How to keep your electricity bill under control

34 minutes ago

Photo: RNZ

When it comes to keeping your electricity bills down, knowledge is power.

This week Morning Report has been looking at the energy sector as the cost of living continues to rise.

Energy Efficiency & Conservation Authority lead advisor Dr Gareth Gretton spoke to John Campbell to share a number of hacks and dispel some popular myths about how to keep your power bill under control.

Heat pumps

Morning Report listener Di, from Havelock North, wanted to know if it's more economical to keep a heat pump on, or to switch it on and off as needed.

"That's the perennial question with heat pumps, which is the best way to run them. It's pretty straightforward. You're going to use the least energy overall if you turn it on and off when you need it to. So if you're leaving them on all the time, it will use more energy. Simple as that," Gretton said.

There's a significant price difference between cold and hot washes.

Photo: 123rf

Washing machines

"Probably one of the easiest things is you can switch to cold washes. The difference between doing cold wash and hot wash, especially with a top loader washing machine, it's pretty significant.

"You're down to around 10 cents a wash if you're using cold, but you could be up around 80 cents a wash if you're using hot," Gretton said.

Time of day

"When we calculate the cost of running appliances on our website, we generally use an average rate. An average rate for a lot of Kiwis is about 30 cents a kilowatt hour.

"Some people will be on a flat tariff, which basically means they're paying 30 cents a kilowatt hour no matter the time of day, no matter the day of the week.

"Other people will be on a more complex plan, which varies the price. And the one that most people will probably be familiar with is a day night plan. Basically it means you're going to pay a slightly higher price during the day and a lower price at night.

"So you could be looking at something like 35 cents during the day, but 20 cents during the night.

"The way to get the value out of that is to shift as much of your usage as you can to those nighttime periods. I think some people might switch plans and think they could save money and they might actually find it ends up costing them more depending on the pattern of usage," Dr Gretton said.

Daily charges

"There's the per kilowatt hour charge, but then there's also a daily charge. And I think the daily charge is probably one of the bits of many people's bills that's been changing the most over the years.

"If you're just looking at the overall total that comes in every month, you're not necessarily tuning into that. The daily charges have been going up from less than a dollar a day to now sort of one, two, to even three dollars a day for some people.

"That is starting to become an increasingly large proportion of your bill. And it's probably worth saying that there's also a bit of an interplay between the daily charge and the variable kilowatt hour charges, because a lot of the retailers, they'll give you lower variable charges if you pay for a higher daily charge," Dr Gretton said.

Heated towel rails, fridges and the TV

Additional data from the Energy Efficiency & Conservation Authority shows on average, watching your television for 10 hours a day costs about 25 cents. That's around the same cost of running a regular fridge-freezer.

Photo: 123rf.com

Heated towel rails do push prices up if they are on all day, every day. But cost around the same as an incandescent lightbulb, and double the cost of running your fridge-freezer.

Cooking a big meal in an oven costs approximately 50 cents, air fryers cost as little as 25 percent of that due to only needing to heat a smaller space.

The Electricity Authority recently launched a new price comparison website, Billy, where users can compare their current bills to plans available with other providers.

Yesterday Morning Report spoke to Neil Mallon, the Utilities Disputes Commissioner following a 500 percent increase in complaints to the organisation about power companies over the past five years.

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