
For a Bit of Colored Ribbon - planb
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/11/for-a-bit-of-colored-ribbon.html
======
ck2
Our power company does this too.

I sat down and calculated it costs them roughly a million dollars per year in
postage to print and send those out.

I emailed the managers insisting they just put it online and use the million
dollars to fund low income people from getting their power turned off and
avoid the $50 fee to reinstate power.

All they would offer to do is take me off the mailing list.

If they insist on snail mailing stuff, they should only mail the worst
offenders and radically reduce the cost. I use less than 200kwh per month in
the winter and I still get those things.

The super stupid thing about those graphs is they include landlords with
vacant apartments and houses that keep the power on for maintenance and easier
new tennant move in (they just read the meter and change owner on the bill).

~~~
davetron5000
This is not really true - I worked for the company that generates these
reports. It's true that the default product is snail mail, but this has been
shown to be highly effective at driving down consumption and is a net savings
for the power company.

Further, the company in question does A/B test various ways of sending the
report, including email-only to find the most cost-effective way to drive down
consumption.

Finally, the neighbor selection criteria DOES account for empty homes and
other demographics, where that information is available.

~~~
ck2
Since I once got the report when I only used 150kwh and was saying there were
other people more efficient than me, I assure you it's looking at vacant
apartments and houses.

Also it's downright stupid to waste resources and postage to mail people who
aren't offenders and can do little more to optimize their power use other than
turning off the mains.

Just mail worst offenders, people above the averages and save hundreds of
thousands of dollars on what becomes junk mail.

------
Tichy
I've read about an experiment somewhere where they found that doing this lead
to Democrats trying to save more energy, but for Republicans it lead to them
using more energy. They figured "hey, my neighbors use a lot, so I should be
allowed to use more, too - otherwise I miss out" (I suppose that was for cases
where people saw that they use below average).

Sorry I am too lazy to Google for the paper. The point is: careful with such
experiments, the outcome might not always be what is desired.

~~~
dpark
This plays too much into the dumb Republicans stereotype to be believable.
"We-ell, if I'm not usin' as much 'lectricity as Jimmy down the road, I must
be missin' out on the 'Murican dream!" It's hard to believe that this
mentality is prevalent enough in any group to affect overall energy
consumption meaningfully.

I could believe that a few people who are in the "below average use" bucket
might take these reports as a confirmation that they can relax their energy
conservation efforts, but I can't believe that any meaningful number of people
would actively increase their usage to "catch up" to their neighbors.

~~~
Tichy
Yeah well science sometimes is surprising, otherwise, why even bother to do
it? I am tempted, but I'll resist for now to google for the article.

Must resist... :-/

Edit: damn it... Luckily it was the second hit
[http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/20...](http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/2010/04/nudges_gone_wrong.html)

~~~
dpark
Thanks for the link. I have some doubts about the validity of the conclusion,
though. The only Republican group that showed the increase seems quite narrow.
"Registered conservative, does not pay for renewable energy, does not donate
to environmental groups, and in bottom 25th percentile liberal block group".
How many people are actually in that group? Maybe it's a large percentage, but
I kind of doubt it. If it's only a small percentage of Republicans that fell
into this bucket, then it's inappropriate to claim that the conclusions apply
to Republicans as a whole.

I'm also having trouble parsing the tables in the original paper, but it
appears that there are groups with a worse treatment effect (e.g. college
educated with above-average use) that the authors did _not_ highlight. Perhaps
this is a misreading on my part?

<http://www.econ.ucla.edu/costa/Nudgew15939.pdf>

~~~
Tichy
I'm not sure if the article I linked to was even the same one that I read a
while ago, it was just the second thing that popped up in Google. I regard it
more as a curiosity anyway.

I think it would have been better if they had made that experiment in a more
neutral setting (psychology students perhaps), the aspect of the political
parties is distracting. The main point is that nudges can go wrong.

~~~
dpark
That's fair enough. It's just misleading to paint in broad strokes with terms
like "Republican" if the evidence supports only a narrow slice of that. It
turns into spin at that point.

------
ChuckMcM
I noticed this to, and noticed that they lie. Well perhaps not lie but they
cherry pick the other homes, and they can be 35 - 40 miles away in a 'similar'
area. The only funny part was when I got my PV solar system, which I turned on
"to test" prior to them getting through all the paper work. (we were one of,
or perhaps the first, people in our general area to get a 'large' PV system (a
bit over 5kW)) Our house came in at like 1/10th the numbers of the 'efficient'
house but all the wording was written to tell us how we could improve to get
closer to the "efficient" house (which in our case would have meant leaving on
a few lightbulbs 24/7 :-)

Anyway I realized then that what ever program generated those reports, the
programmer had been told that there wouldn't be any 'good' houses so that text
never got into the code. I stopped paying any attention to their propaganda at
that point.

As that was 9 years ago I'm sure they are much better now than they were but
still.

~~~
davetron5000
The report Jeff mentions could not have been made nine years ago as the
company that generated Jeff's report (a company hired by PG&E) didn't exist
nine years ago.

~~~
ChuckMcM
As far back as 1998 I've got letters from PG&E that put my power bill in
'context' with the 'baseline' and 'typical' home in my neighborhood. The
format has always been the same

Part 1, here are the base lines

Part 2, here is where your power usage puts you

Part 3, here are all the things you can do to reduce your energy usage
including, if active, any rebates for various programs.

The funny part was that Part 3 was always created on the assumption that part
2 was significantly higher than part 1. It made me wonder if they were fudging
the numbers in part 1 to make that always true.

------
brudgers
_"[I] design massively multiplayer games for people who like to type
paragraphs to each other."_

That is an amazing insight and much more interesting than power bills.

------
jiggy2011
I'm not surprised Jeff's energy use is through the roof. Doesn't he have a
massive workstation and home server running all the time? Not to mention
charging all of the tablets and phones he must have around.

~~~
dpark
I'm pretty sure Jeff specifically builds his machines for low energy use. He's
written about that before. Keeping device batteries "topped off" doesn't use
much energy, either.

More likely is that Jeff's house is poorly insulated relative to his
neighbors. Or that the "average" presented is extremely skewed and not
actually representative. (Is Jeff's house actually <1200 sq ft?) It might be
interesting to see how many households get reports indicating that they are
"above average".

~~~
indiecore
>I'm pretty sure Jeff specifically builds his machines for low energy use.

It doesn't matter how low energy your servers are they are still servers than
most people don't have.

~~~
dpark
That makes no sense. Obviously the efficiency of any appliance will play into
how it impacts your energy bill. Having a server that your neighbor doesn't
have won't automatically make your usage greater than theirs unless they
happen to have identical usage in all other respects.

Jeff's recent server build (which I believe is going to a colo and not sitting
in his house anyway), uses 31 watts at idle and 87 watts at full load.
Assuming the middle is typical (and this is likely a serious overestimate),
you're looking at 59 watts, or 10kWh/week. You could offset this with a more
efficient furnace, or better insulation. You could also more than offset this
by hanging 3 loads of clothes per week instead of putting them through an
electric dryer (~5000 watt).

------
Adrock
The points system on Consumating encouraged me to become social to a degree I
had never been before or since. It wasn't all bad. I met my wife on the site
and now we have two kids.

------
chmike
I would suggest to debug the gas and electric installations. That means
monitor if there is any abnormal consumptions or leaks.

Changing light bulbs types is like a blind hit.

My brother installed solar panels and could thus monitor consumption. He
noticed abnormal consumptions and with his kids search the origin. They found
a useless heater left on in some basement room. Problem solved. The nice thing
is that it turned out as a game for the small kids and at the the same time
they became more careful about devices consuming electricity for nothing.

------
yen223
The cynic in me has to ask: what does PG&E stand to gain from making houses
more energy-efficient?

~~~
whatusername
Not sure about the US energy market -- but here in Aus -- the profit is in the
baseload kilowatts and not in the peaks. Your cheap Coal plant can produce
electricity really cheaply - but when demand spikes you need to fire up the
higher cost on-demand generators. You can still sell this electricity - but
you may even make a loss on it at the margins.

~~~
curiousdannii
In fact, one quarter of electricity bills goes to _40 hours_ of peak demand
_per year_!

[http://theconversation.edu.au/air-conditioning-is-peaking-
ou...](http://theconversation.edu.au/air-conditioning-is-peaking-out-time-to-
rethink-cool-comfort-10598)

~~~
yen223
Having stayed in Melbourne for a while, I am honestly not surprised.
Melbourne's climate is normally rather mild, but their short summer periods
are _brutal_.

------
nnnnni
You should always check your bills to make sure that the estimated usage
matches the actual usage. It's not uncommon for them to "estimate" based on
the average for the neighborhood/city/state/country.

------
scott_w
I was amused to read that he bought LED bulbs for everything.

I don't deny that they're efficient, but are they so efficient they're worth
spending 3-5x the price of a standard energy efficient bulb?

~~~
mavhc
I was just looking at this, seem to be 2-3x the price, and, in theory, last 6
times longer, so you win without the cost savings, which are about
$1/(hour/day)/year/100W (incandescent equivalent, so 4 rooms with 100W
lighting each on for 3 hours a day saves $12/year, compared to CFL, so worth
replacing CFL with LED as the CFLs die.

~~~
adwf
One thing I'm interested in seeing with my new LED bulbs is the potential
failure modes.

If an incandescent or CFL goes - it's done for. But a quick check of my LED
bulbs shows 22 emitting diodes. When it fails, is it more likely that the
controlling circuitry goes or that an individual diode goes and it carries on
at slightly reduced output? I'm waiting to see, but they've already outlasted
the average lightbulb in my house by a long way - so I don't know how long
I'll have to wait to verify.

~~~
keenerd
It depends.

LEDs use current-regulated power supplies. Lets say your bulb had two chains
of eleven LEDs in parallel. When one LED burns out the whole chain is lost and
the regulator would increase the voltage across the remaining chain until it
was using enough current for two. Naturally this will greatly shorten the life
of the remaining eleven LEDs.

This is the worst case scenario and probably won't happen. Two ways around it.

1) Since current is (non-linearly) proportionate to voltage, the regulator
need to increase the voltage to compensate. But all regulators have a maximum
output voltage. If the regulator is cheap and running near its limits, it
can't increase the voltage high enough to damage the remaining chain and the
bulb will run a little hot but be fine.

2) LEDs get warm and should not operate above 85C. A good regulator has a
thermistor connected to the LEDs and will automatically drop the current to
safe levels. The bulb will once again run a little hot but will be mostly
fine.

If there are more than two wires connecting the regulator to the LED it might
have over-temperature protection. Or if the regulator is physically connected
to the heatsink.

The regulators themselves are pretty reliable. I work mostly with low voltage
DC lighting (12V-48V, 20W-100W) and there is nothing in the regulator that
would wear out easily. Line AC might be a different story, those probably have
large filtering capacitors. If the caps are electrolytic they might dry out
eventually from the heat.

------
rkwz
I'm not from US, so can anyone tell me why some months have low energy
consumption compared to other months? (electricity - may vs july)

Also, do you guys use natural gas for heating too?

~~~
curiousdannii
The biggest proportion of household energy goes towards temperature management
-- heaters, air conditioners, or in some climates, both!

~~~
j-g-faustus
Space heating, water heating, refrigeration and air conditioning add up to 75%
of the energy used by households in USA:
[http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=us_energy_...](http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=us_energy_homes)

Although I was slightly surprised that "lighting and other appliances" is as
much as 25% of the home energy use.

------
mumrah
In my experience, heating and cooling is the bulk of residential energy use.
If you live in an older home, make sure to get an energy audit from the
utility company (usually free - maybe you just need some additional
insulation.

Also, thermal curtains (aka, black-out curtains) can help if you have a lot of
window surface area.

------
tomjen3
That totally works btw - statistically. If you notice you are being taken for
a fool (or your customers notice it) then expect there to be hell to pay.

------
beaker52
The only problem is that they're motivated to reduce your consumption to mask
their price increases and reduce their costs to maximise their profits.

Just like petrol/gas, spend your money to buy fuel efficient cars, petrol
costs more, no noticeable difference in the bank. Everyone has to get on the
wagon or be priced out. It's like an armed robbery, but the gun is an
increasing cost of living, with the threat of jail if you can't pay.

