Home Energy Analysis

The Home Energy Analysis System (HEAS) has long been able to report on weeks and months - see some examples here. I recently had a request to add the option to report by days. The reason was that changes were being made to electricity consumption on a daily basis. Taking readings at the same time every day, recording in Excel and producing graphs wasn’t good enough, especially when readings were taken late or missed. 

 HEAS obviously copes well with missing and irregular readings although there is some loss of precision. I have now added the capability to report by day. A date range, eg 17 July to 3 August can be requested to make reports more relevant and avoid clutter.  This option should be very useful for those with the discipline to read their meters each day. I’m not that person, so can’t link to an example based on our household.

Whilst changing the report, I changed a few aspects of entry of parameters for reports. It’s long annoyed me that every time a report is requested, all parameters have to be entered, even though the new report might only differ from the previous in minor detail. Now, parameters are stored so that each time a report is requested the previous report’s options are shown - this saves me time, and I hope users will also be appreciative. 

I’ve always thought bottled water a waste of resources and some recent reading supports this belief:

• It is expensive to buy at approximately $2.00 per 600 ml. Petrol was less than $1.20 a litre this morning (not tonight, but that’s another story). Piped to our home, water costs less than a dollar per 1000 litres here in Melbourne.
• The production of bottles uses considerable crude oil.
• The bottles are recycled less than most other containers, at least in part because bottled water is often consumed outside the home.
• There are considerable transport costs in bringing Evian water from the French Alps or Fiji water across the Pacific Ocean.
• The crude oil equivalent of bringing bottled water to market, when everything is taken into account, is 20% of the bottle’s volume.

On a not completely unrelated topic, apparently the Japanese have been able to buy diet water for three years. I can’t wait until it’s available here.

The non-Australian reader might need to consult an atlas to see that Tasmania and Victoria are some distance apart and that there is a considerable amount of sea water between them. Nevertheless, there is a suggestion that Victoria’s water crisis could be lessened by piping water from Lake Margaret in North West Tasmania to Victoria.  No pumping would be necessary as the Lake is 600 metres above sea-level. Apparently the 350 kilometre underwater section would be easily built by comparison with other projects, for instance,  a gas pipeline being constructed between Norway and Britain.

Lake Margaret is the site of Tasmania’s first hydro electricity centre, beginning production in 1914. The area has reliable rain, apparently receiving 177 inches in 1948. Melbourne, by contrast, receives an average of 24 inches (600mm). There would be some negative effects on the environment by such a large infrastructure project. Tasmania is used to robust discussion of major projects.

 The desalination plant planned to be built in Victoria over the next few years has obvious environmental impacts and with considerable ongoing electricity use and carbon dioxide emissions.

By comparison, a pipeline would be almost benign. As it is claimed it could be operational more quickly and cheaply than a desalination plant, it seems to be well worth further investigation by our elected representatives.