UNDERSTANDING YOUR ENERGY USAGE CAN HELP TO MANAGE IT
Monitoring a home's hydro can find `hogs' and assist amid crisis, Mark Wessel writes.
A little over a year ago, our newfound community of Ridgeway in Fort Erie, Ont., was hit with a monster snowstorm, leaving us without power for almost four days.
After that disaster, which caused untold hardship for our community and contributed to at least 47 deaths just across the border in Buffalo, I resolved to never to have to contend with a power outage again without having some sort of energy backup in place to keep the lights on.
We have since completed an energy audit of our home and are now close to getting a battery backup solution from a company called Ecoflow, which was recommended to us by a local solar energy provider.
There are several companies that sell what are known as portable power stations, used by everyone from campers to homeowners looking to keep fridges running when the power goes out for a few hours.
Ecoflow, which also sells more affordable whole-house solutions, is in direct competition with Tesla's Powerwall. Both companies have products that are designed to keep the lights on not just for hours, but days.
In advance of having an electrician come in to wire up our new backup battery system, I wanted to have a clear understanding of our electricity usage, not just on a monthly basis (which you can get from your local utility), but day to day. And from there, how that daily total adds up in terms of how much juice our fridge is using compared to other appliances and areas of the house.
Our local electrician first piqued my interest in energy monitoring solutions when he told me he uses one all of the time and in the course of conducting my own research, came across a product known as the Emporia Vue Energy Monitor.
The Emporia Vue connects directly to up to 16 individual circuits in your panel board and tells you how much energy you're using circuit by circuit not only on a daily basis, but weekly, monthly and annually. And going the other way, by the hour, the minute and even per second.
Our fridge, for example, which we inherited from the previous owners and I'm embarrassed to say is not Energy Star rated, consumes about 1.5 kwh per day (similar to running a 100-watt light bulb for 15 hours steady) even though we have it set at higher-than-recommended temperature settings.
Our basement bar area is another “energy hog,” consuming 2 kwh per day by virtue of the fact that both a second fridge and a dehumidifier are running off the same outlet.
Other revelations from this app include that our dryer accounts for five per cent of our monthly electricity usage (to her credit, my wife air dries most clothes), our sump pump uses a mere one per cent and our stove doesn't even register because we hardly use it.
While all of these stats have provided us with a much clearer understanding of our energy usage, Shawn Mclaughlin — the founder and chief executive of Emporia whom I spoke with recently — says for homeowners, the future of products such as the Vue is less about energy monitoring and more about energy management.
“If you have a smart thermostat, you can set it up with Emporia Vue so that it precools your house during off-peak hours and then you let it drift the other way at peak,” ultimately doing what's known as load shifting. “It can be the same again with smart appliances and EV charging,” he says, whereby you're charging or running products more during off-peak hours and then backing off during peak times.
Mclaughlin says his company is working on automating all of these load management solutions to the point where soon
“we will simplify the user experience with push notifications that say, `Hey, we see that your smart thermostat is connected to our Emporia system, do you want us to precool your house during off-peak hours, because if you do, it will save you $9 a month?' ” So from an energy management perspective, the app will enable you to reduce your electricity bill by simply clicking yes to suggestions made.
Also tying in with energy management for us — and really for anyone contemplating going down the same path of installing a backup battery system — is determining which circuits to back up and which to sacrifice for the sake of keeping the lights on longer during our next power outage.
Author's note: Stay tuned for the next chapter of our energy management journey, as our backup batteries are installed and we discover just how long we can keep things running in anticipation of that next 100-year storm.