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Smart Meters
updated: Nov 27, 2012, 3:35 PM
By Robert Price
After all the tumult over the smart meters this year I thought it would be nice to show what the meters
are capable of. When we got our October electricity bill we were surprised to find a large jump in our
usage. October was colder and we have a new addition to our family but we also replaced some major
appliances so I wasn't sure where we were using so much more energy. I was concerned that our new
energy efficient appliances were not so efficient after all.
So I logged on the the smart meter page and found that I could download the usage data for every hour
of every day since June when our meter was installed. After some data formatting I was able to pop the
data into Excel and graph our energy usage by each hour for each day of each month. I found it to be
very detailed.
First I graphed all the data for each hour of every day for June through October:
I can see some AM spikes for October that I do not see for the other months but it is noisy so I plotted
the data for each month, again at an hourly basis adding an hourly average line. Most months
resembled September's profile:
Then when I graphed October's hourly usage I could clearly see the increased usage is in the early
morning hours:
For us, this definitively answered the question as to where our increased electricity usage was coming
from, and thankfully it is not from our new energy efficient appliances Rather at the beginning of
October we had also purchased a small space heater for our baby's room which we only used at night.
With this data in hand we were able to increase the household thermostat a touch, which uses natural
gas, and decrease the temperature on the space heater and reduce its usage. Overall we have been able
to reduce our electricity usage while maintaining a reasonably comfortable temperature in our baby's
room thanks to the powerful data collected by our smart meter.
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