Marsden is Here

A bit over a month ago I changed electricity companies, moving to PowerShop from Meridian.

As I said at the time the move was not because of price, but because whatever their usage-reporting, it's bound to be light years ahead of what Meridian provide.

So how has it stacked up? Well, my (smart) meter is now read daily just after midday and the data is visible in my online control panel the next day (except at weekends it seems). I can also download it if I wanted to perform more in-depth analysis.

How pretty? This pretty.

1. Smoothed data (I don't find this display particularly useful yet, but I have to drill past it to get to the good stuff)(please note it has a different vertical scale to the other two images)


2. Unsmoothed daily power usage (for each preceding 24-hour period)


3. Daily power use by meter register (Night use, Weekday day and Weekend Day)


This last one is the most interesting until it's possible to meaningfully compare longer time periods. See those occasional big spikes in night use? That's when I have the hot water cylinder turned on. Smaller spikes tend are either myself or zakzahn staying up late (early) playing computer games.

Hitting the power button on the TV (not leaving it on standby) also saves about a unit per night (and the same during the day). From a power saving perspective just being able to look at this information is a powerful motivator for remembering to turn things off when they're not in use (I'm particularly bad at leaving the TV going & wandering off).

So am I saving money? So far - the first month cost a little more than half what I would have expected to be paying Meridian. BUT of course Powershop doesn't have the annual price averaging that the other companies do, the cost fluctuates based on the spot market and there is currently a surplus of generation capacity / prices are at their summer low. In winter I may yet wind up paying more (I'm not pre-purchasing for that period - this year), in 12 months time I'll decide if the savings are real.

The 20% discount on weekend power which was another sweetener for moving only amounts to a few $ a month and comes in the form of a monthly account credit. So to make best use of that (if you can get it) wait until it's arrived before making a power purchase / paying your bill, depending on how you want to look at it.

I still have invites that will get people a $50 credit* for signing up with PowerShop - of course you can probably also get that credit just by asking for it if you are moving from another company rather than connecting a new flat :)

*I also get a $25 credit for the referral :) They also promise guaranteed savings to you of another $50 in the first month.

Admittedly I didn't expect it to be at 7:10pm.

They opened with the assumption that I was making the switch to PowerShop because of the 20% discounted weekend electricity, a notion of which I quickly disabused them. Their counter offer was interesting though - a 20% prompt payment discount (through to April) instead of the usual 10% (effectively a 20% discount on -all- my electricity use + their daily + the levy).

It was enough to make me pause, but not enough to make me change my mind. Better data > extra $5-$15 a month.

PowerShop must be making the push into Christchurch, because they called me this afternoon.

I did not move because of the $50 credit which comes with the 60-day trial, because that's exactly the same as every other electricity retailer has offered me this year (but without the trial period).

I did not move because of the 20% discount on all power used between 7am - 9pm on Saturdays and Sundays.

I did not move because they promise to save me money (impossible to prove, since my use profile has changed with the addition of the solar).

I did not move because I expect it to be cheaper (I've been tracking my weighted spend/unit against the prices on their website for the past 12-18 months, and it invariably comes out equal to their lowest price).

I did not move because they offer an individual rate tailored to my electricity usage and patterns.

I may have moved partly because they're actually doing something with the so-called Smart meters.

I definitely moved because whatever their usage-reporting, it's bound to be light years ahead of what Meridian provide (ie monthly totals, broken down into day/night on your bill if you're on such a plan). Give me that juicy juicy data on my usage patterns, so that I may make better informed decisions about who supplies my electricity in the future.

And they called and made it easy to undertake a shift which I was probably going to make sooner or later.

~~~
Side note: what Meridian could offer to win me back (I expect a call from them in the next couple of days).
- equivalent or better access to my usage data
- assistance layering my house with solar panels and feeding excess juice back into the grid (legal if technically non-trivial, but doesn't gain them anything).

An article in the Herald put me on to Powershop, a new service aimed at letting you buy your household electricity from a variety of suppliers instead of being tied to the one. Basically exposing yourself to the spot market I guess. The idea was interesting enough that I sat down and plugged details of the last 11 months power bills into a spreadsheet* to see if I could save money, taking the current best price available on the PowerShop site. Even optimistically though, I'm better staying on my Meridian Night & Day plan by a few hundred dollars a year.

* because MyMeridian is pretty hopeless. For instance the 'compare your electricity usage' graph only seems to show the current calendar year, which means right now I can see January 2009 vs January 2008 and 11 months that haven't happened yet. Not incredibly useful, ne? I'd like to see the past 12 months, at least, thanks.

While I was at it I popped over to the Consumer PowerSwitch site and fed the details of my last bill in to see what it recommended. I might be able to save ~$80 a year if I switch to Genesis - not sure that's worth it.

Of course Meridian has just notified me their prices are going up and I don't know if PowerSwitch has taken that into account yet, so I might repeat this exercise in a few months.