24 Jan 07 Death By Power Bill

When the bill came yesterday my initial reaction was disbelief. I was going to call the company that supplies our power (using sustainable energy of course) and use some of my own energy - which only seems to sustain itself until about 9pm - to find out what on earth was wrong with their billing system. Instead, I decided to put together a quick spreadsheet showing the approximate amount of energy our three main energy culprits use, how much we think we use them, and how much this could all mean when it appears on our energy bill. It went something like this: - clothes dryer - 2 KW - 2-3 times a day - 2 hours a time - washing machine - 2kw - twice a day - 2 hours a time - dishwasher - 1 kw - once a day - 1 hour a time - everything else - 0.5kw a day This came to roughly 34 + 28 + 7 + 3.5 = 72.5kw/hr a week, which sounds quite cheap compared to what the bill was telling me, which was around 172kw/hr a week. That was before I discovered the teenager had been using a 2kw electric radiator to heat his room as that part of the central heating had broken down some weeks earlier and no one had got round to telling me. Hmm, this could add anything from 84 to a possible 24x7x2 = 336 very scary kilowatts per hour. But only if I were being truly paranoid about it. Once I had worked it all out, I figured I'd forget about making matters even worse with the additional cost of the phonecall and instead start talking about heating engineers and time switches. For several years before this winter we didn't even have an electric dryer, let alone run up Googly bills on it. Only problem was, we were forever loading and unloading clothes onto lines. On the other hand it did wonders for our global footprint and I think the clothes lasted a lot longer. As soon as the weather picks up we're going back to the clothes rack. Maybe we won't need our gym membership after all the running around with pegs between our teeth. Of course there's also the cost of the socks eaten by Dog, but that's another story.