The first thing a South African needs these days is an Eskom strategy.
The utility’s attempt to shoot the lights out by getting electricity tariffs jacked up by 45% each year for the next three years may have been shot down by the treasury, but the smart money reckons the Big E will get at least 25% increase this year and the next. This is before others in the electricity feeding chain add their little slices.
City Power, for instance, doubled its key monthly service fee from R100 to R200. Other add-ons bring the monthly electricity bill for Jo’burgers to R256, before you switch on a single light or appliance.
My electricity usage for a household of four costs about R70 for 140 kilowatt hours a month. But add in service fees of R256 and I’m paying an effective R2.30 for every kilowatt used.
Kilowatt hours is not a terribly meaningful unit for ordinary mortals to understand.
Would you recognise one if it tried to mug you on the way to pay your electricity bill?
When I completed the renovation of my Richmond house, which was designed to be as energy efficient as possible, I took daily meter readings to establish the electricity usage.
It came in at R4 a day or R120 a month. This is low for a suburban household of four. But the meter supplied by the municipality only monitors overall usage. It is less useful in analysing which appliances are using what amount of electricity.
A friend brought a clamp meter and used it to check his household use. The major surprise was that desktop computers use 12 times the amount of electricity that laptops do.
The clamp meter did not have the user-friendliness I was looking for. My web reading told me that Google had software that allows you to analyse your electricity usage.
Software cannot work by itself and I was missing the hardware element to collect the data from my meter.
I asked an Eskom contact if he could recommend a meter for the job. He could. Eskom ran trials of the Efergy, a UK product that attaches to the electrical board in your home.
Andrew Hutton, who distributes Efergy in South Africa, was disappointed by the Eskom trials. He was looking for Eskom to endorse the product, but formed the view along the way that Eskom was not actually interested in helping to save electricity.
It’s easy to guess why: it wants you to buy oodles of the stuff.
The Efergy works in two parts. One clips on to the board. The other is a wireless display you can carry around or place in a prominent place so that the whole household can get an instant reading at that moment.
You take the display to the kettle, turn it on and watch the display roar higher. The Efergy has three main display options.
You can see how much carbon dioxide your house produces, how much electricity it uses in kilowatt hours or the rand cost for the present hour.
The first has little use for me. Try as I may I cannot conceive of a ton of carbon dioxide.
Kilowatt hours are also of doubtful value. Most useful is how much money the electricity is costing you there and then.
You get this information after typing your tariff into the Efergy, in my case 49c a kilowatt hour, which City Power charges low-usage households.
You can download the data to your computer and run an analysis, which can give patterns of electricity by day, week and month.
The Efergy gets its basic data from the amount of electricity being used at any one time. As such it cannot give you historical data by appliance, but by switching key appliances on and off you immediately see their relative contribution.
Not surprisingly perhaps, it is the appliances producing heat — geysers, irons, washing machines, dishwashers and tumble dryers — that burn the most electricity.
The Efergy website suggests savings of between 5% and 20% of typical consumption. Hutton says that as the cost of electricity increases South Africans are using the product to get an understanding of their electricity profile.
‘The basic use is education. People use it to see how much power they are using.”
He says that as meter readings have become infrequent, households are monitoring their own usage so that they do not get an unpleasant shock when estimated use is reconciled with actual use.
Our household usage averages about R2.50 a day, but then we use natural gas for cooking and hot water.
We do not have a swimming pool or lawn mower and use only energy-efficient lighting. But the R2.50 does include the cost of running one of our vehicles, an electric bicycle, which I use for my
daily commute.
Our big saving now, on the advice of colleagues, will be to convert to a pre-paid meter. This costs R2 500 to install and the tariff jumps to 80c a kilowatt hour, but our monthly bill should reduce substantially.
The Efergy comes in two options: the Elite (R800), which does not include the option of downloading data to a PC, and the E2 (R1 000), which does.
Hutton sees the potential for these prices to come down as demand increases. The Efergy does not make extravagant claims regarding the savings it will bring about. The website says that you can expect savings of 10%.
Reports on these meters, such as a recent one in the Guardian, speak of savings ranging from 3% to 15%. Assuming that the 10% figure is correct and your household spends R800 a month on electricity you can expect a saving of R960 a year.
The real value for me is seeing the least energy-conscious members of our household look at the display and ask: ‘Gee, what is on?”