Our family (two adults and two young children), live in an older three bedroom house in the Wellington region. We’ve been trying to make our home as energy efficient as possible and while our power bills haven’t been particularly “cheap” since we moved here a few years ago, they’ve never been really high.
However, over five months last year we were really worried because our power costs kept going up. During cold snaps we expected a monthly bill of around $300, up to a maximum of $400 (taking into account a brand new baby at home), but not the bills we received – over $600 or more! In August we were expecting another big bill even though three of us had been away on holiday for 10 days.
So in mid-August we called the power company, who put us in touch with Sarah at the not-for-profit Home Energy Advice Centre. She advised us to monitor our electricity on the meter while turning off various appliances over a few days to try and find out what might be causing the problem.
We spent the first evening with one of us watching the wheel on the meter box while the other turned appliances on and off to see what sped it up or slowed it down. We also checked what appliances would be going when we weren’t at home and thought the problem could be our ventilation system.
So over the next few nights we took meter readings and experimented with the whole system. With the heating unit on, power really went up, so we turned it off for a week. Over that time we used only 196 kilowatts of power, an average of 28 units a day, so we seemed to have found the answer.
Sarah at the Energy Advice Centre was really helpful. She was supportive of our efforts and gave us some very handy advice (which we greatly appreciated because we were shocked by the huge bill we received). She also said we should keep in touch over the test period if we had any questions and to tell her what we’d found out.
It was great seeing the big difference in the next power bill and since then our bill has been what we consider “normal”.
We also had our ventilation system checked out by the installer. Oddly there seems to be “nothing wrong with it”, but our power use jumps if we have it on! So we’ve stopped using the heating unit part of the system and instead we will use other heating over the winter. We know it hasn’t fixed the problem, but we know what’s causing it, so we can control our power use.
Many thanks to Sarah and the Home Energy Advice Centre(0800 388 588; www.energyadvice.org.nz) for her support and suggestions.
Alina and Justin
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