Something to talk about - electricity usage

[LCHIEN]

Here's yesterdays Smartmeter data showing electrical usage at my house in 15 minute slices. I.e. the kWh used in 15 minute intervals.
You can clearly see at night when it was about 79F outside minimal usage and during the heat of Houston daytime around 100F the AC was cycling about every half hour.

Interestingly my baseline looks to be about 100 Wh per 15 minutes which is an average of 400 watts which is Computers/monitors printers on standby, fridge, security lighting, wifi router and TV set top boxes, various remote controlled stuff, wifi smart switches and motion detectors, and handfuls of USB chargers

[Jim Frye]

Very interesting. There has been talk here about installing smart meters on residential homes, but the transmission utility caved and installed digital, remote read meters last year instead. Since they were involved in a $60 million fraud scheme lead by a former Secretary of State trying to save an unprofitable nuclear power plant near here, they ended up short on money to put the more expensive meters in. Fortunately, we still get to pick our energy supplier, so I can at least get cheaper electricity. I just don't know how it's used.

[cwsmith]

There's been some talk of adding smart meter or digital meters here in Binghamton, but our local News station are horrible anymore and other than a mention there's no depth or follow-up to the news

I'm in favor of some kind of whole-house monitoring as I'd like to see, like Loring's post, what our peak time power usage is. I can guess of course, or figure roughly but it would be nice to have an actual method to doing that.

That said, I think we're pretty light on electrical usage when compared to many others. Our monthly bill states (with color code) that we are on the lighter side of power usage, but I don't particularly put a lot of trust in that. We run the central A/C from about 11:00 AM to 8:00 on really hot days, keeping the temperature at about 72 and in the winter the thermostat is at 68. All of our lighting has been LED for the last several years. We keep a light on in the kitchen, and one in the TV room, and one in the library as needed. Basically if one of us is in a room, we have a small light on, and if not, it's off.

TV's, and cable boxes and the refrigerator/freezer are probably our biggest consumers.

CWS

[Jim Frye]

Shortly after building our home, I changed all of the light bulbs in the house to LEDs as the original bulbs burned oul. Haven't changed a light bulb since. We have a porch light on from dusk to dawn and it hasn't died yet, the original incandescent flood lasted three months.

[cwsmith]

We've been in this house for about 17years now and I've rewired most of it. I had a new panel put in right after we bought it and over time I've replaced most of the light fixtures and installed LED bulb all but the kitchen florescents. The only problem I've had was the four LED bulbs I placed above the bathroom sink. Those were 'globe-like' designer bulbs and within a year they started strobing (flashing on and off rapidly). First one, then a week later the second, and the other two bulbs followed similarly. Sort of freaky in a way. I replaced each one as it started and over the month all had shown the defect.

Other than that, the LED's have all lasted since they were first installed.

CWS

[Jim Frye]

When I purchased an electric riding mower, I also bought a Poniie PN2000 meter to measure the electricity the mower consumed to measure the cost of operation of this device I knew relatively little about. Being able to measure the cost of an electrical device is pretty eye opening. The mower costs me $0.22/hr. to run. The big surprise was the cost to recharge a Ryobi 40 volt 7.5 ahr. battery pack at $0.025. Therefore, I can run my snowblower for an hour and 15 minutes for the cost of $0.05 (unit can use two batteries).

[dbhost]

How do you get that data from your smart meter?

[LCHIEN]

How do you get that data from your smart meter?

in Texas, you need to get your smartmeter ESIID from your electric company bill. and the meter number

Go to this website and create an account

https://www.smartmetertexas.com/home

then click Smart Meters > add smart meter

to fill out this form

Once you have it on your account you can just view the dashboard each time you log on there's lots of options including the fineness of the report (15 min min) and how many days you want including history and the option to download data for excel spreadsheet if you really want to go to town.