Some how the subject of electricity bills came up and after talking to a few people down here it seems I'm paying about twice that of an average house hold with about $500/quarter. In comparison a friend has a house 5x as big, 2 kids, more appliances, 4 aircons (you get the picture) and his last bill for the same period was $220. After a bit of comparing it's blatently obvious my usage is stupidly high with 2400 kWh compared to his 1550.

There is only two of us here, at work all day and we don't use heaters (gas heating), dryers, plasma TV and the water is on gas too. For all intents and purposes we have an average or below average usage of electricity so I'm baffled as to how it can be so high.

So now I need ways to try and figure out what the hell is using up all the power. I've gone through a flipped circuit breakers and watching the little meter disc spin around. Using a very scientific calculation of counting the rotation of the black dot on the disc I've found one circuit that makes it spin at 8 seconds and when the circuit is off it goes at about 15 seconds. From what I can tell the circuit only controls the lights in the back half of the house including the outside sensor lights.

I don't know too much about usage of lights but I would have thought they would be a pretty low usage item .. so any further things I can do to try to find what the problem is?

Move to QLD and get a wireless electricity monitor? It's free if you live in Brisbane.

Depends on the bulbs you're using, large halogen lights can have 150watt bulbs.

Look for extension cord running towards your neighbours.

Also poorly sealed/failing compressor on your fridge?

Bulbs look like big suckers for outside but they are on a sensor so I'd imagine they aren't on alot.

Actually the neighbour thing could be a reality since I live in a semi-detached but when we moved in the power was out for 4 days (connection problems) and who knows how long prior to that so whatever might have been hooked up wouldn't have worked .. unless they've reconnected it. Time to go suss out the 60yr old ladies attic.

Fridges all seem fine, newish Westinghouse models and can't hear any problems with them.

The largest electricity bill I ever received was $1034 for a 2 bedroom apartment at Indooroopilly. Fully ducted a/c that my housemate would leave on constantly (during the day while his girlfriend was 'living' there). Up to 5 pc's running, fridge, microwave dryer and washing machine that were all used constantly.

I've moved into a new place and the last electricity bill was just over $500. I suspect that it's the two computers I have that are constantly on. Laptops go into hibernation mode so that's not an issue, but the others I should look at.

I'd love to get a bill < $300.

Ours is like $1200 wifey and 2 kids

We routinely get $900+ power bills here but hey, it's a LAN house with 4x aircon, multiple beer fridges (all relatively new <5 years), 5 PC's which most go into sleep mode or are powered off when not in use oh, and my fish tank which has the equivalent of a 600w PSU from a PC running 24x7.

Oh, 4 permanent residents with a couple of lounge lizards now and then.

You've made me feel better about our last bill that clocked in at ~$380. I thought that was a lot.

That was mainly because the 3 of us were being lazy and using the clothes dryer ALL the time. We've since cut that back to next to nothing. We don't really leave or PCs on that much either if we're not using them.

Bulbs look like big suckers for outside but they are on a sensor so I'd imagine they aren't on alot.

We had a buggered/wrongly adjusted sensor and the lights were on constantly, might want to check to see if yours isn't the same.

Our last bill was $372, there's only two of us here. Usual suite of appliances 6kg washer (no dryer), medium size fridge, 3 x pcs on all the time, 50" plasma, air cond (rare on), both of us work during the day, electric stove (don't use often at all), espresso machine (switched off at the power point during the day) and all the lights are energy efficient bulbs. I reckon the biggest thing power sucker for us would have to be the hot water system which is electric system.

Mind you it's been ~350 for quite a while now so it didn't seem to fluctuate that much really. But $500/quarter for two people? that seems a little high really...

Move to QLD and get a wireless electricity monitor? It's free if you live in Brisbane.

Where would one get this gizmo?

last edited by Twisted at 11:01:47 24/Apr/09

electric hot water system.???
if so make sure its set to a reasonable heat level.
if its too high it just sits all day boiling.

we usually hit 350 a quarter with electric hotwater, my pc at least on all the time and a couple of big lcds in high use

we got aircon as well, but i police its use:

1 fridge, 1 smaller freezer:

for some reason we got a 500 bill one quarter, but all our other bills are approx 350!

get ready for bigger bills

We got our last bill down by $50-60 basically by unplugging my powermac (30W even when "off"), and turning off my PS3 at the back (35W while asleep).
We're now down to about $220 a quarter for 2 of us, with no gas, occasional use of aircon and dryer, and an 80cm crt tv that's basically on all the time while we're home.
A couple of friends have got the wireless monitor thingo, but we bought a $30 meter from jaycar that you plug devices into individually and checked a few things out. (that's how I know the powermac and ps3 are power hogs even when off)

Yeah, some of the bils mentioned here makes me feel pretty good about ours now! The owner of the rental here had the green electricity check thing done to the house recently and we have a wireless monitor. The electrician also said the lights in the house are some of the biggest power users heh.

After looking at the electricity monitor when turning lights on and off, the lights add up to a fair bit fairly quickly. Also leaving PC's on isn't *that* bad but they do add up. But judging by the monitor you'd definitely save power and money turning them off when you aren't home for long periods.

Anything with a heating element uses crazy amounts of power (kettles, ovens/stoves when they're heating up and dryers). TV's really aren't that bad either, although I've heard somewhere older LCD/Plasma tv's still use power when turned on at the wall but off with the remote (newer ones don't, but how new who knows).

Also visually inspect the fridge seals just to be extra sure.

Edit: Going by what Cerb said the older TV thing could be right, same with other appliances/systems. Might be worth investing in a power monitor like he did!

last edited by Saint at 07:35:52 22/Apr/09

yeah, my 80cm CRT uses about 60-70W, but my 26" (68cm) LCD uses about 80-90W. Only a small difference, and we basically use the CRT cos it's slightly bigger, not for any power savings. But compare that to a 42" LG Plasma I tested which uses 300-400W and there'd be a fairly massive difference in your power bill.

The interesting bit was that my LCD (a Panasonic Viera) wouldn't register on the meter while it was in standby. Granted the meter can only display whole watts, but it's obviously using less than 1W on standby, which is what all devices should be. The CRT (a Grundig) pops the power button out after it's been on standby for an hour, so it uses no power at all when we're not using it, even if we've turned off at the remote. That's a cool feature.

Another note on our electricity bill - we don't have any incandescent bulbs in our place, and only one down light (50W halogen) in the kitchen. Want to replace that halogen at some point - hoping they make drop-in LCD replacement bulbs for them eventually.

Oh, and we have ceiling fans too, which we used basically 24/7 over summer. A pedestal fan is about 30W but I can't measure the ceiling fans with my meter, but they must be fairly low usage given our bill was still lower over that period.

Move to QLD and get a wireless electricity monitor? It's free if you live in Brisbane. Where would one get this gizmo?

http://www.climatesmarthome.com/

I'm not sure if it's the same back at home as it is here in England, but we recently got a refund for £220 from our power supplier for overcharging. Problem was a faulty meter clock, so we were being charged at the expensive day rate all the time rather than it clicking over to the night time rate at certain times. Not sure if Aussie meters have a clock on them or not, but if so maybe check this?

Ours is normally $400-500 for 4 of us

~1k for 10 of us. Something's wrong ticman, get a sparky to check it out.

Sounds like there could be several options ... most of which have been pointed out already:

- Faulty fridge seal
- Constant running of computers
- Power jacking from a neighbor
- Air con
- TV's, etc

Do a trial run where you turn off everything at the wall after use for the quarter and see if that reduces your bill in any way. If not then you may (as greazy said) have a faulty meter and henceforth the electrical company will owe you money. You never know until you give it a go mate.

wow you guys have high power bills
me and wifey with no solar or gas, everything is elec, $~220/qtr, on a bad qtr. Usually i like to keep it under $200. Oh and i can salary sacrifice my elec cos i'm a public servant ('in-house service').

Last year we got hit with a $700 bill for the month, which was mostly made up of heating

Thankfully we have gas hot water so it could have been more, currently in our new place the power usage has dropped with the last bill coming in at $201 for the month

Thats a month (not a typo)


last edited by HerbalLizard at 08:52:21 22/Apr/09

I think ours is around $300/q (+/-$40) and gas around $150.

Two adults and three leaches.

Two fridges
One computer (gets turned off overnight)
Box air-con in main bedroom that is used when needed
Two TV's Plasma and LCD that get med/high use (but not during school/work days)
Gas hotwater & Stove but electric oven
Compact fluro bulbs in all lights
Occasional use of electric hedge trimmers, blower, pressure cleaner and water pump.
Our dishwasher and washing machine gets frequent use

last edited by mission at 08:54:53 22/Apr/09

About 6-700 a quarter over summer, save a hundred or two from that in winter.

2 adults and two young sprogs, various computers, NAS, switches, consoles etc. turned on or at least standby most of the time, lazy attention to lights and aircon almost 24/7 in this god awful heat.

Wife wants to get all motivated to bring it down a bit, I'm happy ot pay 700 a month to not have to think about it. I'm probably wrong tho, saving power seems vaguelly responsible.

In my house there are 4 of us, we had ducted aircon which gets used a bit, and our electricity bills were steadily climbing last year. When our bill topped $400 3 of us (me, gf + her sister) decided to make a big effort to reduce what we use.
Our 4th housemate on the other hand was a bitch.. she'd get home from work at 3am, put the aircon on and go to sleep.. sometimes leaving it on for 10-11 hours unless I was still up wow nerding it up and would wait a bit and turn it off. I approached her about it and she whined that she wanted to be able to pay more to use more.. I said fair enough, it's not like I could stop her really.

Anyway last quarter the other 3 of us were overseas for 2 out of 3 of the months, so we assumed that our electricity bill was going to drop quite a bit. Low and behold when we returned our bill was our highest ever! over $450 (my parents had called in from time to time @ my place while I was away and told me whenever they went around the aircon was going, even if she wasn't home).

Naturally I was pissed. But the other bitch had moved out (thank f***) but trying to get her to pay a significant share more than the rest of us, was difficult. She claimed she didn't use any more than normal and that she wasn't going to pay any more than us. In the end I got her to pay a measly $165 share of it. FML

/rant

Move to QLD and get a wireless electricity monitor? It's free if you live in Brisbane.

Its not free, pretty sure its $50.

my last power bill was the highest i've ever got... $410 for a quarter... usually it's around $250/quarter. 4 fishtanks (total of 1300w of heaters), 2 computers on 24/7, a 30+year old air-con unit (it's gotta be inefficient!) that i only turn on when the temp is over 25c... & usually only at night coz it only does my bedroom. my hot water system is from the dawn of time too though of course it's controlled with a ripple controller.

i'll definitely be lookin at replacing my a/c unit for a more efficient modern one when the price of electricity starts climbing. gonna get some quotes on a full insulation job on my aquarium-room too to try & minimise the heating required in it.

kr0w - what a nasty cow. I'm all for remaining comfortable but running aircons when nobody is home is just wasting resources.

I did another test this morning and ran around like a nazi and turned everything off and the spinning disc virtually stopped so I'll progressively hunt around and see what circuit is making the disc spin the most and then track down whats on that circuit. So far my eye is on the lights in the back part of the house and it might be a faulty sensor, bloody light could be on all day for all I know. From now on it's off permanently though and anything that goes to standby mode gets turned off overnight. Might as well start being environmentally conscious by saving money!

For the sparkies in the hizhouse, does the rotation of the disc relate to anything. Perhaps 1 rotation is 1 watt being used or some such thing?

Me and a mate $290 for last quarter. Only thing on all day is my pc, 22" crt monitor, big fujixerox printer.

the the rotation of the disk is somethink like 10Wh or something like that. I can't remember, but i did once know.

One day my old man and i suspected Dimplexes (oil column heaters) as being terrible - and there's an electrical point right near the meter at his house. So we plugged it in and turned it on whilst watching the disk - went from a crawl to spinning faster than i've ever seen it before. Like from 2 rotations a mintue to about 2 rotations a second.

I flipped the switch on the circuit for our (gas) heating last night and the disc slowed down a lot but I figured I'm running heating right so it's consuming a bit of electricity and didn't think that much of it. I wonder if the unit's broken somehow and using more electricity then it should.

I think I'll need to get one of those electricity monitors and annoy the crap out of wifey on the weekend by turning everything on and off one at a time.

The biggest problem is that people leave s*** on when they won't use it for several hours and its just a waste of money. I know that whenever I walk out of my room I automagically raise my hand and flick the light off. When I go out or won't be using my computer for a while I'll turn it off and prefferably at the wall too. We don't watch much TV at home (its just my dad and I) and I make sure I've turned off the hifi system ,DVD player, TV etc fully (not standby mode) when I'm finished.

Its just common sense to reduce your power bill. Unless I'm downloading something over night (not often since we dont have a huge cap) I'll turn my Mac off completely at the wall (since the power surge thingo and mice etc use a bit of power) before going to bed. There's no need to run appliances when you aren't using them.

The amount of energy represented by one revolution of the disc is denoted by the symbol Kh which is given in units of watt-hours per revolution. The value 7.2 is commonly seen. Using the value of Kh, one can determine their power consumption at any given time by timing the disc with a stopwatch. If the time in seconds taken by the disc to complete one revolution is t, then the power in watts is P = (3600 * Kh) / t. For example, if Kh = 7.2, as above, and one revolution took place in 14.4 seconds, the power is 1800 watts. This method can be used to determine the power consumption of household devices by switching them on one by one.

Go go wikipedia!

I think your bills are excessiely high. My bills are $350-375 a quarter, and this covers:

Big 4 bedroom house with 2 people (working full-time)
Electric water heating and elec oven
1hp pool pump running 6hrs per day
2 x PC's on 24/7
6.4kW AC system (though rarely used, maybe 6 times a year)
1 big (new) fridge/freezer
50" Plasma, on for <2 hrs per day
Lots of downlights, but I use only what's needed and switch off
No dryer (these things chew mega heaps of power)

Mine is $140.

Being the uber tight-arse that I am I started cutting back a few yrs ago.

Tight-Arse Energy Tips.

1. I replaced nearly every light in the house with CFL's.

2. I have an electric hotwater system thats 20+ yrs old but I turned it way down so that in Winter the hot water only lasts enough for a 5-10min shower. Any longer than that and you are just wasting water anyway.

3. I replaced my old Fridge about 2 yrs ago with a new more efficent one which uses about half the power that my old one did and its bigger too.

4. I have an Electric Stove but I went out and bought all new Pots and Pans (Circulon) with the solid metal bases. These f***ers heat up really quick compared to the thin el-cheapo cookware.

5. I have a Split System air-con but I never have it any lower than 25 degrees and I have only used it maybe a dozen times during summer otherwise I just use fans.

6. I hardly ever use the Clothes Dryer but with all the rain of late I expect my power bill to be higher because I've used it about a dozen times in the last month.

7. I dont have a Plasma/LCD TV. I have a 68CM CRT TV. I'll buy a Plasma/LCD when this one dies but I could be waiting another 10 yrs or so.

9. When using the electric kettle I only put in enough water for what I need. The water boils in much less time.

10. I turn off everything I'm not using at the wall or on a power board.

11. I use software from the www.localcooling.com website. It's a simple way to run the power usage from your PC.

My bill is low $300's a quarter. That was for me and gf and 2 cats (they dont use much though, since they dont have opposable thumbs to plug things in) with electric cooking, electric hot water, halogen lights, plasma, home theatre, aircon, 2 pc's on 24x7 plus router etc.

Have just moved to a house that has gas cooking, oven and hot water, so should see power drop off a lot but gas + service charge will offset this drop

mines typically 300/qtr for 2 of us, but its a very tech-nerd house

parents is 700/qtr because of pool/aircon etc etc

Ticcles, we bought one of these a while back which has been sitting on my shelf still in the packaging from the place we bought it from (not jaycar) - basically a power meter so you can plug it in and see how much power stuff uses. I dunno how accurate they are, whirlpool seems to have people saying they are/aren't accurate, so not sure. I'll have a play at lunch and check it out.

Ok thread can you guys post who your electricity provider is? I've read a few of your house hold setup and those with similar situation to me seem to be paying less??

I'll start, mine is Origin, I live in Clayfield. Do they have a different tariff for different suburbs etc?

wow you guys have high power bills
me and wifey with no solar or gas, everything is elec, $~220/qtr, on a bad qtr. Usually i like to keep it under $200. Oh and i can salary sacrifice my elec cos i'm a public servant ('in-house service').

Same us us. 2 peeps, no kids. Biggest we have ever had is $270/qtr for leaving Linux ISOs uploading/downloading a lot that month.

Ive had 2 massive power bills and they have both been because of faulty fridges. Make sure the seals are good on your fridge and if its an old fridge dont let the ice build up in the freezer.

I only use my Air con after 8pm in summer and its off by around 8am the next day just for the bedroom. Air-con during the day is an easy thing to get addicted to.

opec: i'm in zillmere, agl is who sends me my bill.. i wouldn't call them a provider though.. more of a money skimming middleman ;p there was an overall price hike recently from 14c/kwh to 16c/kwh so everyone should have experienced a small price rise on thier power bills.

also watch the little things.. the missus being dutch is a bit frugal sometimes.. and i have learned some things about saving precious electricity...

for examply.. she always washes the cloths after 10pm cause thats off peak..

and when boiling the kettle she only puts in the water for 1-2 cups.. where as i usually fill it up..

also now i put the pc into sleep mode during the day and night

also being in holland when we buy a house i'm going to be rigging up 1-2 of these bad boys which will cover 30-60% of my electricity bill

and when boiling the kettle she only puts in the water for 1-2 cups.. where as i usually fill it up..

also now i put the pc into sleep mode during the day and night

I started doing the kettle thing cuz it takes way way less time to boil, but the energy reasons are good too :)

we're agl, signed with them for their tasty 5% discount for signing with them

trog: that's the same power meter I have.

on the topic of dryers: mine uses about 2kW when running. Given that a load of washing takes about an hour to dry, that's about 2kWh each use. I used to use my dryer basically all the time, which on was about 2 loads a week, so 4kWh per week or about 0.6kWh per day. if you have a PC that uses say 200W average and it's on all day, that's 4.8kWh per day. Even leaving my powermac off but plugged in and using 30W it works out at 0.72kWh per day, which is still more than the dryer.

So it's not all about peak power usage - one 100W light bulb left on 24/7 is like running the dryer for over an hour a day.

Every little bit adds up. My laptop's power supply uses about 9W when it's not even plugged into the laptop. The dell LCDs we use at work from memory used about 10W when "off". Unless there's a physical switch then there's probably still power consumption.

With all this standby power and the always-on nature of PCs/DVRs/Modems/etc, it'd be easy to have anywhere up to 500W around the house at all times, which adds up to 1000kWh per quarter. And that's without even really using those devices all that much.

we're with Origin on 20% green power (for no extra cost + free shower head and a few CFLs, win). 900kWh peak and 350kWh off peak

With all this standby power and the always-on nature of PCs/DVRs/Modems/etc, it'd be easy to have anywhere up to 500W around the house at all times, which adds up to 1000kWh per quarter. And that's without even really using those devices all that much.

I'm going to start experimenting with turning all the A/V off at the power point for this quarter and see if that make much difference. I've started today by switching off the garage light (fluro) which basically stayed on 24/7 all the time. I'm going to also pull the power out off my PC's LCDs, I really don't want to turn off my PCs though :/

Should be an interesting exercise.

trog: that's the same power meter I have.

Any idea if its accurate? I've only tested my mobile phone charger atm (draws 7 watts which I would have assumed to be in the right ballpark).

Well just for your information according to a news.com.au article prices are on the rise for electricity by 14% to fund infrastructure maintenance of the power system. Privatisation = Toll Roads, inevitable price hikes. I want my solar / hydrogen setup... Don't know if anyone else knows this but studies have found that a hybrid of plastic, molybdenum and titanium could be used to extract nearly 100% of the sun's energy on a solar platform. They say the tech is 10 years away :/ by that time it'll be a bit to late I think.

last edited by Corrupt at 16:52:53 22/Apr/09

Any idea if its accurate? I've only tested my mobile phone charger atm (draws 7 watts which I would have assumed to be in the right ballpark).

Most things seemed to be about what I'd seen quoted online, eg PS3 at 200-230W in game.

I should find my post-its with the figures on the stuff I tested and post them here.

I should add that when I said $400-500 for 4 of us that that's for the quarter.

Its not free, pretty sure its $50.

$50, which is fully rebated by the Brisbane City Council if you're a Brisbane resident.

10. I turn off everything I'm not using at the wall or on a power board.

This is a great tip. National Geographic has this article about electricity and saving energy. This picture was included:
http://img253.imageshack.us/img253/2893/powerboardnationalgeo.png
Caption: The red glow of warm adapter plugs shows they keep using power even when the appliances they're connected to are turned off - as much in a year in some cases, as the appliances.

There's a few more awesome pictures in the gallery. The article is great too.

There's also a comment on computers. "If we turned off home computers when they are not in use, we would cut their CO2 impact by 8.3 million tons a year, or 50 percent.Turn off your computers when you're not using them people.

last edited by greazy at 21:42:19 22/Apr/09

parents started turning a tv off at the wall after use every time, within a few weeks of starting to do so - the tv died

coincidence?

You mean without first powering it off properly? Yeah totally dude, coincidence.