Wow that’s a lot of money! I just got the electricity bill for the first two months of the cold season. This is the first ‘winter’ in our bigger house so we were not quite sure what to expect. I’ve realised that I’ve been stupid though by not keeping a closer eye on the meter. You don’t need to go out and buy a fancy electricity meter to read appliance electricity use etc. You can easily keep an eye on your electricity use just by recording what you are using each day from the meter reading and what this translates into in terms of money. That way I can start working out what we can do over the winter season to keep the power bill down a bit as we thought we were being fairly good!
Power Pricing again
I wrote a little while ago about investigating my power and changing to a lower use rate – this gives a higher unit rate but lower daily charge. My bill came in last week and working out old plan vs new plan I saved $5.30 last month by changing plans. I’ve set up a spreadsheet so I can easily see each month if this plan stops being economical. A really long brochure (40cm long!) got posted to me from Meridian over the week – not sure why an environmentally aware company couldn’t have given me the same information on a smaller piece of advertising? They are trying to grab new customers by offering deals:
q Fixing rate for two years, 11% discount for prompt payment and paying electronically
q 10% prompt discount with a bucket of Ecostore products
q 10% prompt discount with 6 months magazine subscription/6 month Fatso subscription.
(conditions apply).
According to http://www.consumer.org.nz/powerswitch/ calculator I am a little better off with Genesis than Meridian but I know that new/old customers often get different rates than the standard rate on the websites so it might be worth ringing Meridian. In the meantime have to run – have to go pick up a secondhand bookcase from Trade Me, can’t wait to get all my books out of storage.
Power pricing
Got a letter from my power company yesterday pointing out that I might be better on another plan as I was a low user of electricity (not low enough for my liking!). I checked out the pricing and they’re right – I could save about $60 a year by changing price plan. While I was pricing I decided to check on http://www.consumer.org.nz/powerswitch/ to see if there was a cheaper company. Powerswitch is an independent pricing review service carried out by the Consumers Institute. You just enter your last bill details into their calculator and they search the power companies for you. I also tried Powershop given all their advertising on TV but it’s cheaper for me to stay with my company and change plans than go with Powershop.
So I’ve changed my pricing plan. Now I need to keep working on reducing my electricity consumption. We turn all our appliances off, we only have lights on when necessary (Earth hour wasn’t a big deal for us), we wash in cold water, our fridge/freezer is always full for power efficiency…… I think it might be time for a timer in the shower J