In case you’re wondering, the AC unit in our bedroom costs $0.16/hour. The living room costs $0.50/hour.
My wife is trying to make me stop. She says it’s annoying.
I think most people wouldn’t bother to do that, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. If your wife finds it annoying it might be because she feels like her use of AC is now being monitored and judged. You should probably make it clear that that’s not the case. If it is the case, then yeah, you should stop.
We got a free Nest thermostat through the local electric company. That’s exactly the sentiment. I like automated, she prefers manual. Though changing temps from the bed is nice.
Those often come with fine print and
custom firmware(it’s a rewards program google offers/partners with power companies for) that allows the electric company to forcibly set the temp higher than you’d like, usually during peak demand like a heat wave. I’m not big on others deciding what temp I should be.Thank you for noting that. We had received previous “offers” that did include some form of “we’ll give you hardware, you let us limit it”, the offer we took was not one of those. Just simply a free thermostat.
It’s like counting calories: it’s perfectly fine to track your own.
It’s tolerably annoying to share with uninterest parties how many calories you are eating.
It’s wildly rude to state outloud the amount of calories someone else is eating.
And it’s downright dangerous to say to someone who sleeps under the same roof “are you sure you need those calories?”
Counting calories/macros is good thing to do to zero your brain in on what foods contribute what - it’s honestly quite surprising and informative to do. But, doing it constantly is kinda obsessive and annoying. Same applies here too.
It’s sensible to calculate this sort of cost, regardless of being normal or not. However be careful when and how you share this info with your family - because depending on the context, you’ll be basically saying “I put $0.16 over your hourly well-being”. (In special, pissing kids with this is a bad idea. They might even leave the AC turned on needlessly, just to spite you.)
Thanks, this is the answer I was looking for. I’m trying to save money because we don’t have a lot. My wife is on board with saving, but she hasn’t done the math to see where most of our money is going.
I might need to back off a bit. I like to save, but this might be a bit much.
In your situation I’d probably compile a list of general expenses of the household per month (or week), then for the higher expenses project a few costs contributing with those expenses. It should be more convincing when you show “we’re likely spending around $15 per week just on A/C” than “we’re spending $0.50 per hour”.
And context is key - don’t bring this up just because she turned the A/C on, instead bring this up when talking about the overall finances of the household. And it might be useful to ask her for a few other corners that could/should be cut, as she’ll likely notice different ones than you do, based on her subjective values.
Excellent point. Thanks.
I also like to obsesively monitor power use of various things in my house just because I like knowing stats. I used to work with inverter setups so I put power monitors on all of my circuits right at the panel just for the hell of it.
Asuming you have central air and not just a window AC or something then turning your AC on and off frequently is not the best way to save money. When you first turn the AC on it needs to work really hard and run continously to lower the temperature in your home and remove a whole bunch of humidity from the air. That process is very energy intensive. If you just leave the AC on then it only needs to actually run ocasionally to maintain a cool temp. Unless you are planning on shutting off your AC for days at a time then the actual cost savings are fairly minimal.
I used to have roomates who would constantly turn off the AC and open the windows whenever the AC “didn’t need to be on”. The AC would remain off for several hours until things started getting swelteringly hot in the middle of the day then they eventually closed everything back up and turned on the AC. Now that they (thankfully) moved out I just leave my AC running all the time. The power usage from the AC has actually dropped since I started doing that. I’m even way more agressive with the temp setting on the AC now than I was then. My house is rarely above 70F indoors and I’m still using slightly less electricity than when it was being shut off regularly.
I like this take as you take into account the human element, but might even take it a step further in that this kind of knowledge could actually be good for more people to know this cost. Especially if cost is an issue, could help families work together in easy ways for a common goal. Maybe it’s not worth it to say anything during a heat wave to save a few bucks, but on a cooler week maybe open some windows to save some cash sans suffering.
Extreme example: as a dad I feel a cultural obligation to get upset when random lights are left on when no ones in the room (not really, but does beg the question of why) - when you actually do the math on led lights it ends up something insignificant, like a cent. Not an issue that really deserves any attention.
If I got this right, that isn’t even an extreme example, it sounds for me like you’re trying to drill your children into attentiveness - like, “pay attention to what you do, what you don’t, and the impact of your actions”.
And even in the case of working towards common goals, to cut corners, I think that the parents can and should tell the children what’s going on. Children can be surprisingly reasonable once you’re reasonable with them, and that avoids the whole “oh no, mum/dad will scold me if I leave the lights on”.
For a more extreme example: afternoon in a rather sunless city, child with poor sight is studying with the lamps turned on, shithead turns off the lights and wastes 15min of the child’s studying time by screeching on how the kid is wasting its money. This is the sort of thing that should be avoided at all costs IMO, as it’s outright immoral - we humans should be have money for more comfortable lives, not cause the others’ discomfort to hoard money.
Those costs arent fixed. You need to account for the outside temp and humidity. And your insulation efficiency.
Is it okay to do so? Absolutely. Is it common? I’m willing to bet no.
Depending on how you define normal, you have your answer
I don’t think normal exists
It’s probably not healthy but I do this too with heating (UK). I have electric panel heaters that cost £1 an hour to run and all I can think about when they’re on is how much it’s going to cost - over the day, the week, the month - and then I turn them off and get a hot water bottle 😬
I’d say there’s nothing wrong with it…
…but also what? If I run my A/C 8-12 hours a day for a month the bill is like $20 more, are you in California?
I’m in California and running my AC raises my bill by $200+ a month for a 2 bedroom house.
My energy company app just tells me how much I used per day. So I check it every now and then, but not really that often.
I wish my energy company had that sort of an app! I usually have to calculate everything manually using the rates included on the back of each bill I get.
Not a bad thing. It’s nice to know where your money is going to know if there’s places you could easily save.
Installed an Iotawatt a couple years ago to track power usage of the whole house and individual circuits.
The AC in my living room has used 3.35kwh so far today, and the main plugs circuit that has my server and a portable AC unit on it has used 5.56kwh.
This is awesome! Did you install the censors in the breaker box?
Yup: there’s a current transformer on each circuit leaving the breaker panel (up to 14 different circuits), one on each of the main feed lines, and then a small plug-in voltage transformer to measure voltage, phase angle, and frequency.
It takes all that data, polling each sensor a few dozen times a second, calculates power usage, stores, and presents it all with the above graphs in a simple little web interface. It can also export that data to more powerful graphing/data analysis solutions, but I’ve been pretty happy with what’s onboard.
You can see the live data too:
(2 phases of a 3 phase apartment supply. Outputs are math output of multiple inputs. Ex: Main_A+Main_C=Total_Power)
The setup inside the breaker panel is something you should hire an electrician for if you aren’t extremely confident and knowledgeable about what you’re looking at. There is a lot of potential to injure yourself or burn your house down, even with all the breakers off.
Not typical but not a bad idea if you’re broke and trying to save enough on the energy bill to afford instant ramen next week.
As for annoying I’m guessing the annoying part is talking about it or asking people to change habits. You could also put in work to improve rates passively. Like improving the insulation of the home or filling gaps around windows. Note: Don’t do noisy diy projects in the same room as your wife or leave a mess.
Let me introduce you to https://sense.com/ and help you create a new obsession.
P.s. it’s not perfect as it uses machine learning to determine your appliances and it can’t find electronics like your computer or TV but it’ll help you find what might be chipping away at your power bill.
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Thanks for that. I’ve been kinda-sorta keeping an eye out for a good solution for this. My house has three main panels (it’s set up for subletting) so solutions like Sense won’t work well, plus I don’t want it to be dependent on a cloud service. I’ll check out this product.
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Cool product!
Can you post some screenshots of what it looks like with your usage?
(Sanitized of coursed)
I would love to see it in action.
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I went solar a couple of years ago and my power generation and usage are all always tracked and graphed by an online app. Also telling me how much is spend or save. So I crawl up my own ass over electricity usage pretty much every day.
I do think this is much better than the dark ages when I really had almost no idea how much power I used every day.
Went through the same thing. It’s a little game now to try to use less energy than the solar panels are generating. Used to keep my gaming PC on all the time, and watch everything on a giant tv, but now I’m mostly using a tiny laptop. Really helps when you see how much electricity you’re using and how of that you do t really need.
Especially in Europe with exorbitant electricity prices, it’s perfectly normal. The prices just went from like 4 cents per kWh to 40 or even 70 last winter. That made everyone count kWhours really attentively. Now the prices have gone down - in some cases a lot, but the reflex to check prices is still there. A lot of us now have stock-bound contracts, so whatever the current rate for electricity is what we are paying.
That means we all have apps (mine is on my Apple Watch) and whenever the stock price is low we start our saunas, washing machines, ac:s etc. Currently the price is 4 cents per kWh and since the price is determined 24 hours in advance, I can see that the whole day will have similarly cheap electricity.
If you lived in Australia calculating this would drive you nuts.
