[ale] Electric bill

[Drifter]

I would urge one and all to stay away -- FAR away -- from Ga. Power's 
"Budget Billing service." The company, in cahoots with the <insert 
adjective of choice> Public Service Commission has rigged this "feature" 
to steal your money.  The annual contract specifies in the fine print that 
if the company over estimates the charges, they KEEP your money.  You 
don't get it back!  Which means, of course, that they have a HUGE 
incentive to over estimate your electric bill.  I discovered this painful 
fact when they offered to reduce our monthly payment by more than 20% after  
the first year in our current house.  So I went back and totaled up the 
previous 12 bills and discovered that we had overpaid by nearly $300.  
When I asked for the money back, I was told, "Sorry, Charlie; the contract 
says we keep it."

BUT . . . You can do the math yourself and not waste your money.  Ga. 
Power is perfectly willing to let you overpay your monthly bill most of 
the year to build up a credit pool to apply to the summer months.  That's 
what we are doing now and it is working well.

Sean

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On Friday, June 24, 2011 08:14:01 pm Ron Frazier wrote:
> I've had some similar thoughts and concerns with my PC equipment, as
> well as several fans and air cleaners, etc. that I have. Here are some
> things to consider.
> 
> You may wish to consider budget billing, which will make your payment
> the same each month.  It won't reduce consumption though.  If the
> budget amount is too low, and if the winter or summer is particularly
> harsh, you may get a big bill at the end of the year for any shortage.
> However, in general, I like the same payment all the time concept.
> 
> The Kill-a-Watt device was mentioned in the thread.  I particularly
> like the Kill-a-Watt EZ, available from Home Depot and others for
> about $30. It has a neat feature that can calculate the time a device
> has been on and show you accumulated energy usage, as well as
> instantaneous usage.
> 
> Here's how you can gauge the impact of running any device.  Be
> especially wary of any device which runs 24 hours / day, as the
> kilowatt-hours add up quickly.  Here's what it would cost for each 100
> watts of consumption on a 24 hour / day basis.  Using 100 W (or .1 KW)
> for 1 hour is .1 KWH or kilowatt-hours.  The national average cost for
> 1 KWH is about $ 0.10.  So:
> .1 KW * 24 HR / Day * 30 Days / Month = 72 KWH / Month.  72 KWH / Month
> * $ 0.10 / KWH = $ 7.20 / Month to run a 100 W device all the time.
> With electronic equipment, this can really add up.  My laptops
> typically pull about 30 - 50 W of power, so they cost about $ 2 - 3 /
> Month to run all the time.  My desktop, plus a couple of monitors (one
> is my wife's), pull about 300 W, so running that all the time costs
> about $ 21 / Month.  You can use this type of math to gauge what type
> of equipment you want to run and for how long.  Those air cleaners I
> mentioned pull about 50 W and so they cost about $ 3 / Month to run
> all the time.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Ron
> 
> On 6/4/2011 12:30 PM, David Hillman wrote:
> > Our electric bill went up by $15 last month.  Either Georgia Power is
> > passing on some extra fees or we have to look at how we can use
> > electricity more efficiently.  Right now we have 3 laptops and 4
> > desktops that are plugged in mostly all the time.  One of the laptops
> > (Macbook Pro) is usually plugged into a 21" NEC monitor pretty much
> > all the time.  One of the desktops is a dual 604 pin Xeon server with
> > 4 hard drives--that's our VM server.  The other desktop is a P4
> > Prescott machine that acts as a security gateway appliance--it's
> > running Untangle 8.  The last desktop is a Core 2 Duo 2.66 Ghz
> > machine for general use and media serving.  Is that too much.?  I
> > was contemplating adding an old HP 4U server to the mix, but I
> > thought better of it.   My latest trip to Fry's had me thinking
> > about replacing all of the servers with some of those Mini-ITX
> > boards.
> > 
> >  However, some of the boards feel pretty cheap and the others have
> >  way
> > 
> > more stuff than I need.  Supermicro has a couple of dual Atom
> > Mini-ITX server boards, but they are pretty expensive.  You get what
> > you pay for with those boards, though.
> > 
> > I was thinking it would be a good idea for someone to make a Mini-ITX
> > server board with reconfigurable pin headers (future expansion), a
> > couple of USB ports, and maybe 5 or so PCI-E x1 slots.  The PCI-E
> > slots can later be filled with a couple of LAN cards and a RAID card.
> > 
> >  Some of the boards should have silent Atom chips and the others
> > 
> > should have 775 sockets.  There are a lot Core 2 Duo chips that could
> > be reused for light server use.  We have about 5 Dell machines in our
> > office with dead motherboards, but perfectly functioning C2D chips.
> > 
> >  Even better, make them compatible with CoreBoot (LinuxBIOS).
> > 
> > What do y'all think?
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