Smart meter mystery

Once again, I must apologize for being late with the blog. Even after shifting my usual weekly update from Sunday to Monday, I couldn't make that date this week because we were away all weekend for a family wedding. (This event was much snazzier than our big fat cheap wedding, but it still included some interesting ecofrugal elements. For instance, my sister-in-law, the mother of the nonbinary "broom," got all the reception drinkware secondhand—some by cleaning out family cupboards, some from thrift shops. All the pieces were different, making it easy to tell which drink was whose, and we got to take them home afterwards—perhaps the only wedding favor I've ever received that was actually useful.) When we got home last night after an all-day drive, I had to spend most of the evening dealing with all the emails that had piled up in our absence. I still haven't finished unpacking.

One of those emails that arrived while we were away was from our electric utility, which has recently taken to sending us weekly updates on our energy use as recorded by our new smart meter. On Thursday, it sent us a message warning, "Your electric usage this month is estimated to cost $77. That is $34 more than last month." This puzzled me, since I couldn't think of anything we'd done in the past month that would have jacked up our electric usage. The email suggested the change was likely due to "Outside temperatures that are 6° hotter and other factors (changes in schedule, more people at home, etc.)," but I didn't see how that could have made such a big difference. We may have been running our fans more in June than we did in May, but we haven't so much as touched our air conditioner. And adding to my confusion, the little graph included in the email showed that our usage over the past month was actually lower at most hours of the day than it had been the month before, except for four hours where it was "similar." So how the heck could it have increased by around 80 percent?

 

To get to the bottom of this mystery, I clicked the link in the email labeled "See Your Usage." It led me to the "My Energy Insights" section of PSE&G's website, which shows various graphs of your recent energy usage and how it compares to other homes in your area. But this covered our usage only through last month's bill, providing no info about what might have changed this month. Finally I found a link on our PSE&G account page for "MyMeter," and that took me to an interactive tool for exploring the data from our smart meter. I could see our usage over a period of anywhere from two weeks to a full year and click various buttons to see how it matched up the weather and with our usage from the same time either last week or last year. 

This was fun to play with, but still not very illuminating. Looking at the past three months, it appeared that our usage from mid-May to mid-June was indeed higher than our usage from mid-April to mid-May, but nowhere close to 80 percent higher, neither in kilowatt-hours nor in dollars. And comparing it to our usage from the previous year, it looked like it was generally a bit lower, even without counting the five days we'd just been away from home. So clearly we hadn't developed any new energy-guzzling habits in the past month. 

Looking at the raw data, rather than graphs, didn't make matters any clearer. When I added up our total usage from April 15 through May 14, it came to around $31; when I added it up from May 15 through June 14, it was about $6.50 more. That's an increase of a little over 20 percent, a far cry from 80 percent. So as best I can tell, PSE&G simply made a mistake and sent us an estimate of our monthly electric bill that in no way reflected our actual usage. I guess we'll just have to wait and see if our bill, when it comes, reflects the made-up numbers or the real ones.

One thing I know for sure is that the tips PSE&G provided in the email on how to reduce our energy use won't help us at all. They suggested that we "use the sun's free heat by opening the window coverings on your sunny windows during the day, and then reduce heat loss by closing curtains and shades at night," which is exactly the opposite of what you want to do on a hot summer day. They also invited us to "save 10% or more on lighting costs by replacing outdoor floodlights with motion-activated lighting," which is pretty useless advice since we only turn on our outdoor lights when we're actually outdoors or when we're expecting someone. For a company that's supposed to know so much about our energy usage, they're not very helpful when it comes to cutting it.