In case you’re wondering, the AC unit in our bedroom costs $0.16/hour. The living room costs $0.50/hour.
My wife is trying to make me stop. She says it’s annoying.
I run a UPS for my home server and have Telegraf collect metrics, which I then feed into Grafana (via influxdb) to create a dashboard that uses my local kWph pricing to plot daily/monthly/quarterly/annual costs to run the server.
It might not be super helpful for some, but it’s helped me justify hosting applications at home with NAS instead of paying for cloud hosting
Example of the Dashboard:
This is very interesting I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Since I can’t read the graph really well on my phone can you tell me how much on average does it cost per month?
Also is there a point at which its going to be cheaper to use a cloud? Or will it always be cheaper to host yourself?
It averages $25 per month - which is hosting 16tb of storage (running 1tb nVME parity and 3x 8tb HDD) to host 5x Virtual Machines and 33x Docker Containers (which includes MariaDB, Postgres, InfluxDB, and Redis containers that receive a good amount of traffic), and a lot of the storage used for media/photo storage/consumption.
With cloud storage, I was hitting $70/month and that was without having all the backups of photos/media that I now have running on the home server.
That’s really impressive. Thanks for these wonderful insights.
It’s like counting calories: it’s perfectly fine to track your own.
It’s tolerably annoying to share with uninterest parties how many calories you are eating.
It’s wildly rude to state outloud the amount of calories someone else is eating.
And it’s downright dangerous to say to someone who sleeps under the same roof “are you sure you need those calories?”
Counting calories/macros is good thing to do to zero your brain in on what foods contribute what - it’s honestly quite surprising and informative to do. But, doing it constantly is kinda obsessive and annoying. Same applies here too.
I don’t think normal exists
It’s probably not healthy but I do this too with heating (UK). I have electric panel heaters that cost £1 an hour to run and all I can think about when they’re on is how much it’s going to cost - over the day, the week, the month - and then I turn them off and get a hot water bottle 😬
I went solar a couple of years ago and my power generation and usage are all always tracked and graphed by an online app. Also telling me how much is spend or save. So I crawl up my own ass over electricity usage pretty much every day.
I do think this is much better than the dark ages when I really had almost no idea how much power I used every day.
Went through the same thing. It’s a little game now to try to use less energy than the solar panels are generating. Used to keep my gaming PC on all the time, and watch everything on a giant tv, but now I’m mostly using a tiny laptop. Really helps when you see how much electricity you’re using and how of that you do t really need.
I think most people wouldn’t bother to do that, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. If your wife finds it annoying it might be because she feels like her use of AC is now being monitored and judged. You should probably make it clear that that’s not the case. If it is the case, then yeah, you should stop.
We got a free Nest thermostat through the local electric company. That’s exactly the sentiment. I like automated, she prefers manual. Though changing temps from the bed is nice.
Those often come with fine print and
custom firmware(it’s a rewards program google offers/partners with power companies for) that allows the electric company to forcibly set the temp higher than you’d like, usually during peak demand like a heat wave. I’m not big on others deciding what temp I should be.Thank you for noting that. We had received previous “offers” that did include some form of “we’ll give you hardware, you let us limit it”, the offer we took was not one of those. Just simply a free thermostat.
it shouldn’t be a thing, but it is
Yes
I’d say there’s nothing wrong with it…
…but also what? If I run my A/C 8-12 hours a day for a month the bill is like $20 more, are you in California?
I’m in California and running my AC raises my bill by $200+ a month for a 2 bedroom house.
Your wife might have a point…
i did that too. i printed the monthly rates table since the unit rate changes depending on the monthly consumption, but also i include the 13% VAT percentage for residential usage, and it adds up to 0.15$/kwh. my ac consumes about 1.2kwh per hour, and i plan running it 20 hours per day for 60 days. women dont like accountability and dont like to admit to consequences. good on you for staying wise and planning everything in advance.
women dont like accountability and dont like to admit to consequences.
what the absolute fuck?
to be fair to OP, I have only seen this done by women, too.
When you have to explain to an adult woman that leaving the heater on max is like opening the faucet in the sink, and leaving the house, maybe it’s not a surprise that it causes her to have a nervous breakdown. (since if she was a rational thinker, she wouldn’t be doing it in the first place)
Still weird that I have never seen this done by a man.
IDK, that doesn’t sound healthy.
Life is made up of infinite details. Looking too closely at any of them shouldn’t be done without a reason, that way lies madness
Looking at details makes sense when the data is actionable. If you think “my electric bill is too high” or “I’m worried about my power consumption”, then try living with it a bit hotter/colder. That’s a decision to make on more like a monthly basis, maybe every couple weeks - day to day it’s one of a ton of variables. It’s not useful information outside a spreadsheet
Making that decision on a daily basis sounds like obsession. If you just think it’s interesting, you should probably keep it to yourself (and similar minded people)… If your wife doesn’t want to hear it, you should listen to her
Tell me once, fine, maybe it’s a bit interesting. Do it every day for a week, and my brain starts trying to keep a running estimate. I would get very angry, very quickly, because it would make my life slightly worse moving forward for no benefit
Not typical but not a bad idea if you’re broke and trying to save enough on the energy bill to afford instant ramen next week.
As for annoying I’m guessing the annoying part is talking about it or asking people to change habits. You could also put in work to improve rates passively. Like improving the insulation of the home or filling gaps around windows. Note: Don’t do noisy diy projects in the same room as your wife or leave a mess.
Let me introduce you to https://sense.com/ and help you create a new obsession.
P.s. it’s not perfect as it uses machine learning to determine your appliances and it can’t find electronics like your computer or TV but it’ll help you find what might be chipping away at your power bill.
I went with Emporia Vue because you can flash it with ESPHome and get rid of all the cloudware and have it connect to HomeAssistant locally.
This is what mine looks like after install:
And some screenshots from HA:
Instructions: https://github.com/emporia-vue-local/esphome
So, OP, just show your wife what I did, and let her know, it could be much worse, :D.
Thanks for that. I’ve been kinda-sorta keeping an eye out for a good solution for this. My house has three main panels (it’s set up for subletting) so solutions like Sense won’t work well, plus I don’t want it to be dependent on a cloud service. I’ll check out this product.
If you go this route, there are a bunch of videos on YouTube about it too that are quite helpful, just search emporia vue esphome and emporia vue homeassistant.
This is the one that I found most helpful to follow for the flashing process: https://youtu.be/z0Jv4nO9OWg?t=956
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Cool product!
Can you post some screenshots of what it looks like with your usage?
(Sanitized of coursed)
I would love to see it in action.
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Those costs arent fixed. You need to account for the outside temp and humidity. And your insulation efficiency.
