Efergy Elite Update

Efergy Elite Update; one month later

Wednesday, 29 February, 2012

And just like that one full month has passed. We received our January power bill from EPCOR and it was still quite high, as I hadn’t had the Efergy Elite long enough to make a huge impact. But since then I would say the results are quite shocking! Bear in mind that in December we used 1800kWh of electricity; as of February 29th our household has used 700kWh. Quite a reduction, wouldn’t you say? I has guessed at 25% but it was more like 60% - your mileage may vary though.

Other power observations in the first month? Energy Star appliances really do make a difference. The meter barely budges when the dishwasher is running or the miserly LCD TV is on. I unplugged the fridge and there wasn’t a huge difference in power usage. Old fashioned incandescent pot lights are the next target on my quest to save power and money - in the kitchen and living room alone if they were all on we are talking well over 1000 watts. The difficulty is in figuring out if it’s really worth it to spend $30-40 each for LED replacements. Some day if I get the energy to do it (pun intended) I might do a cost-benefit analysis to see when they would pay themselves off.

A few more additional comments on the unit itself that you may be interested in:

1.The daily history only saves the last 7 days of your energy usage. I was planning on charting our consumption in a spreadsheet each month but that can’t happen unless you really stay on top of things.
2.I didn’t mention that you can review your CO2 emissions as wells as dollars spent; you can see quickly how many kg of CO2 you are releasing into the atmosphere and how much money you are spending on power by day/week/month. I’m not sure how they calculate CO2 emissions this way, but for what it’s worth we put 738kg into the air in February. Another incentive to be more power conscious, if kWh alone doesn’t do it for you.
3.Finally, I was contacted by a representative of Efergy not long after my first posting - they are coming out a very cool addition to the Elite to enhance the tracking and monitoring of your energy consumption patterns. If I can get my hands on an advance copy in the next few weeks, I will see if they will let me do a review on it as well.

Email me; theangrycustomer@me.com if you have any questions or comments. I will post them here for others to see. (at least until I get a real comment system going...)

Here is the main culprit; The Honeywell TrueSteam Humidification System - 1500 watts of pure electricity gobbling, money sucking state of the art computer controlled steam humidifying system. Did I say we have two furnaces, with one of these on each? Yikes!

Read it and weep! Or in my case jump for joy. The almost final February results. I will be curious if it matches up with the EPCOR reading...but our bill better be lower this month!!!

As you can imagine after installation, in the final weeks of January I walked around the house turning things on and off and generally annoying my wife and children. I shut everything off in the house and still the usage would spike to 3000 watts, and it would maintain that rate for hours on end. I noticed that the furnace fan was running continuously as well but couldn’t believe that it would chew up that much power. The cause? After some trial and error, I discovered it was our state of the art steam humidifying system. For some reason it would not stop - ever. Even if the humidity was set to 40%, and the house was at 40% humidity it would not ever take a break from boiling water and blowing that nice comfortable humid air throughout the house. My next step is a call to the installer and/or Honeywell to see if this is normal or a setup issue; hopefully I won’t turn into the angry customer! As much as a tech savvy person I think I am, the settings and controls on this whole HVAC system are out of this world.