For anyone who lives on a fixed
income, you live or die based on variable costs like electricity
which can fluctuate by as much as 30% from one month to the next. In
general, we all get a break twice a year; in the spring and then
again in the fall when neither the furnace or the AC is running.
Thus far, I'd been able to skate by
with my AC in the off position until the 17th of
June when it began to get seriously hot. By noon on that day, the
temperature outdoors read 86°F
and seemed headed for 90 or so by the late afternoon. The relative
humidity read 60% and that more than anything else prodded me to turn
my heat pump to cool to 81°F.
In my room, at that time, the reading was 83°F
which felt a bit warm. I was running a ceiling fan which helps up to
only a point. I had been averaging 15.3 kWh thus far in the month,
but felt sure that was going to change upwards pretty quickly! (I
was, in point of fact, trending towards a total power use of about
582 kWh through the 16th.
The would equate to an electric bill from Empire Electric of only
about $80).
At
12:00 Noon, I noticed I had used 8.8 kWh of power (since
midnight) which was not too bad. At that rate (.733 kilowatts per
hour) I could normally expect to finish the day at about 17.6 kWh
which would be very doable and in line with the monthly average.
(That was not be the case, however).
Quite
often in the early summer, we get pop up thunderstorms that serves to
cool everything down before moving on. It's not unusual to see the
temperatures drop twenty degrees or more as the rain transports cold
upper air down to the ground. Unfortunately as you can see at right,
the radar over southwest Missouri was not looking very promising!
A
fourteen hundred square foot home such as the one I live in and which
is a stick-built ranch style dwelling with a basement (cooling
effect) – I can normally expect a buffering effect from the
outside temperatures to last for a couple of hours after the
temperature gets much above the cooling level set for the AC – or,
in my case, 81°F. On this
date, we hit the 81'outside' degree mark at 9:54 AM. The AC kicked
on, for the first time at 11:01 AM and then kicked off at 11:39 AM
(see graph). Poof! A few kilowatt hours of power spent on cooling! Of
note also was an attic reading of 108.9 degrees! So, above my
head was that kind of head while below in the basement it read 65°F.
A temperature that is maintained pretty much no matter what's going
on outside! And, there I was stuck in the middle!
12:43
PM – AC kicked on – outside temperature was then at 86.6°F.
Inside was 83.8°F. Attic
reading was 110.7°F.
Clouds were increasing a bit – the sky was at about 50% coverage.
AC was on for 1 hour.
3:00
PM – The temperature outside was 89.2°F.
Inside, it was 82.6°F
with an attic temperature of 115.2°F.
Power use at that moment was 13.2 kWh. At 3:10, the AC kicked back
on. The temp out was then 90°F.
The
AC kicked on two more times – at about 5PM and 7PM, at which point
things cooled down enough to retire its operation for the balance of
the day. The total power used was 26.2 kWh. Assuming that 15.3
kWh was average, this meant I used 10.9 kWh for cooling. This come to
about a buck in terms of cost.
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