other words, reduce demand on the grid. Simple, right? Pretty straightforward stuff. But is it really just about said grid? And what does this mean in terms of generation?

Peak Demand = Increased Carbon Emissions

Well, it just so happens that I have some relevant and handy graphs here for y’all. Both use data from Friday, November 23, 2012. This first one captures the megawatts generated that day.

We can see that slightly more coal was used during the morning, from 8 am to 1 pm, which covers both seasonal on- and mid-peak hours. More coal equals more emissions, so one could say that on-peak hours are also “dirtier” hours. And just in case you don’t believe me, here is a graph showing the amount of CO2 released over the same day.

Interestingly, two of the least used generation types (gas and coal) produce the most emissions. And you can even see that coal emissions actually increase with the beginning of on-peak hours in the morning. Gas, on the other hand, seems to stay rather constant – and it’s still less emissions overall.

Are Nukes the Answer?

So, conclusions: the more pressure we exert on the grid, the more power we have to generate. The more power we have to generate, the more we have to utilize relatively non-clean* sources. In addition to being monetarily more expensive, on-peak hours are also environmentally more expensive – conserving during on-peak hours is economically AND environmentally responsible. Yet another reason to avoid on-peak hours!

*I was always so confused when emissions experts talked about nuclear power as the best (most readily available, most reliable) alternative to coal. I would always think “But it still makes WASTE! Dangerous, hard-to-dispose-of radioactive waste!” Until I realized that they were referring to nuclear only in terms of carbon emissions. Well, sure – it doesn’t emit CARBON, but it still creates a by-product. Just because it doesn’t go into the air and isn’t directly contributing to climate change doesn’t mean it’s any less problematic. I guess I just felt like we were trading one problem for another – jumping from the frying pan into the fire, as they say.

Understanding Ontario's Energy Supply Mix

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 16:01:07 -0500

Written by Elly

Have you ever wondered what is really supplying your electricity? Not who (as in your local electrical company), but what. How is that local electricity company generating all that power?

I live in Ottawa; Hydro Ottawa is my local electricity provider. And, with a name like that, I used to assume that most of my power was coming from HYDRO electric dams in … somewhere. Probably Quebec, as that’s all I remember about the August 2003 blackout – something had gone wrong in Quebec and we had no power, ergo Quebec supplied all our power.

A gross oversimplification, but that’s honesty the conclusion at which I arrived. Obviously, Ottawa is in Ontario and, consequently, is on Ontario’s power grid. Our power comes from whatever Ontario’s various electricity industry players (there are at least 4) have decided to use.

IESO Generation Information

One of those industry “players”, the Crown corporation that runs the grid itself, the Independent Energy System Operator (the IESO), actually offers a great overview of Ontario’s generation mix along with an hourly output and capability readout. You can even look at the hourly output and capability for the last 30 days.

Here’s a handy little screen shot I took from the IESO’s Supply Overview page:

Pretty interesting, isn’t it? There’s no absolute majority in this generation mix – nuclear “wins” via plurality. It’s like the 2008 federal election. (The percentages actually align pretty closely: wind accounts for 4.2% of the overall generation capacity and the Green Party came out of that election with 4.48% of the votes. HA!)

Further down the same page on the IESO site, there is some info on energy imports and exports. Did you know our grid is connected to Minnesota, Michigan, New York, Manitoba, and Quebec?

Ontario’s Grid Connected to Quebec, Manitoba & US

Ontario can buy from and sell to these different grids. So if we push the grid past capacity, the IESO will bring in more power from one of these areas and WHO KNOWS how they generate their power?!? Actually, that info is readily available, but my point is that once we have to import power, we lose control of how that power was generated.

This is a problem if you’re concerned with the environmental impact of power generation. The Ontario government has committed to phase out coal-generated electricity by 2014 (more information on this is available on the same IESO Supply Overview page to which I have been referring throughout this whole post – apparently, it’s very useful!) but I don’t know what the electricity industry is doing or not doing in Minnesota, Michigan, New York, Manitoba, or Quebec. And, as I am not a citizen of any of those places, I have no say in what will or won’t happen in the future.

So, there you go. In case you needed another reason to conserve electricity, overtaxing the grid forces the province to import electricity from elsewhere, places where we have no control over current generation or to demand cleaner generation going forward. And you don’t want that, do you?

Do You Really Understand Your Electricity Bill?

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 10:54:21 -0500

Written by Elly

When you get your electricity bill, how closely do you look at it? Honestly, do you really look at all those charges? Do you know what any of them really mean?

The Cost of Electricity is Only Half Your Bill

It might surprise you to know that your usage only directly affects half of the charges on your bill. You could even say that you only actually control half your bill. MIND BLOWN, amirite?

To really wrap your head around this idea, we need to closely examine the charges on your bill. I recommend taking a look at the handy interactive bill Hydro Ottawa has on their site. There are examples for both tiered bills and time-of-use bills. You just hover over different parts of the bill and a short description appears.

As with many other bills, the first line on a Hydro Ottawa bill is previous charges and payments. Pretty self-explanatory, I think. Next, we have the charges one might expect to see on an electricity bill: the cost of the electricity you used during the billing period. This is one charge over which you have full control – usage directly correlates to cost (obviously). Depending on how you are billed, the charges might be listed by time-of-use (TOU) period or by season and threshold. Either way, you should be able to see how many kilowatt-hours (kWh) you used and how much per kWh you are being charged.

Then there’s HST which is, again, pretty self-explanatory. Following the HST line is one line everyone loves – a CREDIT! Yes, this is the Ontario Clean Energy Benefit, folks. It takes 10% off the cost of your energy usage (up to 3000/kWh). It’s always nice to get money back, in my humble opinion.

The Charges You Don’t Control on Your Energy Bill

But that is nothing compared to the second, or more interesting, set of charges. These are the charges over which you have little to no control. At least one of them (the delivery charge) is partially percentage-based, so technically you can control how high or low it goes based on how much power you use, but you can never get rid of it entirely. According to the interactive bill, “a portion of [the delivery] charges are fixed and do not change each month. The rest are variable and change depending on the amount of electricity that you use.”

I guess if you’re having electricity delivered to you, you can’t really get out of the delivery charge. Anyway, on top of delivery charges, you also have to pay regulatory charges, which cover the cost of grid administration and maintenance, and fund the Ministry of Energy, infrastructure conservation, and renewable energy programs. And then there’s more tax, calculated separately for this set of charges. There is also another 10% credit (yay!) – takes a little bit of the sting out of all the charges over which you have no direct control.

There are other points of interest highlighted on the interactive bill, but they’re all pretty obvious. In my experience, the charges are the most misunderstood section of any bill. And I think it’s so interesting how we have to pay for the electricity itself, and then to have it delivered to us, and then to make sure that it will continue to be delivered to us in the future, and then to make sure the rates are fair, and then to make sure that we won’t destroy all our natural resources while we’re generating all that electricity.

I understand the reasons behind all these charges, it’s just annoying that my consumption only impacts about half of them directly, if at all!

Calculate the Energy Cost of Your Christmas Lights

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:18:46 -0500

Written by Elly

Every neighbourhood has one – a house bedecked and bejewelled from stem to stern in Christmas lights. There are a few in mine and every time I go by one of them, I can’t help but think, “How much is all this additional electricity costing them?!?”

Well, apparently this question bothers me enough that I’ve decided to figure it out (approximately) using the equations found over at Christmas Lights Etc.

I’m going to try to estimate how much those Christmas light might cost.

How Much Energy do the Griswolds’ Christmas Lights Use?

Now, because I don’t want to creep out my neighbours by loitering on their lawns and counting light blubs, I’m going to use the original Christmas Light House, the one that caused a (fictional) power outage in (fictional) Chicago in (nonfictional) 1989: the Griswolds’ house from that Christmas classic “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”.

Here’s a clip to jog your memory.

Clark Griswold used “25,000 imported Italian twinkle lights,” which were most likely (read: most definitely) incandescent.

So, 25,000 bulbs x 5W per bulb = 125,000W.

Now we need to find the kilowatts, which is 125,000W x 0.001 = 125kW. Let us assume that someone as … enthusiastic about Christmas as Clark Griswold would want those lights on as soon as it was dark enough to see them, around 5, and that his neighbours would demand that the lights be turned off when they want to go to bed, around 11.

Five pm to 11 pm is 6 hours, 2 at on-peak and 4 at off-peak. So, 125kW x 2 hours (at on-peak) = 250kWh, and 125kW x 4 hours (at off-peak) = 500kWh. With our current rates, on-peak would cost 250kWh x $0.118/kWh = $29.50, and 500kWh x $0.063/kWh = $31.50.

For 6 hours of Christmas lights, at 2012 TOU rates, Clark Griswold would pay $29.50 + $31.50 = $61.00. $61.00 EVERY DAY! Holy smokes! For the entire month of December that would be $61.00 x 31 = $1,891.00 only on Christmas lights, and that’s not including any other regular electricity use or delivery charges/tariffs (which would effectively double that $61.00). Good grief!

Calculate the Cost of Your Christmas Lights

Obviously, Clark Griswold is an exceptional case. Even the most decorated houses in my neighbourhood probably only have an eighth of the lights that he used, and they probably know better than to turn them on during on-peak periods.

So, they probably spend $31.50/8 = $3.94 per day. But still, cumulatively, $3.94 x 31 = $122.06 for all of December – that’s not cheap.

But this is all for incandescent bulbs. LEDs use 86% less energy – an LED bulb uses less than 1W, as opposed to the 5W I was using in my calculations. So, let’s try that again with LEDs: 30 strands of lights x 100 bulbs per strand = 3000 bulbs. Three thousand bulbs x 0.96W = 2,880W x 0.001 = 2.88kW. If these LEDs were on from 7 pm to 11 pm, or 4 hours, that would be 11.52kWh x $0.063/kWh = $0.73 per day. For the whole month, that would be $0.73 x 31 = $22.63. That’s a ridiculous difference.

Clearly, there is no question about it: if you want to save energy and money, use LEDs.

Personally, I prefer the look of incandescents, but I have switched to LEDs because of the calculations above (and because you can’t find anything but LEDs these days). I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to the blue LEDs; however, I have definitely gotten used to the price!

P.S. Don’t forget to use timers on your Christmas lights – like programmable thermostats, these will help you conserve and save even more.

P.P.S. Also, don’t do this:

That’s just a bad idea. Haven’t the Griswolds ever seen that PSA about Christmas lights safety?

Household-Level Information Survey: New SwitchHop Feature

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 11:09:06 -0500

Happy Friday SwitchHoppers. We’re pretty excited to announce a new feature we released – household level information. If you provide this information (which is totally optional), your peer comparisons will be more precise (since you’ll be compared to homes with similar characteristics).

Why is this important? Well, lots of reasons. Let’s say your house is heated with baseboard (electric) heat. Wouldn’t it be nice to be benched against other homes using electric heat?

You might look like an energy hog compared to gas-heated homes but you’re actually pretty efficient when compared to other houses heated electrically.

Or, if you’ve got 10 people living in your household, would you want to be compared against a single-person dwelling? An apartment vs. a mansion? Central air vs. no cooling? You get the point.

The information is also going to be useful down the road in other features like giving you customized energy efficiency tips.

How to provide your household-level information

The next time you log in to your account, you’ll notice a floating box asking if you want to fill out a survey.

If you’re interested, you can follow the prompts and start providing your info. It’s completely optional. You can skip any question you don’t want to answer or just hit the ‘x’ in the top right corner to get rid of the survey altogether.

Don’t worry – it’s all easy multiple choice answers.

Obviously, the more information you provide, the more precise your peer comparisons will be. Hope you enjoy this.

Please send us any and all feedback on this feature.

Program Your Thermostat Around Time of Use Rates

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 10:22:00 -0500

Written by Elly

Recently, my husband and I moved from a house with natural gas heating to an apartment with baseboard heaters. This will be our first winter with electrical heat and we were a bit worried about how this would affect our electricity bill.

Luckily, our landlord was willing to install programmable thermostats for us. While we were trying to figure out what combination of settings worked best for us, my brother-in-law suggested we set the heat to come on for an hour before each on-peak period started (which is a great idea and seemed so ridiculously obvious to me once he said it).

It took us a couple days of trial and error - and monitoring our usage peaks on SwitchHop – to get all our thermostats optimally programmed for our lifestyle.

Programming Your Thermostat For Time-of-Use

Right now, we have our thermostats set to 19 degrees Celsius from 6 to 7 am, to heat the apartment while we are awake and moving around in the morning.

At 7 am, which is the beginning of the first on-peak period of the day, the thermostats all drop to 15 degrees Celsius until 4 pm.

At 4 pm, the temperature is set to rise again to 19 degrees, to warm our home for us before we get there and before we hit the second on-peak period of the day at 5 pm.

From 5 pm to 6 am the next morning, we have set the temperature to drop to 15 degrees again, to get us through that on-peak period and the whole night.

Usually, that hour of heating lasts all night, but, as we are in the apartment at this time, we can change the temperature if we need to – we just have to remember to reset the programs before we go to sleep or all our hard work would be for nothing.

So, programmable thermostats have been quite useful for my husband and I. Even when we had gas heating, we still used them – mostly because we were (and continue to be) lazy and forgetful.

And, seriously, who wants to get up in a cold house and run downstairs to turn on the heat? No one, that’s who. I like to wake up to a pre-warmed house, thanks, and to go to sleep in a pre-chilled one.

Tuning & Calibrating Your Thermostat

If you can’t or don’t want to switch from a mechanical to a digital thermostat for whatever reason, there is one thing you can do to make sure they’re running as efficiently and effectively as possible.

This is called tuning your thermostat, and there are many how-to articles available online.

Basically, by tuning, you are making sure your thermostat’s temperature sensor(s) are calibrated and reading the ambient temperature correctly, and you are adjusting a sensor called the “heat anticipator”, which gives your heating/cooling system some wiggle room so it’s not constantly trying to maintain an exact, specific perfect 20 degree temperature.

Heat Anticipators Explained

This article actually explains heat anticipators (and all the other components in electro mechanical thermostats) quite well.

Mercury Switch Mechanical Thermostat Tune Up

This one describes a pretty quick and easy tune up for mercury switch mechanical thermostats, with a couple good photos.

Calibration Screw vs Mercury Switch Thermostats

This last article is just plain hilarious. It’s from 1988, it’s a scan of an article from a small city’s local paper, and it’s attributed to Reader’s Digest. Setting all that aside, it is actually helpful – it explains the difference between calibration screw and mercury switch thermostats. (I’m not entirely sure of the prevalence of calibration screw models in homes these days but it’s still good to know, I guess.)

I hope this helps some of you better manage your heating this winter. Please be careful when you’re tuning, if you decide to do it! Good luck!

All in a Day for SwitchHop

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 12:55:46 -0400

All in a Day for SwitchHop:

We were on CBC Radio yesterday rapping about SwitchHop with host Alan Neal (rapping as in talking, not actually rapping. Although, that would have been pretty cool too). Hit the link if you’re interested in hearing it. Cheers.

Friends Are Better Than Power Meters

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 11:02:00 -0400

Rick thought his power consumption was pretty average…until he added some friends on SwitchHop and realized that he’s a power hog. It’s not his fault – how was he supposed to know that a baseload of 1 kWh was unusually high?

It wasn’t until he compared himself with friends that he realized his home was consuming about double the power of everyone else.

Lots of people who want to understand their home energy consumption start by using a power meter or other device for measurement. They wind up with lots of information but no context. This is what Rick had done. He knew exactly what his house was consuming but was missing a key element – context.

Were these numbers good or bad? Above or below the norm? How much did his neighbour across the street – who’s got the same model house as him – use? What about his friends?

For Rick, the SwitchHop friends tool helped him understand that he’s actually a pretty big power hog. It also gave us (his friends) something to poke fun at him for :)

Here’s a couple easy ways to use the tool to get that ‘aha’ moment:

1. Compare Your Power Consumption With Your Neighbours

You’ll notice an orange bar on your friend graph. That’s the usage so far this month of your typical neighbours. It’s a good starting point to understand whether you’re using more or less than people who live close to you.

2. Invite Friends That Have a Similar House to Yours

As more and more of us move to the ‘burbs, we’re in a perfect position to compare ourself with friends that live in similar houses. In lots of developments, your house is virtually the same as many others on your street. If you want insight into your home’s power consumption, invite your neighbours to join SwitchHop and add them to your friend graph (you can send invites from your friends page). This is a quick way to identify whether you need to step-up your conservation efforts.

As a real-world example, one SwitchHopper named Phil moved into a brand new house and thought his consumption was a little high this summer. He invited his neighbour - who lives in an identical house right behind him – to join so they could compare usage with one another.

Phil saw that he was using roughly 20% more power than his neighbour despite the fact they had the exact same house, exact same appliances and pretty much the same lifestyle. The answer? The huge bay windows in Phil’s house faced the sun during the afternoon while his neighbour’s bay windows were shaded. The heat this generated made Phil’s air conditioning work extra hard. Phil installed blinds to keep the sun out of his house. Since then, he’s noticed a considerable drop in his consumption.

Historical Home Energy Data Has Arrived

Mon, 28 May 2012 15:10:00 -0400

We’ve just made it much easier for you to get your analytical geek on! You can now use SwitchHop to look back historically at your energy usage. It’s a useful feature that gives you insight into where to focus your energy conservation efforts. It also helps you measure past efforts to determine whether or not they were worth your while.

How Does It Work?

SwitchHop lets you look back historically at your home’s energy usage. You can go backwards day by day, by month (which shows each day of the month on the graph) or by year (which gives you a high-level view of your usage month-over-month).

Wherever we have enough historical data, we’ll show you any point in time you choose benched against that same time point historically. So, for example, if you’re looking at your usage for the month of May, 2012, SwitchHop would also display your usage from May, 2011 to give you some context.

Why would you want to do this? Aside from the pure joy of discovery, there’s lots of uses for this feature:

1. Benching yourself against historical data is really the only way to know if your home energy management efforts are paying off.

2. You can use it to see / test the effect of a new appliance on your energy consumption (e.g. you’ll finally be able to understand your ROI on that high-efficiency air conditioner you bought).

3. Understand seasonality and when to expect a much higher bill (pro tip: if you have central air conditioning, you’ll easily be able to see the months you’re using it in the yearly view)

4. Use the monthly view to understand your Monday-Friday usage patterns versus weekend usage patterns (you’ll be surprised at the difference) and troubleshoot how to reduce them.

There’s dozens more use cases that we haven’t even figured-out yet but hopefully, as you continue to use the tool and discover them for yourself, you’ll share them with us in the comments.

I’ll share with you the major “aha” moment I had as soon as I fired-up this new feature late last week.

The picture above is a screen-shot of my monthly historical energy consumption (since my smart meter was installed in June, 2011, that’s as far back as the history goes).

The blue line is my usage by month so far this year. The grey line is my usage by month from 2011. Right off the bat, you’ll probably notice that huge spike you see in the middle of the year (which happens to be summer). That’s my highly inefficient central air conditioning unit eating my wallet!

I always knew that my A/C unit was slightly undersized for my house (thus the compressor kicked in more often than it should) and that it was an older, inefficient model. But what I didn’t realize is that during peak summer months when it’s being used all the time, my home’s energy usage more than doubles! Wow!

Now, I have a baseline to be able to calculate whether installing a new air conditioner is worth the money and a basic idea of what the ROI would be.

New Features: Buddy System and TOU Indicator

Wed, 16 May 2012 11:33:09 -0400

Woohoo! New Features! We just rolled-out some awesome new features that are really going to improve your SwitchHop experience.

Friend System

You can now buddy-up to see how your power consumption stacks-up to your friends. On your personal page, you’ll notice a link to “see your friends”. That’ll take you to your friends page (go figure).

Once there, you’ll see a graph that compares your usage this month with your friends. It also benches the average usage of your friends to give you some context.

On the right, you’ll notice a list of your friends and a search box that lets you look for people. The on/off switch beside each friend lets you toggle them on or off the graph.

Be careful – this feature can lead to obsessive competition with your friends! While we were testing the buddy feature, I was the most efficient guy on our team in terms of energy usage.

One of our devs got really ~~jealous~~ competitive and started swapping his light bulbs out with LEDs, unplugging electronics and showering bi-weekly (ok, that last one was a joke). Before long, he was experimenting with turning off appliances and now obsesses over the timing of his laundry loads.

So where are we taking this feature? Well, we’re working on allowing you to overlay a friend’s daily usage graph on top of your own to facilitate helping each other find ways to reduce consumption (and create more friendly competition). And we’re building a competition and ranking system in to SwtichHop complete with leaderboards and incentives to save more.

Time of Use (TOU) Indicator

For those of you that are being billed on a time of use rate structure, you’ll notice a small, multi-coloured line beneath your usage graph. That line represents the price of energy (red is high, green is low).

You can use this to understand when the best time to do things like laundry or running your dishwasher is (hint: it’s generally not during ‘convenient’ hours in the day).

Thanks for using SwitchHop – we’re really excited to keep the features rolling for you guys as we expand our user-base!

Why Did We Build SwitchHop Home Energy Management?

Wed, 02 May 2012 13:11:00 -0400

As you start to use SwitchHop, you might be thinking, “Why did these guys build this amazing service?” (at least, we hope you’re thinking that ☺ ).

The way we consume power and pay for it has been virtually the same for a long, long time. We blindly consume energy then get a bill for it a month after the fact. That’s kind of archaic considering the technology that’s out there today.

So, we think it’s time for a new experience – one where you can see what you’re consuming and what it’s costing you in real-time. It’s an experience where you can take action mid-month to ensure your bill doesn’t give you a heart-attack when you open it.

And we think home energy management should be social! We’re building tools to let your peers help you identify and achieve opportunities to save energy and lower your bill.

With that in mind, here are some of the guiding principles behind SwitchHop.

You Have a Right to Your Home’s Energy Information

We see a fundamental flaw in “the Smart Grid”. As taxpayers and utility customers, we’ve shelled-out a lot of money to install smart meters en masse. There were promises of real-time information, the ability to see your bill mid-month and lots of other pie-in-the-sky value statements. Can you hear the crickets chirping?

So far, the promised value hasn’t been delivered.

Sure, utilities have gotten value out of smart meters. The “smart grid” has enabled them to introduce fancy new fee structures like “Time of Use” and it lets them save considerable money through features like remote meter reading.

But wasn’t the point to give us – the customers – some value? We paid for the things through taxes and/or higher rates. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to actually use the tools we bought? After all, power is a basic necessity these days. Can’t live without it. Isn’t it our right to see our power usage information when and how we want?

We think so. So we built SwitchHop to be the experience we want from our utility. We want to see our information in meaningful ways and use it to lower our bills. We’re also in the process of building a buddy system that’ll let you help each other save some coin. There’s also a budgeting system with alerts in the works.

This is how we think a modern utility experience should be, so we’re delivering it to you. Enjoy!

We Want to Make Power Sexy

Yes, we’re serious. Why should dealing with your power consumption and energy bill be such a drab, boring experience? Maybe if it was fun and easy, you’d be more into it! One of our main goals is to make you WANT to look at your power usage and reduce it.

That’s why we’re making a very conscious effort to ensure our design is fun and – more importantly – our interface is easy for you to use. We’re not going to bog you down with overly complicated reports or facts and figures that need to be interpreted by an electrical engineer.

Not everyone’s an analyst. Most people don’t have extra time to waste tracking their energy use. We get that. We’re here to make that as simple as possible for you and create a community of people who will help you out.

Just like you, we’re people with personalities. We embrace that – you’ll notice our quirkiness sprinkled throughout our tools.

Conserve Energy & Save Money – That’s It!

Our goal is to help you understand your power usage, conserve energy and save some money in the process (and hopefully have some fun while you do it). That’s really all there is to it.

We’re using the tool everyday at our homes to do the same thing and are committed to sharing everything we learn with you as we go along.

We’re not aiming to save the world (although we would like to make a dent in the universe). We’re not claiming that we’re going to help lower greenhouse gases and we certainly aren’t going to post ridiculous tickers showing all the fictional CO₂ we’ve abated.

SwitchHop is just here to help you be conscious of your energy use. If that’s achieved, you’ll naturally use less power and save yourself some money too.

Infographic: What Are Your Appliances Costing You?

Tue, 01 May 2012 08:58:00 -0400

Check out this infographic to see what some of your appliances are costing you in power consumption each year. Might push you over the edge to go buy that energy efficient fridge you’ve been eyeing…

Infographic: What’s Driving Your Energy Bill And the moral...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:46:12 -0400

Infographic: What’s Driving Your Energy Bill

And the moral of the story is: make sure your heating and cooling system is dialed-in and not wasting any energy!

Case Study – How Behaviour Affects Electricity Usage

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:31:00 -0400

Hi, Alex here from the SwitchHop team. For you early adopters of SwitchHop: thanks so much for taking part. We’re really excited to have you on board. And just wait – there’s some awesome features in the pipeline that’ll be released shortly.

We’re also working to bring you lots of valuable content to help you get the most of our current version of the toolset. So, one area we can add value is to get you thinking about how your everyday behaviour affects power usage (and bill).

To demonstrate this, I’m going to use my home’s usage from yesterday (Sunday) compared to the Sunday before it. Last Sunday, I only used 11 kWh while yesterday, I used 20 kWh. What gives?

Step One: Compare Hydro Consumption Between the Two Days

First things first, let’s look at the two days together. Below is a screenshot from my SwitchHop account.

The blue line represents my house’s power usage yesterday while the grey line represents the previous Sunday. It’s important to use the same day of the week so that you’re looking at apples to apples (no worries, our tool does that automatically for you). Sunday’s usage signature would look a lot different than Tuesday’s, for example.

You can see that the big discrepancy is the huge morning spike and then the late afternoon spike, which both occurred yesterday.

Step Two: Behaviour

Alright, so now we can see where yesterday differed from the previous Sunday. The next step is understanding what created the differences.

Background

There’s three people that live at my house (four if you include my pug, Tony):

My wife
Me
My son (2 yrs old)

The weather was pretty consistent between the two days (so it wasn’t much of a factor).

Explaining Hump #1

Yesterday, between 7 am (where the spike starts) and 10 am (where it starts to come down), we used a lot of power compared to the Sunday before. What happened?

Well, the difference is what didn’t happen. The night before last Sunday, there was a charity ball that my wife and I attended. Our son slept over at his grandparent’s house. You can probably see where this is going…

At the ball, I had a ~~bazillion~~ couple drinks. With no son to wake us up at 6:30 the next morning, we snoozed longer than usual. The result? No power being used in the morning.

Now, let’s contrast that peaceful morning with what happened yesterday in the same time frame:

7 a.m. - 8 a.m.

lights on all over
electric kettle to make oatmeal for son
blender making smoothies
electric stove making eggs and refried beans (the magical fruit, the more you eat ‘em, the more you…)

8 a.m. - 9 a.m.

load of laundry goes on
dishwasher goes on

9 a.m. - 10 a.m.

load of laundry goes into dryer
another load goes in washer (now both are running simultaneously)
beans kick in, family disowns me and turns on every fan in the house (joking, joking (about the fans, anyways) )
toaster used for son’s snack

You can begin to see how our collective behaviour affects power usage.

Explaining Hump #2

What about that second afternoon spike? Easy to explain.

Yesterday, there was a family dinner (not at our house) and we cooked an appetizer to bring. We also put the second load of laundry in the dryer during that timeframe. The two behaviours produced that spike.

This also explains yesterday’s low-point that follows the second hump.

Since we didn’t cook dinner and weren’t home during that time, there’s no “dinner spike” like there was the previous Sunday.

Step Three: Lessons Learned

What lessons can be learned by looking back at my usage yesterday versus the Sunday before? Well there’s some obvious ones:

Doing laundry (especially running your dryer) should be done when power is cheapest because it’s an absolute hog
Sleeping in is good for energy conservation :)
Might be time to start considering a gas stove…

At the end of the day, the value of this exercise is to be aware of how my behaviour drives power consumption. Am I going to avoid eating because my stove uses so much energy? Absolutely not!

But, I may be more conscious of unnecessarily running kitchen appliances or leaving a couple lights on. It sounds cheesy, but being conscious of all this stuff will start making you smarter about your usage.

Bragging Rights

On a similar note, I would like to point out that I’m kicking the rest of my colleagues’ butts in average consumption! Check out this screenshot from my SwitchHop interface:

The blue bubble is what I’ve used so far this month and the green bubble is the average of what they’ve used. Slackers :)

Ontario Energy Prices Going Up Again!

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:12:43 -0400

Ontario Energy Prices Going Up Again!:

Hit the link in the title to read the Globe and Mail article.

Wow. Ontario Energy Board increases the cost of energy…again… Changes effective May 1st.

How to Figure Out Your Base Load Like a Champ and Use it To Save Dough

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:28:00 -0400

Hello! If you’re reading this, you’ve likely started using SwitchHop. Awesome! We’re happy to have you onboard.

One of the first things you’ll want to figure out is your approximate base load. Doing this lets you start to understand what behaviours and things are driving your usage (and bill) through the roof.

What is a base load?

There’s varying definitions of what a base load is. Some people think it’s the average amount of energy you use on any given day. Or some look at it as the average daily usage over your lowest three months of consumption throughout the year. Either way, there’s no real consensus but there’s definitely lots of noise out there.

When we’re talking about base load, we’re looking at what your house is consuming when you aren’t around doing stuff like laundry, turning off and on lights, and cooking. In other words, we look at base load as the average hourly energy your house uses just to exist.

Why do we encourage you to look at it this way? Because it makes it easy to see the things you do to drive your energy consumption through the roof. Also, if your base load is higher than average, it’s a great warning sign that something’s not right and you need to investigate it immediately.

Figure out your base load Using SwitchHop

Now we’re talking! Let’s roll-up our sleeves and figure out how to identify our base load (don’t worry, it’s not rocket science). Head on over to your personal SwitchHop page. You should see a similar graph to this one near the top of your page:

Play around with it. Every point shows you what you used during that hour of the day (the blue line represents yesterday and the grey line represents that day a week ago).

All those low points are likely from when you were either sleeping or not home (depending on the time of day). So, simply mouse over them and see what they are.

Now, anywhere where there’s a big spike in your usage generally means you were doing something major in your house like cooking, running a washer/dryer, etc. Ignore those. It’s the low points we’re interested in.

In the example above, the low points ranged from 0.5 to 0.3 kWh and most of them were about 0.4 kWh so that’s what I’ll assume my base load is for this time of year. No need to be scientific here, we’re just trying to understand the bare minimum energy our house uses before layering on all the things we do to make those spikes happen.

What to do once you’ve figured out your base load

Yeehaw! We’re rolling ahead! Let’s put our new knowledge to use. At this point, you need to know what to look for. Here’s some telltale signs to help you identify opportunities to use less energy:

Spikes when you’re not home and/or sleeping

When nobody’s home and when you’re sleeping, your baseload should be low and pretty consistent (not deviating from about +/- 0.2 kWh of itself). If you see weird spikes during these times, it’s a good indicator that something’s wonky.

Obviously, every person’s household, habits and appliances are different so it’s very tough for us to tell you exactly what to look for when you see strange spikes. Often, it’s good to think about what is automated in your house as a starting point.

Here’s a few examples of things you could investigate:

Programmable Thermostat

If you’ve got a programmable thermostat, make sure it’s properly set-up. If it’s not, it could be doing some weird stuff like unnecessarily heating your house at 2 a.m. while you’re fast asleep under your warm duvet.

Honestly, dialing-in your HVAC system is probably the easiest way to make huge savings in your energy usage.

Most of them have weekday and weekend settings, so make sure both are set up around your lifestyle.

Automated Lighting

Got automated outdoor lights? Make sure they’re not set to turn on at unnecessary times. Or, maybe you’ve got some motion-sensor lighting coupled with a pesky racoon that frequents your backyard every night. Time for a pellet gun (joking, joking)!

In all seriousness, just look around your house for things that might be unnecessarily firing-up at weird times. Even your DVR could cause a bit of a spike…

Unusually high base load

If your base load is unusually high, there’s likely a big problem with one or more of your major appliances. What is an unusually high base load? Well, that’s a tough question that depends on season, weather, size of house, age of house, appliances, number of people living in house and many other variables.

For that reason, it’s hard to definitively say what’s normal or not. But, as a rule of thumb, if your house is in the 1,000 to 2,000 square foot range and your base load is higher than 1 kWh, it might be cause for concern.

If your house is bigger than that, just use multiples of our rule of thumb to gauge whether you’re high or not. Also, it’s worth noting that we’re working on new peer comparison features that will let you check your usage against similar households. So, that’ll give you better context in this department. We’ll be rolling that out shortly for you.

Alright, so now we need to talk about some common reasons why your base load may be high. There are so many things to look for, but here’s a laundry list for you to check:

Change your furnace filter: dirty ones cause your fan to blow more often and to work harder – change at least every three months.
Have your furnace cleaned: dirty furnaces are energy hogs – getting yours cleaned can work wonders for lowering your consumption (costs about $100). Also, make sure the technician cleans your A/C coil at the same time (if you have central air)
Check your fridge: if your fridge is old, it’s likely using a ton of energy every time the compressor kicks in. I know you don’t want to hear this, but it might be time to replace it. Most utilities offer programs where they give you a discount on a new fridge and you’ll save the money you spent on it within the first year or two. A 20-year-old inefficient fridge will cost you about $285/year to run while a new, efficient one will be more like $67/year.
Check your insulation:if you’ve got a leaky house, your whole HVAC system has to work that much harder to keep the temperature / humidity level you like. If you notice drafts near windows or doors or notice your furnace / air conditioning firing often, you may want to get an assessment to see if there’s opportunities for better insulation.

All bets are off if you have any of these: the following list of things are absolute energy hogs that will make your base load quite high:

Water bed
Hot tub
Heated pool (during the summer months, anyway)
A grow-op (joking)
Sauna

Hopefully, this post will help you get started on your quest of better understanding your energy usage using SwitchHop.

We’re going to be rolling out new features very often to make it easier and easier for you to get value from our service. Subscribe to our RSS feed to get automatically updated when we post new stuff, which will be often ;)

Cheers and thanks again for using SwitchHop.

Stay Tuned

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:37:33 -0400

Hello there!

We’re scurrying as fast as we can to bring you some valuable content! In the meantime, hit up our RSS feed so that you’re automagically notified when we post new stuff.

Also, if you haven’t already done this, you should click here to sign up for an invitation to SwitchHop.