Home Energy Analysis

This morning the good people at Yarra Valley Water sent Keith and Nash(sp?) to our house as part of a program to audit and survey water use. They had a look at flow rates from our taps and showers. They asked how often we flushed our toilets. We are partial believers in “If it’s yellow, let it mellow, if it’s brown, flush it down”, but our answer was an estimate with a large error potential. The toilets are new, and dual flush with a relatively modest volume so we are efficient on that score.

We received a printed report with a number of suggestions:

• install more efficient shower heads - estimated saving of 23,926 litres per year
• persuade our teenage son to have shorter showers
• install flow control valves and aerators on taps 

They gave us a $40 voucher to one of Melbourne’s larger stores and I gave them a copy of one of the reports from HEAS  which is the least I could do.

We recently received an electricity bill which was abnormally high. When I entered it into the HEAS database it was obvious that there had been a misreading of the account. This is actually quite easy to do with our meter so I assume it happens regularly. So, instead of ringing the supplier and asking for another reading, I produced a long letter with graphs and screenshots of the electricity readings to emphasize how wrong this reading was. And didn’t pay the bill. Of course, a letter is processed less quickly than a phone call, so we received a computerized threat of disconnection before Sam read the letter and made the appropriate entries to our account.

HEAS probably is overkill when faced with situations of this kind, but it certainly made me much more confident that an error had been made and added weight to my case in support.