This is our electricity usage for the last couple years. Each vertical bar represents one two-month period, which is the frequency at which our power meter is actually read. It took a while to accumulate enough data points to say anything meaningful about our power usage; the thing that it says is “ouch”. I know it’s been a cold winter, but we’ve jumped up 20% in our power use over the same period in the last two years. We’re above the period where we had three people living here, not two. I’m not quite sure what to make of this, but I know that my shower times have crept up; I’m going to be more diligent from now on.
(I would, in fact, be curious about running temperature numbers alongside this graph – if anyone can put their hands on temperature data that I can use, that would be great, the only way I’ve found is by contacting NIWA and asking an actual human to quote me a price for the data I want, which seems a ridiculously old-fashioned way of doing things.)
5 thoughts on “A Poor Trend”
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Some mean data available for free at Niwa (link in comment URL). Despite the rapid changes in weather patterns year to year, the mean monthly data should plot effectively for your data and 2009 hasn’t been THAT cold.
Personally I think that the spike in electricity use is due to married life and a sure sign you are happy at home.
They’ve got more complex information (and for a much longer historical period) available for free on the CliFlo db as well. (In URL.)
Stephanie’s link is o for awesome. Weird that this service didn’t pop up when trying the various searches for nz weather/climate info i plugged into google.
The thing that always interests me is what appliances use more power. I mean, I’ve heard leaving the lights on is not as bad as, for example, leaving the oven on. You know, because then you could work out if you needed to save some funds what the most expensive appliances were, and try and cut down the time you use them.
I have no idea though. I guess it’s based on wattage? Given power is measures in kilowatt hours, I guess I could work out the wattage of my various appliances. I’m interested in seeing how much my TV costs me to run…
“Weird that this service didn’t pop up when trying the various searches for nz weather/climate info i plugged into google.”
Family connection. My partner’s mother works for NIWA and she’d been complaining a while ago about someone who couldn’t figure out how to use their database and kept badgering her for help. So I knew the DB existed to look for, although I didn’t need to actually badger her for a URL.