Natural gas is up a little, because it has been very cold in Melton this week and we use gas for heating the house, but water is down, as I haven’t needed to water the vege patch because of the daily drizzle, and Adam moved out so we now save water by not having his showers and laundry. The electricity is up a little because I had my PC on all day Monday downloading documentaries, and also because of the drizzle, we haven’t generated very much power from the PV system. We are averaging 5.1 KWh per day with the broken cloud cover which is about right for near the Winter Solstice. The days only get longer for the rest of the year.
I take the measurements on Friday evenings at 1930. I have now been taking these measurements since 14th of April 07, and have not missed a reading. It just goes to show that I don’t go out much on Fridays! I believe that if you cannot measure something, then you cant make effective changes without accurate information on your performance. A simple thing like reading your meters weekly (or daily if you are that excited about it) goes a long way to understanding your energy consumption in your home.
This week will be the big test, as Amy and Megan have gone on holidays for a week in my Honda Civic Hybrid, so it will just be Kim, Ben and myself using resources in the house. It will be very interesting to see the results. I will let you all know how we got on next Friday.
I reckon it is pretty good that we can generate 50% of our electricity needs in winter for a family of five, and if we had a wind turbine, we probably would get close to 100% of our needs. Just imagine if every house in Australia or better still the world had PV and a wind turbine, we would be able to decommission most of those dirty coal power stations, and maybe, just maybe have a chance at saving the world from catastrophic climate change.
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