Electricity Challenge - Update 6

With all the excitement of Blog Action Day on Monday, I didn't get around to posting this weeks results for our electricity challenge. Okay, it wasn't so much that I didn't get "around" to it as I was putting it off. I didn't want this post coming *too* close to my blog action day post.

Why? Ummm...... well, we didn't do so well this week. :-(

I was expecting our usage to be a bit higher this week. After all, with school holidays we were ALL home ALL day for the WHOLE week. That has to make a difference right? Plus we had oil column heaters running in both bedrooms for a couple of nights when 1 child had croup and 1 had asthma.

BUT, things were even WORSE than I expected. *sob* *sob*

Our average daily usage for the week ended up being 22.9kWh!!!! I was kind of hoping for 20 or lower. Our goal is 15 but we only seem to achieve that if we're not home!!!!

On a brighter note, we only used 3.8kWh's of hot water this week - for the WHOLE week!!! Which works out to 0.54kWh's per day. Obviously we're getting a bit more solar power from the sun as the days get longer. And perhaps the shorter shower times are slowly getting there. Oh, that's right, we didn't bath our kids for the whole week. LOL. Just kidding! :-)

So, I've been doing a bit of research into how much electricity certain appliances use. I found an excellent resource online by clicking on one of my google adsense links. Um ah.... you're not supposed to do that (click on your own links). It's okay, they don't pay you if you click on them but you're still not supposed to click on them which is a pain in the you know where because there have been several I wanted to click on. Apparently you can get some kind of preview mode for checking out the links yourself but it was all a bit technical for me. *sigh*

Anyway, back onto what I learnt in my research.

Our oil filled column heaters are costing us around 23c per hour to run. So for a 12 hour night it's costing us $2.76 per night (per room) to keep warm!!!! Interestingly enough, our small fan heater costs the same amount to run. I wouldn't leave that going in the kids rooms but I had always thought the oil heaters were cheaper to run than fan heaters. It would appear not.

Obviously these figures are only a rough guide and the heater clicks on and off through the night so it's unlikely it is costing us quite that much per night. Still food for thought. Something we really need to do before next winter is purchase Econo-Heat wall panels for the kids bedrooms. In contrast they cost around 8c per hour or around 96c for a 12 hour night to run. I think they would be safer as well as they don't get quite as hot to touch.

I also found out that a single electric blanket costs around 1c per hour to run. How's that for economical? Now I have the perfect excuse to spend the day in bed during winter - I'm being "economical". LOL.