For a Bit of Colored Ribbon

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/11/for-a-bit-of-colored-ribbon.html

by planb • 14 years ago

49 46 14 years ago

codinghorror.com

yen2232• 14 years ago

The cynic in me has to ask: what does PG&E stand to gain from making houses more energy-efficient?

j-g-faustus2• 14 years ago

They can claim that they take the environment seriously.

Of course, if they are successful in reducing overall energy consumption, they will increase the cost of energy to cover their costs and maintain their profit margin.

whatusername• 14 years ago

Not sure about the US energy market -- but here in Aus -- the profit is in the baseload kilowatts and not in the peaks. Your cheap Coal plant can produce electricity really cheaply - but when demand spikes you need to fire up the higher cost on-demand generators. You can still sell this electricity - but you may even make a loss on it at the margins.

curiousdannii2• 14 years ago

In fact, one quarter of electricity bills goes to 40 hours of peak demand per year!

http://theconversation.edu.au/air-conditioning-is-peaking-ou...

eidorb• 14 years ago

The network is built to cope with a peak demand that only occurs for a relatively small amount of time. By reducing the peak demand they can delay the capital expenditure of upgrading the network a number of years.

sutterbomb• 14 years ago

In many states in the US, there are energy targets that must be met or the provider is subject to penalties. Opower is a startup who's entire business model (at least to start) was to work with utilities on hitting these targets. I could be wrong, but I think they were actually the first to use this peer comparison model in this space.

davetron50003• 14 years ago

sutterbomb's post is 100% correct. Energy companies are often under strong regulator pressure to reduce consumption or to reduce consumption of specific fuel types (e.g. coal). Compared to wind or solar, a voluntary reduction in use by customers is a much more cost-effective means of meeting such regulations.

ck22• 14 years ago

Our power company does this too.

I sat down and calculated it costs them roughly a million dollars per year in postage to print and send those out.

I emailed the managers insisting they just put it online and use the million dollars to fund low income people from getting their power turned off and avoid the $50 fee to reinstate power.

All they would offer to do is take me off the mailing list.

If they insist on snail mailing stuff, they should only mail the worst offenders and radically reduce the cost. I use less than 200kwh per month in the winter and I still get those things.

The super stupid thing about those graphs is they include landlords with vacant apartments and houses that keep the power on for maintenance and easier new tennant move in (they just read the meter and change owner on the bill).

davetron50003• 14 years ago

This is not really true - I worked for the company that generates these reports. It's true that the default product is snail mail, but this has been shown to be highly effective at driving down consumption and is a net savings for the power company.

Further, the company in question does A/B test various ways of sending the report, including email-only to find the most cost-effective way to drive down consumption.

Finally, the neighbor selection criteria DOES account for empty homes and other demographics, where that information is available.

ck22• 14 years ago

Since I once got the report when I only used 150kwh and was saying there were other people more efficient than me, I assure you it's looking at vacant apartments and houses.

Also it's downright stupid to waste resources and postage to mail people who aren't offenders and can do little more to optimize their power use other than turning off the mains.

Just mail worst offenders, people above the averages and save hundreds of thousands of dollars on what becomes junk mail.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

Those vacant apartments don't draw much power.

defective• 14 years ago

Right, they're dragging down the average.

rkwz• 14 years ago

I'm not from US, so can anyone tell me why some months have low energy consumption compared to other months? (electricity - may vs july)

Also, do you guys use natural gas for heating too?

curiousdannii2• 14 years ago

The biggest proportion of household energy goes towards temperature management -- heaters, air conditioners, or in some climates, both!

j-g-faustus2• 14 years ago

Space heating, water heating, refrigeration and air conditioning add up to 75% of the energy used by households in USA: http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=us_energy_...

Although I was slightly surprised that "lighting and other appliances" is as much as 25% of the home energy use.

dagw2• 14 years ago

The US loves their air conditioners. May hits that lull between people turning down their heaters and cranking up their air conditioners.

joezydeco• 14 years ago

Yes, a lot of homes in the US use natural gas for all heating (forced air, water, cooking, clothes drying). The usage is minimal in the summer months (just cooking and hot water and some clothes), but can spike to very high amounts when the temperature drops to below freezing.

Usually a home will be built with all gas appliances or all electric, a mixture of the two is not as common.

There are cultural differences too. Americans love to air condition their entire homes with central systems and run them a lot in the summer months. They also dry their clothes with automatic dryers and rarely use clothes lines anymore.

scott_w• 14 years ago

I was amused to read that he bought LED bulbs for everything.

I don't deny that they're efficient, but are they so efficient they're worth spending 3-5x the price of a standard energy efficient bulb?

dagw2• 14 years ago

He said that for him it was about winning the 'game' and getting a higher(lower) score, not about saving energy or money per se.

indiecore2• 14 years ago

> but are they so efficient they're worth spending 3-5x the price of a standard energy efficient bulb

Don't they last like a billion years longer than even compact florescent blubs?

mavhc• 14 years ago

I was just looking at this, seem to be 2-3x the price, and, in theory, last 6 times longer, so you win without the cost savings, which are about $1/(hour/day)/year/100W (incandescent equivalent, so 4 rooms with 100W lighting each on for 3 hours a day saves $12/year, compared to CFL, so worth replacing CFL with LED as the CFLs die.

adwf• 14 years ago

One thing I'm interested in seeing with my new LED bulbs is the potential failure modes.

If an incandescent or CFL goes - it's done for. But a quick check of my LED bulbs shows 22 emitting diodes. When it fails, is it more likely that the controlling circuitry goes or that an individual diode goes and it carries on at slightly reduced output? I'm waiting to see, but they've already outlasted the average lightbulb in my house by a long way - so I don't know how long I'll have to wait to verify.

Adrock• 14 years ago

The points system on Consumating encouraged me to become social to a degree I had never been before or since. It wasn't all bad. I met my wife on the site and now we have two kids.

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

I'm not surprised Jeff's energy use is through the roof. Doesn't he have a massive workstation and home server running all the time? Not to mention charging all of the tablets and phones he must have around.

dpark5• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure Jeff specifically builds his machines for low energy use. He's written about that before. Keeping device batteries "topped off" doesn't use much energy, either.

More likely is that Jeff's house is poorly insulated relative to his neighbors. Or that the "average" presented is extremely skewed and not actually representative. (Is Jeff's house actually <1200 sq ft?) It might be interesting to see how many households get reports indicating that they are "above average".

indiecore2• 14 years ago

>I'm pretty sure Jeff specifically builds his machines for low energy use.

It doesn't matter how low energy your servers are they are still servers than most people don't have.

handelaar• 14 years ago

And you think that's why his house uses a lot of natural gas?

beaker52• 14 years ago

The only problem is that they're motivated to reduce your consumption to mask their price increases and reduce their costs to maximise their profits.

Just like petrol/gas, spend your money to buy fuel efficient cars, petrol costs more, no noticeable difference in the bank. Everyone has to get on the wagon or be priced out. It's like an armed robbery, but the gun is an increasing cost of living, with the threat of jail if you can't pay.

nnnnni• 14 years ago

You should always check your bills to make sure that the estimated usage matches the actual usage. It's not uncommon for them to "estimate" based on the average for the neighborhood/city/state/country.

Tichy3• 14 years ago

I've read about an experiment somewhere where they found that doing this lead to Democrats trying to save more energy, but for Republicans it lead to them using more energy. They figured "hey, my neighbors use a lot, so I should be allowed to use more, too - otherwise I miss out" (I suppose that was for cases where people saw that they use below average).

Sorry I am too lazy to Google for the paper. The point is: careful with such experiments, the outcome might not always be what is desired.

dpark5• 14 years ago

This plays too much into the dumb Republicans stereotype to be believable. "We-ell, if I'm not usin' as much 'lectricity as Jimmy down the road, I must be missin' out on the 'Murican dream!" It's hard to believe that this mentality is prevalent enough in any group to affect overall energy consumption meaningfully.

I could believe that a few people who are in the "below average use" bucket might take these reports as a confirmation that they can relax their energy conservation efforts, but I can't believe that any meaningful number of people would actively increase their usage to "catch up" to their neighbors.

Tichy3• 14 years ago

Yeah well science sometimes is surprising, otherwise, why even bother to do it? I am tempted, but I'll resist for now to google for the article.

Must resist... :-/

Edit: damn it... Luckily it was the second hit http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/20...

brudgers• 14 years ago

"[I] design massively multiplayer games for people who like to type paragraphs to each other."

That is an amazing insight and much more interesting than power bills.

chmike• 14 years ago

I would suggest to debug the gas and electric installations. That means monitor if there is any abnormal consumptions or leaks.

Changing light bulbs types is like a blind hit.

My brother installed solar panels and could thus monitor consumption. He noticed abnormal consumptions and with his kids search the origin. They found a useless heater left on in some basement room. Problem solved. The nice thing is that it turned out as a game for the small kids and at the the same time they became more careful about devices consuming electricity for nothing.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

I noticed this to, and noticed that they lie. Well perhaps not lie but they cherry pick the other homes, and they can be 35 - 40 miles away in a 'similar' area. The only funny part was when I got my PV solar system, which I turned on "to test" prior to them getting through all the paper work. (we were one of, or perhaps the first, people in our general area to get a 'large' PV system (a bit over 5kW)) Our house came in at like 1/10th the numbers of the 'efficient' house but all the wording was written to tell us how we could improve to get closer to the "efficient" house (which in our case would have meant leaving on a few lightbulbs 24/7 :-)

Anyway I realized then that what ever program generated those reports, the programmer had been told that there wouldn't be any 'good' houses so that text never got into the code. I stopped paying any attention to their propaganda at that point.

As that was 9 years ago I'm sure they are much better now than they were but still.

davetron50003• 14 years ago

The report Jeff mentions could not have been made nine years ago as the company that generated Jeff's report (a company hired by PG&E) didn't exist nine years ago.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

As far back as 1998 I've got letters from PG&E that put my power bill in 'context' with the 'baseline' and 'typical' home in my neighborhood. The format has always been the same

Part 1, here are the base lines

Part 2, here is where your power usage puts you

Part 3, here are all the things you can do to reduce your energy usage including, if active, any rebates for various programs.

The funny part was that Part 3 was always created on the assumption that part 2 was significantly higher than part 1. It made me wonder if they were fudging the numbers in part 1 to make that always true.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

That totally works btw - statistically. If you notice you are being taken for a fool (or your customers notice it) then expect there to be hell to pay.

mumrah• 14 years ago

In my experience, heating and cooling is the bulk of residential energy use. If you live in an older home, make sure to get an energy audit from the utility company (usually free - maybe you just need some additional insulation.

Also, thermal curtains (aka, black-out curtains) can help if you have a lot of window surface area.

For a Bit of Colored Ribbon

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