Pennsylvania Electric Rate Increase

I guess I need to put the meter on it again. I only watched it a few hours. This is one of those old R2D2 looking rental machines that farts every 45 seconds or so. It may just be worn out.

I'm OK with that. They do buy her "go bottles". PT lady says she thinks she can get her off of it. Things are getting a lot better.

That's good. I also have a machine to fill the bottles too. One of the benefits of having a family member in the business.

If we had nat gas here, I would have a smaller electric bill I imagine. My guess is my baseline average without any "heaters" on is about 2.5 kw/h. At least a kw of it is computers of some sort.

I am tolerating all of it hoping this all goes away soon. Nobody is really sure why she needs oxygen. (heart and lungs are OK) They are still doing stuff to see. They say her D Ox is fluctuating. We are both walking around with oximeters in our pocket trying to make sense of this. Maybe it just does.

Nat gas here is cheap. I average about $15 a month for two of us. Dryer, hot water, cooking, grilling. My gas use is 10 to 11 therms equals about 300kW in electric.

Granddaughter has a place of her own and starting next week use will be less.

The "H" is silent ;-)

Delmarva Power cut off gas to new customers nearly 50 years ago before my house was built. About half our small development got it before they cut it off an there is a gas line a few hundred yards away.

Now I see in newer adjacent large development that they are putting in new gas lines.

I would like a gas line if I could put in a whole house generator but not sure I would switch heating due to cost and wife likes cooking with electric.

The bill is pretty constant, all year long. Big charges in the winter for the hot tub; big charges in the late spring, summer, and early fall for air-conditioning.

Cindy Hamilton

I looked at my usage and it is all over the place. We can get it by the hour, day or month in bar charts online since they put in the smart meter. It does explain why I can get by with a 5.5KW generator tho. My average usage, even with the big power hogs on line (central AC, water heater dryer and oven) is still 2-3 KWH but there are big peaks and valleys. Some I still don't understand. Others make perfect sense. It is an interesting way to blow an hour tho, looking at the detail of your usage. I do understand why Musk says one of his batteries will level out your demand. With a big enough battery a

Our hot tub is a big 500 (700?) gallon tank that takes the better part of a day to heat. I'm not sure we'd care to plan our soaks that far ahead.

Cindy Hamilton

CA is eliminating gas in new homes and a friend i talked with this morning said MA is planning to eliminate gas and oil in the future. Emissions is their reasoning.

For things like the dryer or water heater I have no fuel preference as long as they work. I like gas for cooking. Heat up Naan? Just toss it on the grate with a medium flame, flip with tongs.

NG for a generator would be nice though.

Making dark toast and burning food is unhealthy too. That is why there is a vent over the range.

Offhand it appears to me that eliminating gas and oil for home heating is incredibly stupid. These uses are extremely efficient versus automotive where petroleum efficiency is less than 50%. Gas furnaces are available with over 95% efficiency. With these fuels used to generate electricity and transmission losses I bet electric home heating is more inefficient and polluting. Also in colder climates heat pumps alone are inadequate.

Mine is 8' roughly square. I think it is ~450 gallons but I don't really know. With 11,000w I can get about 10-11 degrees an hour so it is not horrible planning ahead. I really just use it when it is cold outside and that is not that often. I have a 330kbtu propane pool heater that would warm it up in 15 20 minutes but I haven't made that connection yet.

My bill is a constant $10.00/month. I use somewhere around

I think gas stoves were popular when houses leaked plenty of make up air. Now that we are sealing houses up, maybe we do need to turn the air over more. The answer might be air to air heat exchangers to scavenge the heat or cooling from the exhaust air. I also think blocking new natural gas hookups is stupid until we come up with a replacement. We are already stressing the grid and a few million electric cars will only make it worse. California may be the worst example of a broken grid infrastructure and mandates to push it beyond capacity.. John Oliver did a show about the grid a while ago and he showed the hooks that failed, causing the Camp Fire. Those lines are already running beyond their design load and that isn't getting better. Another thing Oliver pointed out is the places most suitable for alternate energy generation are not near any transmission lines to get that to where the people who need it are. That is a multi decade project, not just stringing an extension cord across the great plains. Logically, this should be directional bores, putting the lines underground and away from the weather that can take them out. It might also be easier to sell underground lines to the people who will have to live with them. As long as they know not to drill any deep holes, they could farm normally on PoCo land.

Irma destroyed my pool collectors so I would have to factor that risk into any PV system I bought. At this point in my life, I might not live long enough to get my money back from a system and when it was an option mathematically they were still $8-9 a watt. I do have a spot on the new addition where I built the roof with collectors in mind (orientation, additional membrane etc) but I just can't get interested yet. I still only have room for ~2.3kw using the collectors they proposed then. They say, honestly, that is only about 13-14 KW/H a day on average here. A buck and a half a day is not going to make much of a dent in my bill.

Now you are confusing the greenies with technical terms like efficiency.

In retrospect, I wish we'd used gas for heating the hot tub. But it's comparatively far from the house, and we didn't want to run gas out there.

Cindy Hamilton