We got our power bill yesterday which was significantly more than it's ever been, $500 for the quarter :(, it's usually around $300 in spring and autumn and $350 in summer and winter (air-con and heater used in those quarters).

I can't figure out why it's so high.

Yes, the price of electricity went up and that works out to be about $50 of the $150 extra, but $100 on top of that is a significant increase in usage.

So, if electricty is $0.15 per kwh is the following calculations right? (I'm assuming the wattage rating of an appliance is how many watts it uses per hour, also assuming there are 1,000 watts per kilowatt hour?)

$0.15/1000 = $0.00015 for every watt used per hour.

So a 10 watt light bulb would cost:
10*0.00015 = $0.0015 per hour to have on?

Or a 400 watt TV would cost:
400*$0.00015 = $0.06 per hour (doesn't sound enough?)

Or a 2.5kw air-con would cost (assuming it's on full juice 100% of the time): 2,500*$0.00015 = $0.375 per hour.

Obviously some appliances will vary their usage, such as air-conditioners etc.

I might sign up for the power audit thing that's been on tele lately cause this jump has stumped.

Threads I made about the same topic a while back. If your TV was on for 6 hours a day for 30 days then it would cost around $11 to have it on (400W * 6HRS * 30DAY = 72000WH = 72KWH). The aircon on for 4 hours a day for 30 days would cost $45. However that's based on your average cost of KWH and you might find you're on a dual zone system with peak hours costing more than off-peak.

It's a real bitch to figuring out where the costs came from. Check that the meter reading is actual and not an estimate, then check the meter reading as well. On the bill it should say when the reading was taken and avg daily usage so you can roughly work out if it's correct.

Leaky fridge (bad seals), running down lights, aircon, heater, dryer, stoves, etc are all big users of electricity.

I saw an inline power reader the other day when I was looking for the ones you just plug into the power point - it was at bunnings and needed to be fitted by an electrician - I think you might be able to put it just on the inside of your meter box and thus measure everything at one point

We got our power bill yesterday which was significantly more than it's ever been

.....

Power cost is rising, it's privatized, it's going to continue to rise.

Once this hippy carbon trading scheme comes in it'll jump up a s***load too.

Blame the government.

I'll check that thread.

The weird thing is is that nothing has really changed.

We don't have a dryer, rarely used the heater, all lights are the energy efficient compact fluro's, laptop computer,two TV's (one LCD one Plasma), two fridges but we've had all that for years.......

Our summer bill was $350 (adjusted to $400ish with the increase in power cost) and that included the air-con in the bedroom running often overnight - far more use that what we used the small oil heater during winter :/

EDIT: If you read my post Chub I acknowledged that power has gone up in price but the rise fell well short of explaining the overall increase in our bill.

last edited by mission at 10:14:43 20/Aug/09

Didn't the government mention a few months ago about an Electricity rate increase? Or one of the Electricity companies mentioning it? At least that's what i thought...

i just got my quarterly bill today as well n it's about $40 more than the same quarter last year :/ i did use a bit more power though.. so with the rise in energy it seems about right for my bill.

power meters with In Home Displays (IHDs) will becoem a lot more common place shortly... even the company that I work for is developing our own. if you google for power meter ihds there is a heap of them out there... but personally i rekn it's too exxy atm due to being at an early stage.

i have my own power meter that i made out of prototype parts from work :P it's a single phase 240v power meter with logging n some cool features. i just have it wired so you just plug it into a 240v socket n have a power board coming out of it so i can plug a few devices in at once to measure total power use of them all. due to being a developer i can communicate with it via it's optical port n run dev.tools on my pc to collect the logs n info. still... it hasn't really helped me use less power... i just know what's using what :P

i've seen those IHDs demon i reckon they look awesome. you can get ones that show you your real time power usage with a few secs delay or something. i'd so wanna play with it, running around the house turning s*** on and off to see how much power stuff uses :D

trying to convice my folks to put one in the house they're building up the coast.

Yeah our power has gone up by a bulls*** amount - they just make it up, says so on the bill.

i have my own power meter that i made out of prototype parts from work :P it's a single phase 240v power meter with logging n some cool features. i just have it wired so you just plug it into a 240v socket n have a power board coming out of it so i can plug a few devices in at once to measure total power use of them all. due to being a developer i can communicate with it via it's optical port n run dev.tools on my pc to collect the logs n info. still... it hasn't really helped me use less power... i just know what's using what :P

cool Demon.

how much to build one for someone else? :D

heh, the cost is negligable... i built my meter out of proto bits that would normally have been thrown out after thier testing life was over. the problem would be that i can't give out the developer firmware/software required to communicate with the device because it would be a breach of several contracts :P & without the comms & dev.tools it's use is pretty limited. it does have a small LCD that displays stuff like voltage/current/tou/varh n shiz but you have no access to logging.
also, i'd prolly get in trouble if someone electricuted themselves with a dodgy prototype :P

Yeah I think the 'Bill Shock' (pardon the pun) is really start to kick in.

It's coming up alot in coversation and the media in the last few weeks I've noticed.

People are starting to complain now ... Imagine what it will be like when we get hit with the full price hike that's coming up.
We'll all be back to candles.

get the free climate smart guys to come out... the little wireless device gives you a running total, no bill shock.

link http://www.climatesmart.qld.gov.au/

pluse you get a whole heap of engergy saver lamps.

last edited by mooby at 12:33:21 20/Aug/09

if you think electricity is getting dear now, wait till the ETS comes in and ruins our country.

Yeah do the CLimate smart and you'll be able to see where all the usage is going.
If you like your SHowers though, make sure to keep your old Shower heads, as they sometimes change them to really s*** low flow ones (save on water heating apparently)

Also, check your actual usage box against the usage they have placed on the bill, they dont always check every quarter.

imo, we should go nuclear.

nuclear energy has a few things going for it.

1. we have heaps of uranium.
2. doesn't produce co2.
3. waste product can be contained and stored.

compared to coal.

1. we have heaps of coal.
2. produces heaps of co2
3. waste product can not currently be contained and stored.

I just booked the Climate Smart dudes, they'll be out early October.

I'll check Origin's numbers against the meter when I get home.

Our whole shower systenm is old as and completing rusted up so they can't change the head :)

I'm not complaining about anything such as the price, I'm just stumped as to how our usage has increased so much whan nothing has changed. And to increase usuage by $100, or about 30%, is pretty significant.

Check your cost/kw too. Down here the price of gas goes up in winter and electricity seems to go down a bit and then flips around come summer time.

the water saving showerhead i got from the climate smart guys is ace actually. i prefer it to my old megagallons/min one.

It was mentioned above, but did you check your meter yet mission? Sometimes they don't come and read - they 'predict' and then read and correct next time.

I'm renovating bathroom in a bit, been looking around - and it actually shocked me that you can still buy these in abundance:

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/images/uploads/3-16-tayor.jpg

those shower heads rock.

the westin in melbourne has them in their suites. awesome. it is like taking a shower in warm summer rain.

Nah, haven't checked the meter yet but I would have thought the bill would be clearly labeled 'Estimate Only' if it was only an estimate.

Everything is probably right I just dunno how we managed to use so much more and I'm pretty anal about leaving s*** on.

Do a search for a Kill-A-Watt or Cent-A-Meter - that could be a start to help find out.

theres gonna be some huge power bills this summer.
blackouts ?

We were going to put in a 7.5kw split in the lounge room, nearly booked the guy yesterday, now I'm not so sure.....

Bloody vultures sweatin' a man for every buck.

nuclear might be better than coal, but it's still ripping the surface apart for a depletable resource, and storing the waste doesn't seem awesome

Meh, we have plenty of open space in Australia we could build huge waste bunkers in.
The new fission reaction plants produces materal with a greatly reduced radioactive life. So instead of thousands of years it's reduced to the hundreds. It's better, cleaner and more efficient.

still dumb tho
just maybe not as dumb

jim, iron is a depletable resource, should we stop making cars?

if we don't use uranium for power, what are we saving it for? more nuclear weapons?

Reactors for space travel, duh.

I just booked the Climate Smart dudes, they'll be out early October.

thats a bit crap, mine was 3days from appoint to install. i told em not to touch the shower head.

i'd be all for nuclear power if they built them (& thier waste storage facility)out in the desert... but you know they won't. some nimrod accountant will go 'it'll be x% cheaper if we build it right here in suburbia' n then they'll look at piping the water to the plant & go 'be cheaper if we just build it on a water table n have direct access to the water'. n soon enough you'll have a potential chernobyl waiting to wipe out suburbia & contaminate the water supply.

that's how it pans out in my head anyways. :P

yeah i wouldn't really go comparing russia from the 80's to what we could manage today...

that's a flawed analogy ara, using iron is substantially different than using uranium for fission with a resulting radioactive waste that can basically only be buried somewhere. it's often recycled and reused. additionally, at this point we don't know how to make cars from sunbeams or wind or water, but at least some work has already been done in those areas for power generation

just take my post in context, I think you're reading too much into it

nuclear fuel is recycled and reused fyi

Then someone would have to go up the Bruce Highway and remove those "NUCLEAR FREE ZONE" signs. Far too much work IMHO.

thats a bit crap, mine was 3days from appoint to install. i told em not to touch the shower head.

I booked it for a Saturday morning so that's probably why it's so long.

yeah i wouldn't really go comparing russia from the 80's to what we could manage today...

sure. i'm not saying that modern reactors are all as likely to have a mishap as chernobyl... but more they all have the potential for massive disaster. so i'm not saying 'don't build them'.. i'm saying don't build them in suburbia or on water tables!

I got a power meter from jaycar. You plug it into the wall & plug your devices into it and it tells you how many watts are being drawn from that outlet. Obviously you'd have to do it for all outlets to find out where your biggest power drains are because it only works for devices you can plug into a wall socket. Good if you want to find out whether its your computer that you leave on 24/7 or the TV or the kids night light chewing up all your gigawatts.

I think what you're trying to say is we should make cars out of nuclear waste - yeh?

imagine it jim, instead of worrying about how deep a flooded track is you'd just drive straight through it & have the irradiated body of your car instantly boil away the water & make all the trees die and fall over so there's more obstacles to navigate around/over thus enhancing your 4wd experience :)

me rikey

If we create electricity by passing a conductor through a magnetic field and the spinning Earth is surrounded by such a field, why not just stick a big copper rod in the ground and as the Earth spins it will pass the rod through it's own magnetic field thus creating free energy and powering the world for the rest of forever.

Patent Pending.

Don't be stupid, we should just get a giant vacuum cleaner & suck fusion straight from the sun or fission or whatever the hell kind of reaction goes on way the hell out there in space.

Finally we could have a vacuum cleaner actual clean a vacuum!

yeah i wouldn't really go comparing russia from the 80's to what we could manage today...

that's right, ours would be built by the lowest bidder based in a tax haven.

If they said something about making electricity provisioning "cleaner, cheaper and more personalised" the government would not even bother with a tender process, just hand them triple what they were asking, tell them not to worry about deadlines for delivery, and be done with it.

sign me up for nuclear.

though clean coal and renewables definitely deserve solid support too imo. anyone else seen this?

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/energy-smart/research-powers-push-for-clean-coal-20090819-eq9z.html

seems early stages but could be pretty awesome.

Nuclear is the future.

The government drags its feet like it does with everything.

Nukes are very expensive to set up, run, dismantle etc etc. If we were to start building one here tomorrow it would take at least 7 yrs before we could get any net power out of it.

Basically I think we're f***ed.

If we had significant nuclear power we could start a nuclear waste storage facility

We have 70% (?) of the worlds known uranium deposits, there's no need for us to sell it so cheap, especially with the 'moral' argument that we should take it back.

Include storage of spent fuel in the cost of all exported uranium. You can buy our uranium and we'll take back the waste, $100 a gram a year for the life of the material, paid upfront.

So you'd be happy living in a country that would basically become nothing more than a uranium mine/dumping ground? I'd rather go back to candle light & dying from a f***ing cold than having my dinner glow in the dark.

Basically I think we're f***ed.

No, we aren't. (Sup, long time no post.)

What we need is just a tiny bit of rationalism. Global warming has a lot of dodgy science and guess work. Despite what people would have you believe the science isn't rock solid by any means. There are some very flaky assumptions in the science that haven't really been given a proper and public airing simply because of how emotive the whole thing is.

It's this emotion (from both sides) behind it that is severely limiting the true story from being revealed.

There are big problems with the mainstream theory (which is what all this policy is based on) that aren't really discussed:

- CO2 alone can't really heat the earth enough to have a noticible effect.

Even if CO2 were to double (from where it is now) it'd only be able to account for something like 1C. All the carbons produced since the mid 1800s would have only had an effect of somewhere in the order of 0.2C. This sort of thing has been tested, effectively theres more than enough CO2 in the atmosphere to effectively absorb completely in its absorbance spectrum. Essentially, in the atmosphere at current PP and within its absorbance spectrum, it could be "none more black". This is called saturation, and isn't really in dispute. The IPCC even says as much. The warming theory however, comes down to what they call positive feedbacks. This is the major area that is in dispute. There really isn't a whole lot known about how these work. The climate models that are giving numbers of 2-6C in the next 100 years are all built on assumptions about how these systems work. In reality though, we know less about climate than we do about quantum physics, and no model is anywhere near accurate. A planet isn't just a ball of water and gas. Apparently a lot of models assume that higher temperatures cause more water evaporation, which then causes even more heating, but ignore any negative feedback that clouds (caused by water vapour) might cause. This is because the models aren't complete enough to be able to model cloud formation, and there isn't much observational data to base it on, so they just ignore it.

- CO2 changes can't explain previous climatic events that are within a similar magnitude.

The warming ~1000-1100 (about the same as today) and the cooling of the 1600-1700 (apparently 1C lower than today) are both on a similar scale yet CO2 can't be shown to have played a part (it was a flat line). The understanding of these isn't all that great, so without knowing the causes of these periods its hard to put all the blame on CO2 for the current warming. Also, pretty much all of the observations from this period are taken from second sources, not direct measurements (obviously). So its difficult to compare current direct measurements today with things like ice cores. Direct comparisons require all things to be equal, and with climate it never is.

- Temperatures have effectively been flat for the last 10 years

Apparently CO2 production has never been higher, yet the temperatures aren't rising like they are expected to. In fact for the last 2-3 years its been cooling. Without saying it disproves global warming, or that it has stopped or reversed, it shows that at the very least there are other things at work altering global climate on ~5-10 year scales.

Theres a whole heap more, and anyone whos at all interested should read up on it (especially the rebuttals from both sides). It will open your eyes. The most important thing is that people, not just scientists, do question the science or the lack of. There are some very emotive types on both sides. James Hansen is one, he is in charge of the NASA climate institute, yet he got himself arrested trying to stop a coal mining operation. Not exactly someone who is likely to be objective. Not to mention Nathan Rees. On the other hand more than a few on the flip side who have been or still are in the pocket of big miners.

Personally, I'm a bit of a flip-flopper. Only recently have I really looked into it in any kind of depth, but the more I read the more I have my doubts about this whole thing. And it annoys me that people, especially scientists, try to shut down debate on it. The whole point of science is to TEST things, if they don't fit, they aren't right. The whole notion of "concensus" is laughable. (Read this for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_drift#Controversial_years ).

Richard Lindzen for example worked with the IPCC and is massively respected, but doesn't really see the drama at all. He's also massively boring, but he knows his s***.

To go off on a slight tangent I think that the elephant in the room is also sustainabilty or lack thereof of natural resources. It seems the media is fixated on the Climate Change debate whilst football fields of old and new growth forests are being burnt/dozed per hour. Not to mention that the worlds fisheries are nearing collapse.

^ Yeah. I spoke to a guy over here who does algae photobiorefinery research for Exxon, and his take was basically that 'I don't believe in all this global warming stuff, I just think we're running out of oil!'.

I took on board the suggestion of checking the meter reading on the bill against the actual meter and ............... there is a new meter in there, a trick looking electronic gizmo.

So, in a nut shell, they took the reading of the last meter, then added some cream, and then destroyed the evidence by pulling out the meter and replacing it.

I suspect Faceman may know what is going on here.

Demand and explanation and hold off on payment.

uve probably been getting cheap power for years and they were just fixing it up

How many of you lot are familiar with new generation fission plants? I'm not a huge fan of nuclear power, but we're further from another Chernobyl than most people realise. Pebble Bed Reactors are one of the new (I think they're technically fifth generation) nuclear reactors, they can't do the whole run-away chain reaction thing. It's not a matter of them having fancy failsafes or eliminating human error (always the route cause), it's just the fact that the reactor requires constant coaxing and prodding to keep it reacting at all, unlike earlier deigns where you have to be ready to intervene to slow the reaction down with control rods or what have you.

Enough with nuclear power, I want solar convection towers and hot rocks power. Hot rocks even works, can't ask for more than that.

Demand and explanation and hold off on payment.

beware, if you do this and they send people out to check meters/equipment/etc they may charge you. check the fine print.

Hot rocks even works, can't ask for more than that.

So does coal.

Ah touche :) But people don't like the pollution, and the coal supply has a limited life, particularly if we start hoeing (is that the right sp?) into it as LNG and oil run out.

Hot rocks has great potential for long term use, where available of course. It's also worth throwing into the discussion that improvements in transmission efficiency would be worth almost as much as some breakthrough fancy new power generating technology. Huge amounts of power are lost en route from the source to the user. We wouldn't need room temperature super conductors or anything, just something better than straight copper and steel.

clean coal is getting closer. linky upwards somewhere.

Carbon sequestration only delays the release of CO2, it doesn't eliminate it's production. Still, it's an improvement. I just happen to prefer existing technologies to unproven ones.

Clean coal lol. Requires energy to process it (a decent amount, it at least requires a process plant circuit which always requires power). Sweet jesus i hope the put that into the calculations which determine whether its actually worth doing (im sure i could wiki it but cbf just got home from work).

Carbon sequestration only delays the release of CO2, it doesn't eliminate it's production. Still, it's an improvement. I just happen to prefer existing technologies to unproven ones.

What do you think coal is?

Huge amounts of power are lost en route from the source to the user.

Nah not really. Bulk transmission is very efficient. Only when you get down to the distribution system (you know, residential lines) that it gets a bit lossy. Even so total transmission losses are miniscule compared to the thermal efficiency of a power station which is only around 38% for the world's best coal/nuclear.

That said, they use superconductors to truck power into some places eg. NY, but it's due to not having the room for copper, not for loss reduction reasons.

What do you think coal is?

Not solid carbon dioxide. What do you think it is?

Most of the proposed ways to store the carbon isn't in CO2 form. You see, the carbons in coal were at some point atmospheric CO2 (it was apparently orders of magnitude higher in concentration than it is now).

Yeah thats why its pretty retarded how in Sth America and Indonesia niggaz are just dozing and burning the best Carbon Sequestration System we have ... Forests.

Except there is evidence that the earth is greener now than anytime in satelite history. Are forests better at capturing carbon than food crops?

Grass is supposed to be better per hectare then trees at absorbing carbon. Not sure which is better at carbon locking though, I guess it would depend on whether carbon locked in the tree is considered as effective as carbon locked in the ground.