Looking for ways to cut your power bills? New meters are coming to B.C. homes that can track your electricity use to the minute.
Krista knows exactly how much electricity she's using all day long.
"That's morning, that's making dinner, that's laundry and dishwasher," says Krista Tulloch, looking at a graph on her computer.
How? She's participating a BC Hydro test program and has a little meter in her kitchen tells her power consumption minute-by-minute.
It's a 'smart meter' and within five years, we're all going to have one.
"Definitely makes you stop and think," says Krista.
When she puts her dryer on, the meter in the kitchen jumps a lot: from twelve cents an hour to almost two dollars.
"It's really made us aware of what it costs to use appliances in our home and it's allowed us to shift the use of some of those higher demand items to what hydro calls off peak hours," explains Krista.
Shifting energy use to off peak hours is key for B.C. Hydro. Between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. we use so much electricity the utility has to buy it from other provinces or the states -- and that's expensive for everyone.
"I can really see the difference between running the dishwasher between four and nine o'clock or running it after nine, you can see there is a real cost difference there," says Krista.
When we all have smart meters BC Hydro will ask the utilities commission for permission to charge us more for using power at peak times.
Essentially charging people different prices during peak times is what gets people to lead towards conservation, says Gillian Robinson of BC Hydro.
How much more? Well, during the pilot project the figure is four times the current rate.
"It doesn't have to cost people more if they think about when they're using electricity, how they're using electricity. People could actually save money on this program," says Robinson.
While that sounds far fetched Krista says her experience proves it could work.
"We ended up using less. We ended up using somewhere in the neighbourhood of ten to fifteen percent less. And we also were able to shift some of our energy consumption that previously had been happening in that four to nine p.m. period to other times of the day," she explains.
What we buy can also make a big difference:
- Pick Energy Star products
- Choose LCD TVs instead of plasma TVs
- Choose induction range ovens instead of electric ovens
- Choose super-efficient LED lighting instead of regular bulbs or even compact fluorescents
With a report from CTV British Columbia's Chris Olsen
