Dee Davis (00:00)
Hello and welcome to Management Under Construction. I'm Dee Davis.
Brad Wyant (00:04)
And I'm Brad Wyant
Dee Davis (00:06)
energy bills part two, because one part just isn't enough when it's such a fun topic like energy bills. if you'll remember in part one, we discussed some of the reasons that energy bills are on the rise, how energy use has changed over time,
As you'll see in this episode, that's changed quite a bit. We also talked a little bit about how some green energy policies are impacting the cost of energy that we're paying today.
in today's episode, we are going to go through the different ways that consumers see energy usage on their bills now, today. Right now, I dare you to go pull your energy bill. In fact, I would love you to do that. Please go pull your energy bill before you finish listening to this episode and pull it out and see if you can follow along with some of the things. You may see some, all, or a few of the things that we're talking about in this episode.
And then we're gonna compare some rates and different methods in different parts of the United States. So was able to gather some information about how things look across the United States in specific areas and give you some specific examples. And then we're gonna talk about what you really are here to hear, which is what can I do about it? How can I positively impact my energy bill, whether it's at your home or at your business?
Brad, any questions or lingering thoughts from part one before we get started?
Brad Wyant (01:27)
just that for a TLDR, the power grid is one of the most sophisticated, awesome inventions of all time. And I don't know about everybody else on this podcast, but I certainly don't appreciate how ingenious and how difficult it was to develop, but very thankful for it. The further we've gone to research on this cast and the further I get into utility work in my career.
Dee Davis (01:51)
Yeah, it is a pretty marvelous thing. And I don't think any of us spend a whole lot of time thinking about it, but maybe after you've listened to this cast, you will. So how your energy shows up on your bill and how you're charged for energy can vary based on state or even your local utility based on where you are, your city, your town, or even your area of the country.
for the most part, what we're seeing is instead of just saying, we're going to charge you $0.05 per kilowatt hour or $0.09 per kilowatt hour, we're seeing things that are called time of use, tiered, seasonal. For some customers in some areas, there's also a thing called demand charges. We're going to go through all of this and explain what they are. And then this fun little thing called event pricing.
Hold your socks on. This is going to be fun. So time of use is exactly what it sounds like. It's when you use your energy. When I was living in San Diego, San Diego Gas and Electric came up with a cute little whenergy is when they switched over to time of use, they called it whenergy. And I thought that was, it was really kind of catchy and cute and fairly self-explanatory. It's not about
exactly or only how much you use, but it's about when you're using the energy. So it's a lot like surge pricing for Uber or Lyft, that when the energy demand is at its highest, the rates you pay are at the highest, if that makes any sense. You'll see terms on your bill like on peak, off peak, and super off peak, which of course is my favorite time because that's when energy is the cheapest.
Each of those has a different rate, cost per kilowatt hour, with peak being the highest and super off peak being the lowest. Energy companies really, really like to play games with the days and the times that define these various peaks and they change frequently. So just when you think you've got a hold of...
okay, four to nine is our peak time and I need to readjust my life to do not a lot of things with energy during four to nine. Well, then it changes five to 10 or three to eight. It moves around. there's lots of reasons why those things move around. Solar and wind power had a lot to do with peak usage times because if you think about it,
If you're looking at, we'll just call it four to nine as peak time. That's when the sun starts going down and the wind maybe starts dropping a little bit, and we're relying on all the other sources of energy to come in and take up the slack.
Brad Wyant (04:40)
Yeah, put another way, the free, cheap way to get power is coming offline just as everyone is deciding to come home, turn their microwave on, run their dishwasher. And what these power companies are having to do is ramp, increase the amount of power they provide to the grid drastically. And what are the only kinds of power plants where you can use a dial to turn up the power? Natural gas, coal.
to certain extent nuclear, but it's the dirty stuff. And that's the trade off we get with the solar until we get to a point when lithium ion batteries cost a penny for a thousand watts. So we're not there yet, obviously.
Dee Davis (05:23)
Yeah, battery storage. don't really touch too much about that and what I wrote about the cast not that we can't talk about it a little bit, but there's some serious concerns and issues with battery storage, not to mention technology-wise, we just don't have the capacity and the cost per kilowatt of storage is just not there for the average consumer. Tiered billing is the other thing we see a lot. So I started seeing this maybe
15, maybe 20 years ago, I started seeing tiers being used on energy bills. And what that means is you have tier one, tier two, tier three. Well, tier one is your cheapest.
I looked up my energy bill at my house in San Diego and I have a really weird thing going on there because I've got solar. So I'm overproducing and I'm selling stuff back to the grid, but then I also have tiered billing.
The tiers are based on how much energy allowance you get for your home. So the quantity of energy you're using, not when you're using it. I have a not small house in San Diego. My allowance is 439 kilowatt hours, which is a pretty small allowance for a house of that size. Interestingly, I had my friend look hers up. She lives down the road from me. Her house is
Probably a half, maybe a third of the size of my house. Her allowance is over 600 kilowatt hours.
I thought it was based on square footage. I believe that's their published data. But what information are they using then? Because my house has a lot more square footage than hers and my allowance is lower.
Brad Wyant (07:01)
strange. It sounds like the kind of thing where somebody's dodging the county assessor trying to fix their property taxes. There must be some, you know, person puts a finger on the scale aspect of this all.
Dee Davis (07:15)
I'm really not sure that came as a big surprise to me. But I get tier one rates for up to 439 kilowatt hours. But as soon as I spend that 440 kilowatt hour, my rate goes up is what that means. And then there's a certain number of kilowatt hours I get for tier two. And if I go over that, which I don't ever, but if I do go over that, then I pay tier three rates. These can be doubling and tripling costs by the way, just for fun.
I looked up some of these rates and my bill is, like I said, a little funny because I have solar and some of that other thing going on. But it's the difference between nine cents a kilowatt hour and 29 cents a kilowatt hour. Oof. Yeah. Yeah. Significant penalty for going over your allowance.
So once you pass the tier one usage, you get penalized for going to tier two, tier three, and then anything once you get past tier two, you're at the very high penalty tier three rate. Most people really don't watch their energy use in real time. do you know when you get to 239 kilowatt? I mean, come on. Who's doing that?
Brad Wyant (08:30)
Who's reading their own meter?
Dee Davis (08:32)
Yeah, I mean, you would have to be watching your energy use in real time, which, the dashboard that I have does actually allow me to do that to some extent. But come on, let's face it, nobody's doing that. So what that system really did is it's really not an effective way to get people to curb their energy use. It was a spectacular failure. And mostly it just makes people angry because their bills just go up.
The next thing that you might see on your bill is called seasonal charges. I think a lot of them, if not all of them are doing this now, charging you different rates in different seasons, like higher rates in the summertime and lower rates in the wintertime, at least in warmer climates. Now in colder climates, it could be the inverse. For most people, energy demand is the highest in the summer because we're cooling.
And AC units, the compressors on AC units are one of the biggest energy users that we have in our homes other than, can you guess what the other one is? Doesn't apply to all homes though.
Brad Wyant (09:33)
I don't know.
Dee Davis (09:34)
Pool pumps.
Brad Wyant (09:35)
Pool pumps.
Dee Davis (09:37)
Yeah, if you have a pool pump in your house, you can actually watch it turn on. If you're watching your energy use live on your dashboard, it goes click, turns on, it goes shoop. It's skyrocketing.
Brad Wyant (09:50)
something
refrigerant or pumping your pool water pumps consume a lot of energy.
Dee Davis (09:56)
They do, and we did replace ours a number of years ago with a variable flow pump, which helps quite a bit. It uses a lot less energy and I program it to run at night so that I'm using it when the energy is the cheapest. So it doesn't impact us as much, still, I threatened to backfill that pool every single year. One of these days I'm going to do it.
Seasonal rates you may be seeing that your rates are changing and you'll see your bills going up higher while part of it may be that you're paying a higher rate during one part of the year. The other lovely thing that has reared its head in the last few years is called a demand charge. this used to only be seen in commercial buildings. Back in my.
commissioning days and my energy manager days, I would work with commercial clients to help them understand how they're using their energy and when they're using your energy and level it so that we're not seeing these big, huge peaks when you come in and turn everything on. That's what a demand charge is penalizing you for.
Because what you're doing is you're creating a huge demand all at once when you're turning a bunch of things on. So for a residential user, that might look something like coming home from work, cranking up the AC, turning on the oven, turning on the TV, turning on a bunch of lights, whatever you got going on in your house. Hey, Alexa, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, whatever you're doing in your home. Now you're home. You weren't home before. Now you're home. Everything's all this jumble of activity.
That used to be saved for commercial customers, but now they are starting to see on residential bills. I think out in California, I saw it the first time maybe seven or eight years ago. And some of these demand charges, for a residential customer can be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars. I've even seen a residential customer get tagged for over $1,000 in demand fees.
Now, what in the world they were doing to get $1,000 in demand fees, I don't know. But these demand charges, the way they work is they have a tendency to penalize you for one act for a prolonged period of time. So it depends on your energy provider how they classify a demand charge and how long they penalize you for it. But it's often not a single penalty.
It can be for a commercial customer. Whatever your peak use was, you get penalized for that for 12 months.
Brad Wyant (12:40)
What?
Dee Davis (12:41)
Yes. commercial customers have been dealing with this for a very long time. energy managers, are going into facilities and trying to help these commercial customers understand how to level their energy use. And this is where complicated commercial systems like, thermal ice storage come in because you're going to make the ice to cool your building in the middle of the night. And then you're going to circulate.
that during the day, there's all these complicated things that happen.
Brad Wyant (13:12)
That's a really interesting piece of engineering that I want to talk about for a second. You're talking about an industrial system inside a commercial building only to create ice just because it is cheaper to create that ice off hours than it is to use a conventional, more efficient air conditioning system during peak hours. That is
Hardcore refrigeration engineering happening in a very different way than it otherwise would, if only for this rate issue, the difference in cost between one time of day and the other. That's mind-boggling to me. That's pretty wild. That's awesome and crazy, and it would drive me nuts if I had to pay for one, but it's radical.
Dee Davis (14:00)
Yeah, this is extremely large scale cooling that we're talking about with ice storage units. These systems are massive and extremely expensive and complicated. But yeah, that's precisely the reason they exist is because the cost difference to cool.
in the middle of the night, create something cold in the middle of the night and create something cold in the middle of the day, we can use heat transfer to pull the cold off the ice for lack of a better term during the day when energy cost is high. So there's whole businesses that are framed on the fact that energy costs more at different times and that these demand charges are a real thing.
depends on your provider, whether or not they penalize you for a long period of time or a single moment in time. in San Diego, have not gotten any of those demand charges on any of my bills, but I got hit on when I checked my bill in Colorado, just for fun. My energy bills are very low in Colorado, energy is very cheap there. But I got hit for like $4 and change.
for a specific event on a specific day. They tell me what day and what hour that it happened. Who knows what happened? Maybe it was really hot that day. I'd have to go back and look. But it was probably the air conditioner. I probably decided it was too hot and turned it on. So that's demand charges.
Event pricing is another one that you may see. So this sounds like it might be fun, huh? Event pricing, like maybe there's a party, there's an event we're going to. Yeah, maybe it's fun. It's not. It's not fun. What it is is event pricing might be something like an extreme weather event, an extremely hot, hot snap.
Brad Wyant (15:36)
Get it going on. Yeah
Dee Davis (15:51)
that happens in a whole area. And this happens in San Diego, I would say three or four times a year. I've seen it happen in Colorado a couple of times. And certainly in other parts of the country as well back East where you'll have a week or two of just super hot days. Well, those are called event days. They'll say, okay, if we have so many days of
the temperature going up this much and being over a certain temperature, people are going to be cranking up their ACs to accommodate for that. It's an event day and an event day means an energy penalty. depending on where you are, you may have the option to get a little device put on the compressor of your AC unit. I volunteered for that program for many years when I lived in San Diego.
where they can actually turn the compressor of your AC unit off during an event day. They decide, not you, when you sign up for it, but you get several hundred dollars a year in credits on your bills and you can still run the fan. I had it happen on a holiday one time. I want to say it was Thanksgiving, which you wouldn't think that you would have a high heat day on Thanksgiving, but we did one year.
And I had that thing on the compressor, the AC unit, and it turned it off and it was miserable. We had it taken off after that. That was enough. But we got several hundred dollars a year in credit on our bill every year. And I think that was before we had solar. And then that may have been what sent me finally over the edge to solar. A house full of people and it's 90 degrees in the house. It's not good.
So these kind of extreme weather events force them to turn on peaker plants, if you've ever heard of a peaker plant. And what those are are power plants that only turn on, they're there for emergencies. They turn on when either a outage happens, another plant unexpectedly goes down, or you have a special event like this where it's like either this or we're not going to have any power.
it will turn on the peaker plants and those are very, very expensive to run. There was actually a scandal a bunch of years ago out in California about that, about them saying that they kept having to turn all these peaker plants on. And I think there was a scandal about they were really scamming the energy consumers to pay more. And I think a bunch of people got money back. There was a lawsuit
That kind of stuff can happen. You can sign up usually for text messages or emails from your energy provider to be notified when there's an event day. So you can modify your behavior that day if you choose to. So you can maybe change the temperature on your thermostat, turn some things off, unplug some things, make sure unnecessary things are turned off to help minimize your energy bill that day.
Brad Wyant (18:54)
But just reminds me of basic economics. How bad do you really want it on that hottest day when you've got 11 people in the house and everyone's miserable? How much are you willing to pay? Your willingness to pay goes up a lot depending on the conditions.
Dee Davis (19:08)
it does. And yeah, I'm sure a lot of people were willing to pay on that day because how many people were entertaining for Thanksgiving when it was 100 degrees outside or whatever it was. So as I mentioned in part one of the cast, if
I could give you a straight answer as to why your energy bills are rising if I could draw a straight line for you. But I can't draw a straight line because all those things we just talked about, all the time of use, the tier, the seasonal, the demand, the event, guess what? It's all happening at the same time. You could be paying seasonal and tiered at the same time. and then you could have an event.
More than likely, you're having many of these things happening at the same time on your bill. So no wonder consumers are confused about what in the heck is happening on their bills. Why is my energy bill going up? I did all the retrofits. I replaced the pool pump. I got energy efficient appliances. I got new washer and dryers. I replaced all the light bulbs to LED.
I'm turning off the lights, but my bill keeps going up. It's not just your use. That's the problem. All those energy efficiency things that we do are to bring your kilowatt hour usage down. But your bill isn't just your usage. It's seasonal, it's tiered, it's time of use, it's all this crazy stuff all at once. So that's why.
I can't draw a straight line for you. And depending on where you are, it is absolutely going to be different. okay, honest raise of hands by all the listeners. How many of you actually look at your bill every month? I mean, look at it, not just the balance, not the how much you owe, but look at the bill.
Brad Wyant (21:02)
My hand is not up.
Dee Davis (21:04)
I gotta be honest, I used to be pretty good when I was learning all this stuff. I was very diligent about making sure that I understood it all and I took classes and I did all these things. I used to be very diligent. I've gotten a little bit lazy since I moved to Colorado because guess what? Energy here, very, very cheap. My energy bill is between 60 and $80 a month year round. Compared to what I was paying in California,
especially before I got solar, don't pay anything more now that I have solar on that house. But compared to what I was paying in California, it's not even worth mentioning. People pay three, five, $800 a month in California for energy.
Okay, so this brings me to where's the most expensive energy in the United States? We touched on it in episode one, it's Hawaii. 41.27 cents per kilowatt hour in Hawaii. And again, this is all of Hawaii average. Might be slightly different in different places. So these are state averages that I'm gonna be giving you. The cheapest average.
energy rate is 11.42 cents per kilowatt hour in Utah.
Brad Wyant (22:14)
wonder why it would be Utah. mean, Utah isn't exceptionally anything in my mind in terms of energy. It's just a ton of coal. don't know. guess when I drove there from Wyoming, I saw a bunch of coal trains going west. So maybe it's just cheap coal plants. don't know.
Dee Davis (22:32)
I'm not sure. I did not research why. I just researched the stats. Hawaii, it's not that surprising because everything is imported in Hawaii. everything is expensive. I was stationed there when I was in the Navy for a little bit. And back then, and this is like early nineties, I think milk was seven or $8 a gallon in the early nineties. I don't even know what it is now.
Brad Wyant (22:59)
Yeah, so you the premium that you have to pay on electrical power, anything for a job if you're in the construction business and you're listening to this. Then add the shipping charge of slowboating it to Hawaii, let alone having to air freight it, heaven forbid the the big equipment that they have to install for power plants. How all has to be shipped and it has to be trucked through mountains and other incredible
geography of Hawaii. Pretty serious, pretty tough. And it's per island. They're not going to run underwater cables between islands, so you've got to have a power plant here and a power plant there and another one there. So there's no scale efficiency with those things.
Dee Davis (23:38)
I belong to the National Association of Women in Construction and we had the Alaska chapter come and do a presentation on the challenges of building in Alaska. And wow, all that stuff you just said, depending on where you are, in Alaska, there's parts including the capital Juno that has no roads that go to it.
It's not connected to the rest of the state with roads. You have to either fly things in via seaplane or you have to bring it in on a barge. Those are your options. So a lot of the state is like that and there's more remote areas. So you can't just drive things to where you're going to your job site in Alaska. and then of course you have the weather. It was a very interesting study.
on how difficult it is to get things built in a remote area like that, Hawaii, Alaska. And I'm sure there's a lot of other countries that deal with that kind of thing. We don't deal with it that much in the US.
Brad Wyant (24:35)
We don't, which is very fortunate. There are a lot of geographies that are much more challenging than ours.
Dee Davis (24:40)
The second most expensive energy, drum roll please, not surprisingly, California. Average of 30.22 cents per kilowatt hour. Now that's an average. So that includes the entire state. It's a big state. There's lots of jurisdictions. It's all very different, but that's an average.
And so how's that deregulation working for Texas? Remember we talked in part one of the cast how Texas kind of seceded from the energy union way back when and said, no, no, no, we're going to do our own thing. We don't want to play with the rest of you states. So how's that working out for Texas? Well, they're in the middle of the pack at 15.61 cents.
So they're right about in the middle.
Brad Wyant (25:26)
Maybe not in terms of performance, if history is any indicator they've had some performance issues in the past.
Dee Davis (25:33)
have, but I think that could be said for just about anywhere. I've had lots of power outages in California. I've had several power outages in Colorado. I've had power outages in pretty much every state I've lived in, Hawaii, Virginia, Florida. So I think overall, our grid is extremely reliable. And if people's reaction to a power outage
is any indication of how reliable our grid is. People lose their minds when there's going to be an outage. They say, there's probably going to be an outage because of this heat event, this weather event, this whatever. You've heard of it. Everybody's heard of it. What do people do? They run to the store. They get bread, milk, ice, and water.
think those are the four main things that the stores usually get cleaned out of. I don't understand the bread part or the milk really. If the power is out, how are you going to refrigerate the milk?
Brad Wyant (26:35)
Yeah, milk's just gonna go bad. What are you doing?
Dee Davis (26:37)
Yeah, I mean the ice I guess I kind of get I'm assuming you're filling a.
Brad Wyant (26:40)
Going back to old days, doing an icebox solution.
Dee Davis (26:44)
put it in the refrigerator or the freezer or you're putting it in a cooler. So that kind of makes sense to me. I crack up. I tend to be one of those people that's prepared. And so I'm not one of those that's running to the store unless you just happen to catch me at a real bad time. But usually I'm prepared enough that I don't have to do those things. The next thing I want to talk about, and this is again, you can control part of your bill, but not all of your bill.
I took a couple of different bills from a couple of different types of properties in California. I took Brad's bills from his last house in Michigan and my bill at the house in Colorado. And I looked at how much of the bill was usage and how much was other stuff. And that other stuff is just fees folks, okay?
deregulation fees, nuclear decommissioning fees, delivery fees, know, blah, blah, blah, fees, fees, fees that are not, your actual kilowatt hour usage. My bill in California is pretty consistently about 50 % of the actual dollar value of the bill is use. The other 50 % is fees, taxes, fees,
things I can't control.
Brad Wyant (28:04)
And those fees, while not altered by how much you use of the power, are the thing that pay for getting you the power in the first place, I assume. I mean, they're covering the minimum cost of having a power company, of paying accountants that have to do your bill no matter what, that kind of thing. Or do we know?
Dee Davis (28:25)
Yeah, there is a specific line item in everybody's bill they call it slightly different things, but it's essentially a delivery fee and it is based on your usage. So if you use 500 kilowatt hours that month, it's a multiple, it's 500 kilowatt hours times however many cents per kilowatt hour, and that's your delivery fee. And that's how the utility company maintains your lines and pays their employees and that kind of stuff.
But there's a lot of other fees on there too. There's taxes and a lot of other fees. That's just one of the many fees that you'll find on your bill. So again, go grab that bill, take a look at what it is in your area. I checked my friend's bill in California, in the same area of California, because she doesn't have solar and I do. And I wondered if that impacted that at all. Not much. 54 % of hers was usage.
She's on a very different plan than I am. And so she had slightly less fees than I did, but not by much. Brad's bills in Michigan, about 35 % of your bill was use, the rest was fees.
Brad Wyant (29:34)
And that does not surprise me knowing what the grid and DTE are like. It's a old system that needs a lot of work, that gets pummeled by snow every winter, and is very, hot in the summer. So just a very extreme set of conditions.
Dee Davis (29:56)
Yeah, and that's why I'm saying wherever you are listening from, and I would actually be curious, I know we have a lot of international listeners, I would love to know how this works, where you are, we have a lot of listeners in Japan, in the Philippines, Romania, in several different countries in Europe, I'd love to hear from you guys how this works where you are, if you could drop us a line at heydee
at managementunderconstruction.com. I'd love to hear from you. My bill in Colorado is about 55%. So interesting, California, Colorado in the 50 % range, Michigan, 35 % range, being use and the rest of it all being fees. I'd love to hear from any listener from anywhere. What are you seeing on your bill? How much of it is actual kilowatt hour usage
to your bill versus your total bill, just a simple division there. So what is the takeaway? The takeaway is you can't change the fees, The only thing you can change is what and how you use the energy. So why is your bill going up? There's a plethora of reasons why your bill is going up, but the only thing you can control is your use. So let's talk about
what you can change. So potentially you can change your billing plan. So for example, San Diego Gas and Electric in San Diego has multitude of different billing plans to choose from. You have to pay attention a little bit. I could choose time of use or I could choose tiered possibly. I don't know with solar, I may or may not have that choice, but
once you understand how you use your energy and how it's built, changing the billing plan may save you money.
You can also change how and when you use your energy. So this is a list. So let's talk about some of these things. Big users, laundry, pool pumps, microwaves, ovens.
compressors, things like that, run them at night or on off peak times as much as you reasonably can. Now, does this mean you sweat to death until nine o'clock at night? I've done it. I've done it. I've, I've just waited. I'm like, okay, I'm only turning the AC to this point. And at nine o'clock, man, when the energy gets cheaper, I am, going to be cooler. So I do that.
Sometimes and sometimes I can't wait. Sometimes I'm just, it's just not worth it. I'm turning it up now and I'm done today. unplug things that you're not using or that you use intermittently, toasters, can openers, microwaves, phone chargers. We talked about putting things on timers in the last episode. Timers and power strips are a great option. So if you don't want to go spend the money for a timer, like we talked about, I don't know what's a timer.
12, 15, 20 bucks, I don't something like that. There's all those little things, you gotta push them all and you gotta figure out how to use it. They're great, they will last forever once you get one. I think I still have one that my parents had in 1975. Still works, but you could do that. You can invest the money in some timers. You can also just unplug it or
I have the toaster, the coffee maker, can opener, things like that that are off more than they're on. They're on a power strip. And when I need them, I turn the power strip on. I use the thing, I turn it off. That's simple. That way it's not drawing power all the time. When you go on vacation or you go out of town, definitely unplug everything you possibly can. That's also a fire safety tip.
You're welcome. Use alternative methods to save energy. Have you heard of that thing called hang drying clothes?
Brad Wyant (33:39)
So a little bit of inside baseball here for the listeners. We paused the recording of the cast a little earlier because I had to do my laundry. I had to move my laundry along because I'm traveling soon and I couldn't avoid doing it just now. honestly, not nuking my laundry in the dryer at like the hottest temperature. My clothes are lasting longer. I got that tip from somebody in grad school and 100 % try it. Do it on a lighter
cycle in terms of the heat and then iron, whatever you want iron. And you will notice a difference in the longevity of your clothes and in the power bill on that dryer.
Dee Davis (34:16)
Yeah, dryers are a major consumer of energy and dryers are pretty much electric. especially my nicer clothes. I like to hang, not that I have all that many nice clothes, but the clothes that I do have, I hang those dry, all of them. So one of the beautiful things about living in Colorado is I can put something on a hanger and a half an hour later, it's completely dry. I love it. It's fantastic. Your clothes will last longer. They'll look better.
and you don't consume any energy or heat up your house in the middle of summer to dry your clothes. I used to hand wash and hang dry my clothes when I was poor. I didn't have any money. I did it all the time. And sometimes I scratched my head and go, why do I still not do that? Okay, the hand washing, okay, maybe not. But the hang drying, that's kind of a no brainer. you just need some hangers and you hang it up and you walk away. It's done.
A lot of places won't let you have outdoor clothes hangers I hear anymore. A lot of HOAs and stuff aren't letting people do that from what I hear. First of all, they'd have to tell me to come and rip it down before I would. And I don't know if I'd even do it then, but I just hang it up inside my house.
The washing machine's now.
Brad Wyant (35:26)
on brand for you to threaten to go to war with your HOA over hanging laundry. That's classic. Sorry, I just had...
Dee Davis (35:32)
I would try me, but I mostly hang the stuff up inside my house. you just put it on some hangers and it looks a little messy for a little bit. the washing machines now, they squeeze pretty much that water out of it anymore. So it's not like you're hanging it up and it's dripping all over your floor. it's not a big ask really to hang dry things. Try cooking with a solar oven. I say this because
I cook with solar oven not all the time, but sometimes. And I'm doing a solar cooking class in August. And I can't wait. It's going to be so much fun. If you're interested in learning how to solar cook, contact me. I'll hook you up with some information. Avoid turning everything on all at once, like we talked about, to avoid those demand fees. Big temperature swings in your house. Have you ever heard this before?
Just leave your air conditioner on, it'll be cheaper. Have you heard that before?
Brad Wyant (36:25)
I've never heard that before.
Dee Davis (36:26)
or your heater. It's true to a point. if you like it like a refrigerator in your house, that may or may not be true. But what you want to avoid is big temperature swings in your house. So you want to leave your heater or your AC on to avoid that wild temperature swing where you come home and you're like, it's way too hot or it's way too cold. And now you're asking the unit to catch up and work really, really hard.
for hours and hours to get the house to the place where you want it. So you don't want to turn it off entirely when you go to work or go to run errands you want to just change it. my AC runs at 74 in the summer. That's where I leave it when I'm home. When I leave the house, I'll turn it up to 78 or 80.
If I'm feeling really frisky, maybe 82. And I leave it there so that when I get home, I can start slowly turning it back to the comfortable level without it having to go from it being 85 or 88 in the house all the way down to 74. So that does help.
You can also use as much natural ventilation as possible. What natural ventilation is, is open those windows when it's reasonably possible to do that. Allow cross breezes. So if you have a window on one side of the house and a window on the other side of the house, open them both. Let that air come across. And again, that's only if it's not like really hot outside. If it's super hot outside, all you're going to be doing is letting that hot air in. In that case, you want to leave it
closed and close those blinds or curtains to keep that heat out and your house will stay remarkably cool by doing that.
Brad Wyant (38:11)
have a story here. So when I was applying to my first graduate degree, it was a master's in sustainable design and construction. I wrote my essay about a house that was a mansion that I had toured that had been turned into a museum in Louisiana. And it was built along the river where the long face of the house was parallel to the river and the short faces of the house were perpendicular. So if they opened up all of the windows and doors, there were no
impedances to airflow. The walls of the house were built such that they were all perpendicular. And if you open enough doors and windows, it would just blow straight through it like a radiator. And I remember thinking at the time I was in high school, like, this is awesome. And people talk about biophilic design and all these other sustainability terms now. People have been doing that for a while. It just takes an understanding of nature and energy and
a little bit more consideration than, all right, look up how big a unit next that a lot of HVAC designers might do. And it takes an architect with a little bit more patience than, all right, this room, that room, done. But you can get a lot more performance out of a building if you think about these kinds of things in advance and the kind of investment you're making when you decide to build a building or to really renovate some existing structure.
There's a might as well mentality I think that some people should take where if you're gonna do it, you might as well try to make it as high performance, as efficient, as considerate a design as you can. So if you're somebody listening to this podcast thinking about building a house someday or working actively on design for a project, try to consider how you can alter the design of that structure to better work with its environment to save you money and be a better place to be.
Dee Davis (40:01)
that's a great example. as I've said before a few different times, I think to solve the problems of today we have to look into the past. How did we used to do it? Because these problems have always existed. We've just we have different technology and different ways of solving these problems, and sometimes our solution to the problem creates a different problem and now we're so focused on solving the problem we created. We forgot we can uncreate the problem.
Passive ventilation has always been an option that has been used. Even when you go back and you look at how ancient buildings were built, they were built on top of water. And have natural cooling from the water below. It's incredible. And you're thinking, how did they know that? They figured it out and then they did it.
And I remember one time I was doing an energy evaluation on an old, old school in San Diego. And this is one of my favorite energy stories these folks didn't have air conditioning. It was an old building, old buildings generally don't have air conditioning. And this school couldn't afford to put air conditioning in. And they were in a high heat load area. They had lots of blacktop around it.
we were looking at shading options and all these different things to try to reduce the heat load in the classrooms for the kids. And as I'm walking through the classrooms I'm a mechanical person, so I'm always looking up, even though there was no AC, I'm still looking up. And I realized that they have those really high clearstory windows that old buildings have. And they're operable. And I remember
these school buildings from when I was a kid. My school had windows just like that. They had the regular big plate windows and then they had these clear story windows up top that would kick open. And we had a big pole with a little thingy on the end of it where you could unlatch it and kick open. And guess what? The heat goes up. The reason for those windows was to let the heat out. And the teachers had no idea that they were operable.
nor how to open them. so that was a game changer for them until we could get some better solutions put in place. It at least let the heat out.
So sometimes we have to look into the past to solve some of our current challenges. Natural ventilation, open your windows, allow your cross breezes, close blinds and drapes to keep the sun from coming through or keep the heat coming through your glazing in the windows. And that works incredibly well. Something that we also touched on in a recent podcast is the energy use
like chat GPT and AI. It uses a ton of energy and a ton of water. sit there and play on AI all day long, you're actually using a ton of energy. So you could maybe skip some of that. Definitely shut down your computers, your printers, your monitors when not in use.
I see this happen in houses, but I see it more in businesses. I'll come into an office at six o'clock in the morning. Not only are three quarters of the lights on that people never turned off, but monitors and printers and copiers and things like that are glowing all night long, especially if you have older ones that don't have the auto shut off on them. It happens a lot and that's costing you a lot of money.
look very closely on your bill at your usage, not just your total cost. Don't just start pulling your hair out when you see the total cost. Look at your usage. You should be able to pull information from your provider for at least the last year, as long as you've had that provider for the last year at that property. And you can compare month to month throughout various times of the year. So once you get at least a year's worth of data, this May you use this much, last May you use this much.
And it's either up or it's down. And maybe it was hotter last year, it's hotter this year. To give you a good idea, if you're starting to see jumps that you can't explain in your usage, not your total bill, but your usage, it's time to start asking yourself what's going on. Something's happening inside your facility.
If you're having a hard time paying your bill, there are programs available through the utility as an individual residential rate payer that may help you and can offer you some significant discounts. You have to contact your utility to find out if you're eligible. Most utilities offer level pay plans, which is kind of a cool thing for people who don't want the wild swings of it's $150 this month and it's $400 next month.
you can request a level pay plan where they average your 12 months and then you just pay that average each month. So that's kind of a nice deal if predictability is important to you. They also have payment terms that can be available if you're going through a tough time. I know there's a lot of people out there right now that are unemployed. If you're having a tough time, there are payment terms usually available through your utility. If you need help understanding your bill,
call me, email me, text me, and I'll see what I can do to help you understand what you're seeing on your bill. Some utilities will offer a free evaluation in your home to come in and check things out and see if they can see something that maybe you can save some money on. you're using a really, really old refrigerator. I remember my parents had this.
50 year old refrigerator in their house for the longest time. I was like, mom, you got to get rid of this thing. the utility will actually give you a rebate. They'll come and pick it up and they'll take it and they'll recycle the refrigerant and they'll give you $50 or $75 towards your next refrigerator. But this thing is killing your energy bill. And they finally got rid of it. So if you need some help, contact me. I'll see what I can do to help.
Brad Wyant (45:57)
I never knew that utilities could be quite as fascinating as this. And I had no idea that my bill was so disproportionately fees as opposed to the actual rate I was paying. long story short, there's a lot more to it than we give it credit for.
Dee Davis (46:14)
it is very, complicated for sure. there's a little part of me that feels like maybe the utilities deliberately make it complicated to confuse the ratepayers and to keep them guessing and the constantly moving parts that we see. they'll announce we're changing over to time of use. What does that mean? a lot of people have no idea what that means.
utility in San Diego last year, I think it was, sent out a letter saying, hey, we're changing over to this renewable co-op and you're signed up for it automatically unless you opt out. And I said, well, it sounds good, but what is it exactly? So I had to get online, I had to do all this research and come to find out, you're probably going to end up paying more for your energy bill than if you opted out.
But we don't know for sure, maybe. And I said, okay, I've said before on the podcast, I'm a wait and see gal. I've never an early adopter at anything. the sustainability part of me wanted to jump on board, but you got to be very careful because I have a low level of trust with the folks that are running things on that side. So.
just because you're putting green and sustainability and renewable energy in there doesn't necessarily mean that that's really what's going on. I'm gonna wait and see. I'm gonna keep some tabs on it and I may switch over to it. But for the moment, I just stuck with the basic plan.
Brad Wyant (47:41)
All right, next time we're talking about procurement.
Dee Davis (47:44)
Thanks for joining us.
