How do you get a $600 power bill?

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Scott3

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#2896271 3-Apr-2022 16:58

lchiu7:

How about his? This is a combined electricity/gas bill from Contact. Most of the gas charges were from a US sourced (in the house when I bought it) gas fired fireplace style heater which sends more heat up the flue than into the room.

After that I stopped using it, moved a column heater into the room and then had a heat pump installed! The differences in running costs were major.

Had a similar experience at on of my uni flats.

Had a gas fired open fireplace that we thought was pretty awesome until we got the bill the first month we used it. Eventually found there was a switch to force air around the back of it, to avoid nearly all of the heat going up the chimney. But we had already concluded that heating the large lounge / dining area of a drafty old villa wasn't viable for students.

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neb

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#2896355 3-Apr-2022 19:10

timmmay:
Do you use any heating or cooling? What part of the country are you in?

Orkland, so not much heating or cooling, usually cooling is handled by keeping the windows open, only on very hot days have we needed to run the heat pump, and heating is the living room only via heat pump, with an electric blanket for the bed followed by a 1-catpower leg warmer later.

neb

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#2896361 3-Apr-2022 19:25

Scott3:
Should note that especially with older and nicer home fixtures, stuff can be very energy intensive. House I grew up in had 2x 300W halogen downlights, just to light the stair well - all the indoor lighting has since been changed to LED. I think that house now has multiple three 300W heated towel rails too, and an unknown amount of underfloor heating under the bathroom tiles. It is all managed with timer's etc, so isn't too much of an issue. But one could see how one could easily consume a massive amount of power.

That was one thing that really annoyed me with the Casa redo, I noticed the sparkies had fitted a wall point for a heated towel rail in the new bathroom. Took them upstairs and showed them the patches where I'd removed the heated towel rails in the bathrooms, along with the I-don't-know-how-many-hundred-watt heat lamps in the ceiling. So ~1kW to light the kitchen and living room, and another half kW or so in each bathroom.

Just dug up the last power bill, it was $75.39, Contact Low User.

neb

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#2896368 3-Apr-2022 19:35

afe66: Hot water cylinder started leaking but as it's under the house we didn't know it was spraying hot water everywhere including underside of kitchen floor... Until we saw the bill and wondered why kitchen floor was warm and there was a curve in it...

Had to replace floor of kitchen and bottom of cabinetry which had split as floor lifted....

That's where these things are incredibly useful, got one by the HWC, one under the sink, and one in the laundry. You can even get ones with automatic water shutoff valves, but they're designed for the US so may require adaptation for NZ use.

timmmay

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#2896443 3-Apr-2022 21:45

YoSmart / Yolink stuff is great, I have the water leak detectors, siren, and a couple of temp sensors. They don't integrate with anything like Home Assistant but the app is good.

Your low user plan is disappearing, or has maybe gone already, hence this thread I guess.

neb

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#2896447 3-Apr-2022 21:50

timmmay:
YoSmart / Yolink stuff is great, I have the water leak detectors, siren, and a couple of temp sensors. They don't integrate with anything like Home Assistant but the app is good.

They're currently adding API support for their devices, it's still a bit of a work in progress but they're making good progress so eventually you should be able to tie it into all sorts of other IoT stuff.

For their sensors, I've got the water leak sensors, letterbox sensor, window sensor (for two windows which are typically left open), temp/humidity sensor to check basement rooms for moisture, and motion detectors for the possum traps, they really cover pretty much everything I'd want to attach sensors to.

Scott3

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#2896468 3-Apr-2022 23:12

neb:
Scott3:

Should note that especially with older and nicer home fixtures, stuff can be very energy intensive. House I grew up in had 2x 300W halogen downlights, just to light the stair well - all the indoor lighting has since been changed to LED. I think that house now has multiple three 300W heated towel rails too, and an unknown amount of underfloor heating under the bathroom tiles. It is all managed with timer's etc, so isn't too much of an issue. But one could see how one could easily consume a massive amount of power.

That was one thing that really annoyed me with the Casa redo, I noticed the sparkies had fitted a wall point for a heated towel rail in the new bathroom. Took them upstairs and showed them the patches where I'd removed the heated towel rails in the bathrooms, along with the I-don't-know-how-many-hundred-watt heat lamps in the ceiling. So ~1kW to light the kitchen and living room, and another half kW or so in each bathroom. Just dug up the last power bill, it was $75.39, Contact Low User.

Might be biased, but I love heated towel rails. Just I think a 60 - 90W unit is plenty, and that 300W is excessive.

I think it is pretty fair for a sparky to wire for heated towel rails by default if the walls are open, they are pritty much standard in NZ. If you don't want them a blank face plate can be installed with the wires behind so the next owner can have one installed without ripping the walls open.

Bathroom heat lamps are generally 275W, and typically installed in sets of two or four. In theory they are a great an efficient way to provide bathroom heat (especially given heat is often only really wanted for a few minutes while toweling off). Sadly they are often sold in 3 in 1 units, where the performance of the ventilation fan is disappointing compared to dedicated fan units. And the fixtures often involve a large penetration between the room and the roof-space, which is far from ideal from a building thermal efficiency point of view.

Assume you have ditched all the incandescent lighting. Kinda alarming how much power capacity was historically allocated to just lighting. Our fairly small house had 3x 10 A lighting circuits (two of them are now hanging off the same breaker to free up a space in our power board). Hate to think what a large, luxury house, running all incandescent lights would need.

neb

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#2896900 4-Apr-2022 17:51

Scott3:
Bathroom heat lamps are generally 275W, and typically installed in sets of two or four. In theory they are a great an efficient way to provide bathroom heat (especially given heat is often only really wanted for a few minutes while toweling off). Sadly they are often sold in 3 in 1 units, where the performance of the ventilation fan is disappointing compared to dedicated fan units. And the fixtures often involve a large penetration between the room and the roof-space, which is far from ideal from a building thermal efficiency point of view.

That's exactly what we've got at the Casa. The gutlessness of the fan is actually irrelevant because the cowboys that fitted it only clipped on about 2-3m of duct and then left it lying up in the attic space, so all it does is move a small amount of the humidity from the bathroom into the attic space.

First thing I did was replace the heat lamps with LED R80s and disconnect the useless fan...

MadEngineer

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#2896969 4-Apr-2022 21:30

… and they’re too frequently made with cheap metal and get drenched in condensation so quickly rust out.

You're not on Atlantis anymore, Duncan Idaho.

tripper1000

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#2897184 5-Apr-2022 13:14

It is pretty easy to get a $600 power bill. I've seen it happen in flats a number if times. Complaint is that the power bill rises from $200 to $600 in a single month and it is typrically from excessive usage of heating appliances (not turning heater off when going to work etc). Just a simple failure to moderate power usage, as often happens when young people think someone else is paying 2/3, 3/4 or 4/4 of the power bill.

eg two x 2kw oil column heaters running 24/7 at 30 cents per kw is over $800 before you throw in hot water, cooking, lighting and entertainment.

Maths:

2x 2kw = 4 kw/hr

4kw/hr * 24hrs = 96 kw/day

96 kw/day * 30 days = 2,880 kw

2,880 kw x $0.30 = $864

or at 20 cents a unit (if you got a good deal):

2,880 kw x $0.20 = $576

(People think fan heaters chew the power, but they use the same number of watts as a large oil column heater, and in practise consume less total because people are happier to turn them off when they go out/once the room is warm. A column heater is easy to forget and is so slow that people are reluctant to turn them off).

mattwnz

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#2897202 5-Apr-2022 14:21

timmmay:

YoSmart / Yolink stuff is great, I have the water leak detectors, siren, and a couple of temp sensors. They don't integrate with anything like Home Assistant but the app is good.

Your low user plan is disappearing, or has maybe gone already, hence this thread I guess.

IMO removal of the low user plan is a huge big mistake. About 60% of houses are on it according to an expert in the area I heard discussing this. Apparently the powerswitch website has just been updated so people can compare the latest pricing. Power companies appear to have increased their profits recently, and I can't see peoples power bills dropping, including those higher power users. Some power companies appear to be phasing it in over 5 years, but apparently some power companies haven't started to phase it in yet . Apparently the removal is because higher power users are subsidizing low power users. But they are doing this anyway, because many low power users get benefits and winter power grants which goes towards paying for power, which high power users who may earn more, and don't qualify for these schemes. Although the winter power payment also goes to multimillionaire retirees who don't need it.
Low users pay a lower daily rate, but pay more per unit. So effectively you get better value per KW by being a higher power user. When we should be encouraging lower power use, to prevent the need to fire up the fossil fuel plants.

mattwnz

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#2897203 5-Apr-2022 14:23

tripper1000:

(People think fan heaters chew the power, but they use the same number of watts as a large oil column heater, and in practise consume less total because people are happier to turn them off when they go out/once the room is warm. A column heater is easy to forget and is so slow that people are reluctant to turn them off).

Potentially column ones are safer though, as long as they are well away from anything flammable. You are still getting the same amount of heat from them. I had a fan heaters fan fail while in use and it started smoking, luckily I was in the room.

tripper1000

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#2897215 5-Apr-2022 15:01

mattwnz: Potentially column ones are safer though, as long as they are well away from anything flammable. You are still getting the same amount of heat from them. I had a fan heaters fan fail while in use and it started smoking, luckily I was in the room.

Yeap, and with kids that could well be a safer option. Fan failure have also caused tumble driers and hair driers to burn houses down. Where do you draw the line? If you were super safety conscious, you could use that as a reason to leave the lights on all the time as well and that will also contribute to the OP's $600 power bill question.

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