We Got the Power!

Unlike most BC locals, we pay our city for our electrical usage. For historical reasons, New Westminster, British Columbia has its own electrical utility. Our city started creating power for streetlights back in 1891. Now, the electrical utility purchases energy from BC Hydro, but we do directly pay our city for it. Exactly three years ago this month, I turned off postal billing and moved to only email notifications. Although the billing cycle is two months here, I appreciated getting rid of some of the envelopes clogging our postal box.


Starting this month, new software has been initiated and this required setting up new logon procedures. That has been a bit of a hassle but I'm sure the newer system is probably more robust.

Interestingly this happened to be the first major billing cycle where I got to see some positive results for having bought our new refrigerator. Of the eight weeks of the December / January cycle, the new stove and refrigerator were plugged in for seven. I hoped that I'd see a dramatic reduction because of replacing our 25+ year old electricity-hog of a fridge.

>>> Success! <<<

There have been a number of years when we were away during the months of highest electrical consumption. I used to save the old, printed bills though. I was able to verify for years all the way back to 2005, we averaged around 1040 kWh during these months. Interestingly, on the newest bill we were charged for just 732 kWh of consumption. That should allow for a sizeable savings of power over the course of a year. Unfortunately though, the required payment didn't seem much smaller. Electricity costs have risen substantially over the past few years.