bladeracer wrote:MtnMan wrote:northdude wrote:More another method of heating up the water as we get a lot of power cuts now for some reason. A hot shower is one of lifes simple luxuries...
A power cut here only effects our lighting and refrigeration. Gravity fed water and the wood stove to cook and heat water means more independence and low electricity bills. Our quarterly power bills have only gone over $300 in the last 12 months.
We're off grid but we were looking at our neighbour's three freezers he just filled with 600kg of beef. First thing that occurred to me was power cut
But he says he has three generators for backup in that instance
Our quarterly bills were pushing $700 from memory when we stopped using them. Just asked Rose if she can get me one of our old bills so I can work out what our bills would be today if we were still paying for it.
Okay, we found some bills.
2019 we were paying 40-cents per kWh and our bill for the year was just on $3000. Last year, 2022 we used 4,428kWh overall - generated by ourselves.
The Powerwall tells us that we're using between 460kWh in August last year down to 308kWh in January, so averaging 369kWh per month. The rates though are difficult to equate as we don't know how much of our usage is "offpeak", and I don't even know what they consider offpeak anyway. Current rates are 36-cents per kWh for peak, 16.5-cents per kWh offpeak, plus there's something called a "shoulder". Our heating, cooking and hot water is wood fires, our "cooling" is an electric pedestal fan if it gets really hot. During winter we have to run an electric pump non-stop for a few days to clear the rainwater from the house and send it up to the dam, that must cost a bit. We do a bit of welding, grinding, lathework and such, and we're always charging batteries for tools, like the lawnmower. It's _possible_ our bills might have reduced a little if we'd stayed on grid, but Rose finds that hard to believe.
So it looks to me like grid electricity has actually gotten cheaper, but I have no idea by how much. Rose did the "energy compare" thing a month back for a mate in town and they paid $3000 last year for electricity, but they have air-con and heating so I don't know how it might equate to ourselves.