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I think before to long you'll see people running their houses on Generators for a lot of time and only using hydro when they have to,
the extra charges on your hydro bill are getting away out of hand.
check out a generator and hook it up to natural gas and start running it 3 or 4 hours a day or more.
update: Talked to London Hydro. Higher bill is due to increased water use. Still hard to explain though he said as I don't have a pool or hot tub. Was very helpful in telling me what to do : check toilets, hoses etc. as they might be leaking. Investigation to continue. :)
edited for grammar
You can do that if you like,but,rest well assured that if you turn off your hydro and go completely off grid and still live in a town or city and buy from a local utility,you will still get a bill for everything except your actual usage. For those who have their water bills and hydro bills combined by a public utilitycompany,you're really getting hosed because they apply a retail profit margin into the prices the same as any other supplier of goods and services.Quote:
Originally Posted by BIG MAC
I don't know how the system in London works but here in clarington my water use is almost irrelevant. In the winter the hose gets shut off so all water usage is indoors. In the spring I constantly running water and I also fill the pool. In the summer I'm watering the grass, pressure washing and washing the trucks more often. I use a lot of water when the temp is higher then 10 degrees. My water bill in during the winter months compared to the summer months is within 10%. It would appear my usage is irrelevant because my water bill is always in the same range.... I don't feel bad about using water....Quote:
Originally Posted by Sharon
You only pay hydro for water use if you heat or pump it....
Our tenant had his daughter and baby visit for a week last spring, stayed two months. We monitor our usage very close and she cost us $200/month just by washing and drying clothes, showering etc during peak hours...... You could actually see in the hourly use when she went to visit other relatives overnight, and when she came home and put the laundry in the dryer. (We can see the dryer vent outlet to confirm)
I stuck a timer on our water heater so it does not run during peak hours and it makes a difference, our freezers and fridges are a different matter.....
I know a gent who's rigged up 2x 250w solar panels and DC pump to move all his home's water. He also had hydro telling him that his increased charges were coming from water consumption. A couple weeks of tracking the situation he was able to prove they were full of crap. They adjusted his bills and then another year later his bills spiked again. When he called that time they told him his on-peak use had doubled. He and his wife are both gone from the house from 7am-6:30pm. Their kids are grown and gone. All their kitchen appliances, home theatre systems & computers are on powerbars with timer shutoffs...So how could their on-peak spike?
Hydro refused to help him out so he had an electrician perform a very detailed audit and found hydro was overcharging him by an average of 11kwh per day.
On the non-hydro fault side... Our old oven was on the fritz last winter...220v can REALLY screw up your bills when one of those appliances is turning itself on overnight, and currents are pumping thru the element control knobs to shock ppl.
How else do you suppose Witch Wynne is to get more money out of us ? Increase hydro rates and then sneak in over charges hoping know one will notice. Happens all the time and you wonder what the $ extra profit comes to at year end ? Any accountant could see that when a forecast for the year is done and it has exceeded all expectations. What a scam !
i heat with hydro and no a/c we try to use off peak for dishwasher and cloths washer and dryer, bill is 120 in summer and around 300 in winter
Our bill is pretty grosse but we have two homes, five freezers, three fridges, two water pumps, numerous lights on motion detectors, two chicken coops with lights and heated water dishes, a tractor block,battery and rad heater. It all adds up without even counting all the green diode night lights and three UPS systems....
We pay about 19 cents per kWh, which is low for Ontario but high for North America