![\"hourly-dec-15\"\n](\"http:\/\/georgianbayphotographs.ca\/GBay_Blog\/wp-content\/gallery\/hydro-one-usage\/hourly-dec-15.jpg\"\n "\\"\\"\n")
\n <\/a>\n\n <\/div> \n\n <\/a>\n\n <\/div> \n\n <\/a>\n\n <\/div> \n\n <\/a>\n\n <\/div> \n\n <\/a>\n\n <\/div> \n\n <\/a>\n\n <\/div> \n\n <\/a>\n\n <\/div> \n\n <\/a>\n\n <\/div> \n\n <\/a>\n\n <\/div> \n\n <\/a>\n\n <\/div> \n\n <\/a>\n\n <\/div> \n<\/div>\n\n\n\nSo what’s going on with the graphs you ask.\u00a0 They’re captures of the hourly power consumption of our humble little cottage.\u00a0 You can check your own consumption as well if you’re a Hydro One customer.\u00a0 Just have to do a little dance at their website to setup your personal My Account login.\u00a0 I’ve been following our consumption since we bought the our little get away.\u00a0 The worst offender for consumption is of course, heating, followed by the water heater, and then the Stove\/Range.\u00a0 Its an interesting exercise to try and match activities to consumption.\u00a0 Unfortunately the site information isn’t updated until the next day.\u00a0 Still you can tell when morning coffee happens.\u00a0 The system will resolve down to the most minor of consumptions changes, but time wise it only resolves down to 1 hour intervals.\u00a0 Which can be a bit misleading.\u00a0 The site does include electrical costs, but this is grossly misleading.\u00a0 Under current billing practices your electrical consumption is less than half of your bill.\u00a0 The other five eights of your bill are nebulous percentage charges that are for the most part linked to the electrical consumption.\u00a0 Only Hydro One understands how this structure works.\u00a0 As evidenced by the Minister in charge of energy in Ontario telling the Auditory General of Ontario that her staff don’t understand how the billing system works.<\/p>\nSo back to the main point of these graphs.\u00a0 I was up at the property until the middle of December.\u00a0 Heating was wood stove and baseboard heater.\u00a0 I had shut off the majority of heaters except for 2 units.\u00a0 The choice of which 2 was based on keeping a minimum temperature inside when I was away so as to not have any plumbing freeze.\u00a0 The actual watt rating of the baseboard heaters isn’t known as the labeling is on the backside of the units, and that would necessitate removal of the units to view the label.\u00a0 The Thermostat was set for 7C while I was away, and 16C when I was there.\u00a0 The wood stove would quickly takeover heating when it got rolling, but around 4 am the baseboard heaters would have to pickup the slack.<\/p>\n
Came time to shut everything down, water, sump pump and heat.\u00a0 As a last ceremony I switched the Thermostat control switch\u00a0 into the position between Auto Heat and Auto Cool.\u00a0 I pulled the batteries for the electronics, sensing and programming.\u00a0 When I left the temperature was still being displayed, I assumed, correctly, this was a stored charge that would run down after a bit of time.\u00a0 The time it took was actually considerably longer than I’d expected.\u00a0 Around the middle of the afternoon on the 15th is where things get mysterious.\u00a0 On the graph power consumption ramps up to a peek level of 3.0 kWh, about 2 hours before I locked-up and departed.\u00a0 Hadn’t payed attention to the displayed information on the Thermostat as the system is supposed to be now off.\u00a0 I don’t know if the display would have told me that it was heating.<\/p>\n
If you watch the dates go by you’ll see that for more than 3 days the heat was running flat out, full on, and curiously the consumption climbs ever so slowly to 3.3 kWh.\u00a0 This is weird as the outside temperature at the same time was more then high enough to allow the system to cycle (see the Daily graph).\u00a0 I’m not sure why the consumption creeps up by an additional 300 Wh.\u00a0 Sometime during the night on day 4, about 3:30 the heaters shutdown.\u00a0 I can only conclude that the Thermostat’s residual power gave out and the relay that operates the baseboard heaters dropped out.\u00a0 My mistake in this process, was not switching off the heaters at the breakers.\u00a0 I’m speculating that pulling the batteries, threw the system into a broken state (crashed) with the relay turned on.\u00a0 The Designers mistake in this event is that the control switch should have been a dead-man switch and killed the power to the relay, not been an sensed input to the Thermostat’s processor.\u00a0 If a Air Conditioner had been attached It may well turned that on as well.<\/p>\n
After the run of 3 1\/2 days, the actual phantom loads become visible.\u00a0 Hydro One’s graphing software has a sliding scale, so the consumption looks like it jumps up, but its the scale that changed.\u00a0 From the 20th and onward you can see Yardcam and its associated electronics running.\u00a0 You can even see when Yardcam wakes up and goes to sleep.\u00a0 There is the odd spike (relatively speaking) were software processes run that use more power. Phantom load or Phantasm… So what’s going on with the graphs you ask.\u00a0 They’re captures of the hourly power consumption of our humble little cottage.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[18,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/georgianbayphotographs.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/georgianbayphotographs.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/georgianbayphotographs.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/georgianbayphotographs.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/georgianbayphotographs.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1341"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/georgianbayphotographs.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1374,"href":"http:\/\/georgianbayphotographs.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1341\/revisions\/1374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/georgianbayphotographs.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/georgianbayphotographs.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/georgianbayphotographs.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"