fivemack: (Default)
Tom Womack ([personal profile] fivemack) wrote2008-12-21 11:05 pm

Power!

This year (21 December to 21 December, because that's where the billing cycle rolls), I have used on average 642 watts of electricity, and 858 cubic metres of gas.

That is, if I remember my units and my GCSE physics correctly, enough electricity to smelt enough aluminium to make a seven-foot-high solid statue of myself, and enough methane to inflate a balloon larger than my house and capable of lifting that above-life-size statue.

I don't have any plans at present to divert my electricity and gas supply for 2009 entirely to that endeavour.

Re: Perversely interested in electricity bills

[identity profile] fivemack.livejournal.com 2008-12-22 12:14 pm (UTC)(link)
Assuming my electricity consumption isn't particularly correlated with the time of year (mostly it goes to running the Victoria Road Medium-Scale Computing Facility), I'm paying £480 a year for my 640 watts, or 8.5p per unit.

This is a bit fiddly to work out because I get gas and electricity from the same people so they show up in the same category on my online banking.

I think I would need a Reputation in the Art World before I could make back the cost of the electrons and the methane in tickets to watch the more-than-life-size statue soar upwards on a house-sized danger balloon.
ext_44: (power)

Re: Perversely interested in electricity bills

[identity profile] jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com 2008-12-22 11:12 pm (UTC)(link)
mostly it goes to running the Victoria Road Medium-Scale Computing Facility

Yeah, I suspected that 640W was a fairly high average for a one-person household with otherwise fairly electricity-unintensive hobbies.

I strongly suspect you will have paid a variety of different rates over the year, not officially correlated with the time of year so much as correlated with changes in long-term gas and electricity prices. (These days you're doing pretty well to beat around 14p/kWh, though you may be able to be cunning with Economy 7 or somesuch.) Hopefully the rates will drop within weeks, but not likely to be nearly to the level of this time last year.