Thanks for all the emails and comments so far during the challenge. I believe that we have between 25-30 people on the challenge so far and the numbers are growing.
With your second reading some time today, you would have been able to calculate your baseline. The baseline is the figure that we are going to attempt to beat every single day. When I started reading my meter many years ago my baseline began at 40 kWh per day. It was a shock to the system, and we managed to get it down to between 9 and 11 kWh per day. Even less in winter, but lots more in the hot summers that we get here. The biggest drain on our energy consumption is our swimming pool, where I have to run the pump for at least two hours in winter, up to about four hours in summer. So there is between 2 and 4 kWh a day that I cannot seem to shake off.
So imagine my shock today when I calculated my baseline for this challenge. The figures are below (click to enlarge).
So my total consumption today was 16.6 kWh. Now I haven’t told anyone in the house that we are on this challenge yet, just to get an accurate reading, so I know we can do much better than that. It looks like a few things have happened since I stopped reading our meter. Because we were not measuring our performance, we have slipped back into some old habits. Some very old behaviours that I noticed today were computers left on when no-one was using them, ceiling fans on in empty rooms, lights on in empty rooms and extractor fans left on and forgotten. I have read that the average daily household electricity consumption in Australia is between 16 – 20 kWh. I don’t want to be average.
Tomorrow I will have a family meeting and discuss my concerns which is probably the best way to tackle the situation. I am sure we can do better tomorrow.
From here on in, the challenge will pan out as follows;
- Everyone should now be taking their daily readings and recording them.
- I will be posting daily energy reduction tips to nudge you (and my family) in the right direction in whatever format I can dig up (text, photos, video, podcasts)
- Every Monday we can all post via a comment the percentage of reduction for the week compared against our baseline day. I will help you figure it on the day.
- Celebrate our successes and learn from our mistakes!
P.S. For those interested this is what my data sheet and calc sheet look like. The calc sheet will only calculate the last day correctly, so ignore any future dates. I am not sure how to stop the random calculation for the next day. Any suggestions from any Excel guru’s out there?
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| Data sheet |
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| Calc sheet |
Thanks Gavin, I am onboard too. I put my raw data into the date spreadsheet and it calculated a mega profit! cool but incorrect. Think I have missed something. Could you please show day 2 of your data sheet? cheers
Prue
PS I am in Qld with the PV net feed in tariff. Is that the same as you? Ours pays 50c per kWh. I changed the column to 50 cents but it still calculated me a daily profit $800!! Now that’s a solar bonus.
prue
Hi Prue,
See the updated post.
Gav
I’m not sure I’m up to doing all the math, but this is causing me to focus on the do-able. Like continuing to dry sweatshirts and towels outside, running the dishwasher only when full, unplugging things not in use etc. We’ve got all compact bulbs now, too. Thanks for the inspiration!
Thank you, I had play around and seem to be on track now. thanks forall your work!
Prue
Soooo excited! I had worked out an average but wasn’t keeping records. I figured we were using btwn 7 and 10 kWh but wasn’t sure. Now I know for a FACT that we used 8.3 kWh yesterday! Yahoo! Not bad with five in the house! Thank you for setting this challenge up for us. What a great idea!
for the calculation to look neater you can use an IF statement.
IF (today’s data = 0, 0, today-yesterday)
Look up the IF statement help and it will explain it better.
I have just been reading our meter to work out what size solar panels would suit us. We use about 8 kWh per day. Considering we have have to pump our drinking water from the rainwater tank and run several freezers full of homekilled meat, I think that’s ok.
forgot to say good on you for starting this challenge, looks like you’re teaching lots of people about meter reading. As you say, you can’t change what you can’t measure, so this will start many people on the path to reducing their power usage.
Yeah Gav, farmer_liz has it right, you can also try IF( SUM( today’s data -yesterday’s data )<=0,0,SUM(today’s data – yesterday’s data ))
Looking forward to saving a few $$’s!
Hi Everyone. A big thanks to Farmer_Liz and Kane for pointing me in the right direction regarding the not-so-pretty spreadsheet. I have fixed all of the issues, and the calc sheet now works very cleanly. Nothing like a good IF statement to fix ones messiness. You can download the new spreadsheet from the original link.
Sorry for the confusion, however I think we are all learning on this challenge!
Gav
Our baseline is 8kw. I would think this will be higher on weekends when we are home all day though. Will be interesting to see!!
7kwh! Granted, we live in a tiny apartment and don’t use much electricity to start off with, but still. I thought it’d be higher since we bought a used freezer and I think it’s a bit of an energy hog (it doesn’t have the energy stickers on and keeps developing a lot ice, so it’s not any of those new ones). The average when I last read my meter was 7kwh, too, before the freezer, but it was winter and we used the aircon a bit, so the freezer probably offsets any of the savings we got with not using the aircon.