Econogics Frugality Tips - How to Survive (perhaps even thrive) in the Recession

2011.06.02

One of the sad realities of the current recession that never quite seems to end is the financial toll it is taking on many families and individuals, even forcing some into personal bankruptcy. For some, it seems the only way out. When considering bankruptcy, consulting with experienced financial professionals can provide peace of mind. If it comes to that, get some expert advice before committing, and don't face this process alone.

2011.10.09

After years of anticipation, our home has finally been moved to interval pricing for our electricity. This is also known as Time-of-Use (TOU) pricing. In short, our electricity generator utilities are generally designed to produce a constant amount of electricity, around the clock, using large, expensive generating stations. These may be powered by coal, nuclear, hydro, natural gas or other fuels. The thing they generally have in common is that the fuel is cheap compared to the plant structure and infrastructure, and they are designed to operate continously, regardless of weather or time of day.

However, the demand for electricity is anything but constant. As residential consumers, most households have a small peak in the morning as we make coffee and toast, and flip on the radio or computer to get the traffic report. Then, we largely abandon our houses to go to school, or work, or run errands or volunteer, and the electricity demand in the house drops. There may be a small increase around lunch time for those of us who stay at home (to work or for other reasons), and then demand drops again for much of the afternoon. One exception for the afternoon drop is on hot summer days when air conditioners may be working harder to overcome the daytime heating effects. The next demand peak comes as people return home, and start cooking dinner. TVs, stereos, computers are turned on, as are stoves and microwave ovens. Air conditioners may be cranked up. Other appliances and power loads may be turned on. The result is a significant surge in demand for electricity, which comes from a supply that is not really designed to handle fluctuations economically. That means it costs the utility more to supply a kilowatt-hour of electricity at peak demand times than at low demand times. Time of Use pricing is about passing along some of that price signal to consumers.

2011.10.10

Locally, there has been much wailing and complaining about the change from constant pricing to time-of-use pricing. That's because most people don't understand the opportunity here to save money. As you are reading my frugality page, you are clearly not most people.

You see, time of use pricing really means that your electricity supplier is putting electricity on sale at reduced prices every day. In my area, they have established the time from 7 p.m. (just after the dinnertime demand surge) to 7 a.m. (just before the breakfast time demand surge) as half-price time (well, almost - 5.9 vs 10.7 cents per kilowatt-hour is tecnically just a 45% saving). (Pricing shown is the wholesale price for the electricity - your effective rate will be higher due to other charges and taxes tacked onto that based rate.) Also, every weekend day and statutory holiday is sale-priced electricity time. There is also a mid-peak time each day, where electricity is priced at 8.9 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Seriously, who else is offering you a 45%-off sale every day?! On something you really need and use. Every DAY a new savings opportunity! In many cases, no cost to you to play. And in Ontario, consumers are complaining about this deal.

In my situation, of the 168 hours in a week, electricity is at the cheapest price at least 108 hours, or over 64% of the time. For an addtional 30 hours a week, it is at the mid-peak price - about 18% of the time. Finally, it is at the highest price less than 18% of the time. If you can shift your electrical use away from the 30 hours a week (or less) when it is priced the highest to other times, you can save money. If you can't or won't shift away from those times, well, that's why they are the peak demand times, and are priced the highest. If you want to win in the stock market as an investor, the key is to buy low and sell high. As a consumer, you want to buy low. Why would you want to pay extra for something that obtains no benefit. It's not like a kilowatt-hour of electricity you buy at 5 p.m. is better or cleaner than the one you buy 2 hours later at 7 p.m. In fact, the opposite is likely true. Not only is the 7 p.m. kilowatt-hour cheaper, it's probably produced from a cleaner, cheaper fuel source.

2011.10.11

Load shifting is the practice of changing when you use electricity so you can save money. How can you load shift effectively in your home? One example I like to point out is cleaning dishes. Suppose your family finishes dinner around 6:00 p.m. You can load up the dishwasher, sink or dishtub as usual. However, if you start the dishwasher before 7:00 p.m. when winter rates are in effect in Ontario, the price of the electricity is $0.107 per kWh. If you wait until after 7:00 p.m., the price drops to $0.059 - 45% less. Many dishwashers made in the past decade even have a start-delay function built into them. So, you can load the dishwasher per usual, select the start-delay function and forget about it, going about your other business. The timer will look after turning on the dishwasher later, when electricity prices are lower. No extra cost to you, and you get to save money every day.

If you do dishes by hand, and your water is heated electrically, you can also save by doing the dishes later. Let them soak in the sink or dishtub in cold water when dinner is over, but put off washing with the electrically-heated hot water until the cheap electricity rates come into effect.

Another big electricity user in many homes is laundry, especially if you use an electric clothes dryer. So, put off laundry until weekends, or after 7 p.m. in the evenings. If a full load in your clothes dryer uses 4 kWh of electricity, would you rather pay $0.45 or $0.24 for that electricity? (We shifted our laundry to weekends years ago as an environmental initiative (to reduce coal-fired electrical generation on weekdays), so now we're just going to reap the price benefits all winter. We hang a lot of our laundry to dry in the summer. Also, we vent the electric dryer exhaust indoors in the winter to benefit from the heat and humidity, saving on our heating bill.)

What other electrical loads do you have in your house that you can easily shift from high-price times to low-price times? Do you have a PVR or other time-shifting capability for your favourite television programs so you can watch them during off-peak pricing periods instead of peak-pricing periods? Big plasma TVs can consume a fair bit of electricity.

2011.10.12

One of my peak-hours electricity consumers is my coffee maker. I work at home, and I generally brew a pot of coffee in the morning at breakfast time, and take the last cup from it around mid-morning. Many afternoons, if I am working from home, I will make another pot of coffee or tea. I already have the coffee maker on an isolation switch, because it consumes 7 watts continuously just to power its "I'm alive" light and clock display - for which I have no use.

When I turn the coffee maker on, so the heating element for the water and the warming plate come on, the power consumption jumps instantaneously to over 900 watts, and then settles down to 860 watts during the brewing process. Finally, once the brewing is complete, the warming plate remains active for up to 2 hours keeping the brewed coffee warm in the glass pot - and glass is a poor heat conductor.

The heating element cycles on and off during the keep-warm period. I'm using a power consumption meter to establish how much power it actually takes to make 3 mugs worth of coffee (0.09 kWh) and keep it warm (0.13 kWh) for a total power use of 0.22 kWh for the full cycle. (The power use information comes from a power monitor device I have. No self-respecting energy geek should be without one (or three or five).

For certain occasions, I have a 'coffee butler' - a thermos designed to hold brewed coffee. Starting today, once the coffee is brewed, I will be pouring the contents of the brew pot into the butler thermos, and turning off the coffee maker. This has the added advantage of bringing the hot drink to where I am, instead of me having to go back to the kitchen for refills, less of an interruption to my day. I expect to save about 0.26 kWh per weekday this way during on-peak hours - about $10 a year this way. (If you aren't interested in saving $10 in after tax money for zero or minimal effort, you probably aren't a real frugalist).

2011.10.13

Continuing with my efforts to move my electrical consumption to off-peak times from on-peak times, there are my 2 chest freezers. The chest freezers have a great frugal story of their own. I got both of them for free, in return for helping friends or relatives move, and the freezers were surplus to their new abodes. So, they ended up in our basement, where they allow us to stock up on food items when on sale, and store them relatively inexpensively until we are ready to use them. Each freezer uses a bit more than a half a kWh per day per past measurements. This is considerably less than their rated power consumption. There are a few reasons for that. First, they are in a cool basement, so the temperature difference between the inside and outside of the freezers is less than would be the case if they were on the main floor or in the kitchen. Second, they both sit on slabs of extruded polystyrene insulation board, which reduces their energy consumption by about another 25% relative to sitting directly on the floor. Third, when the amount of food we are storing can fit in one freezer, we unplug the other so it is using no power at all. When the big sale comes along that justifies stocking up, we just plug in the second freezer again and load it up. That's good stuff for saving energy and money in general terms, but right now I'm focusing on load shifting. How can I get my freezers to use less electricity at peak-price periods, and more at low-price periods?

How about an appliance timer? I know my freezers will keep goods well below freezing for more than 24 hours without power, because my power company has conducted that particular experiment for me in the past.

Let's look at the math. I don't expect to reduce the power consumption via the timers, just shift it from peak demand to off-peak periods. The difference is about 4 cents a kWh. Assuming a freezer uses about 600 Wh per day, and 70% of that would normally be consumed in the warmer part of the day, which coincides with peak and mid-peak demand times, what are the savings? 420 Wh per day, at 4 cents a kWh is about 2 cents per day. Over the course of a year, that's $7.00. I spent just under $20 for the appliance timers (highly programmable with easily accessed bypass controls and battery backup, a bit overkill for this application), so the payback will be in the order of 3 years, or roughly 35% annual return on investment. That's considerably better than my retirement savings are doing these days.

2011.10.14

MyHydroLink. One of the good things to come from the installation of Smart Meters is the ability to get better and more timely information than we get on our monthly or bi-monthly bills. It's a lot easier to connect energy consumption presented by the hour as it occurred yesterday, than when you just get a big aggregated number that is your total use for 2 months, which ended 2 or 3 weeks earlier.

The image above shows my household power consumption for one day, by hour. The colour coding shows the rate periods for the power consumption. Here are some things I can see from the diagram. Our total power consumption for the day was under 10 kWh - not bad. The house seems to have a base power consumption rate of about 250 watts. That is likely used by things like clocks, freezers, the refrigerator and phantom loads like the cable TV set top box and VCR (which lose their minds when the power to them is interruped, a couple of small battery chargers, and the task lighting in my work area. The peak from 7 to 8 a.m. corresponds to making breakfast, while the peak at 3 to 5 p.m. corresponds to making dinner. The final peak from 10 to 11 p.m. is about starting the clothes dryer. It looks like I could save a few cents by making breakfast just before 7 a.m. instead of just after. Hmmm, is it worth getting up a few minutes earlier, or changing my wake-up schedule (breakfast then shower instead of shower then breakfast) to save a few cents most days? I'll have to think about that, but the point is that this hourly power consumption information means I have the information to base the decision on, where before I had no idea where my power usage occurred through the day. That sort of information can save you money. If your electricity provider can supply this kind of information to you, sign up to get it, and look it over. You have nothing to lose, and it might save you some money.

2012.03.06