After Geekyoto I was trying to figure out how much I spend on electricity. I believe people will change their habits once they know the cost.
Then after receiving my electricity bill I couldn’t actually work out how much my ‘50W spot light’ costs me a day in electricity!
The first problem is that I paid my bill with a fixed direct debit. So I really had no idea how much electricity I was really spending per month. I called up and changed that to variable direct debit.
The next problem I had, was understanding the notion of standard energy unit and discounted energy unit blocks. I won’t go into this as it is quite complex. Call up your supplier to give you a simpler fixed unit price which is somewhere in the middle. With a fixed price you now have a chance to calculate out your electricity cost.
Now a “unit price” is actually the cost per kilowatt hour. So I cooked up a web form 2 to help calculate your daily energy cost. So when using a browser that supports Web Forms2 like Opera, I could plug in my energy cost and calculate that my 50W spot light costs me 14.54 pence a day in electricity to run a whole day.