Cool tool: Track your hydro usage online

Inspired by one of Andrea’s blog posts last week, I started looking into how much electricity we’re using at our house, and found MyHydroLink , a new tool from Hydro Ottawa .

Once you’ve set up an online account, you can log in and see your daily hydro usage, broken down by hour.  I think you’ll be amazed at the level of detail this tool provides. Here’s a snapshot of our energy usage last Wednesday, May 25.

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So for the day, we spent 58 cents on electricity.  That seems incredibly cheap to me for a family of four people.  On laundry day, our busiest use of appliances, we spent $1.15.  But those amounts don’t include HST, delivery charges, regulatory charges, debt retirement charges, etc. etc. etc.

No surprise, we used the most electricty in the evening, and also from 8am-9am when we’re getting set for work and school.  That spike around mid-day was probably one of us coming home and making lunch.    And the highest bar was at dinner time.  Also: how come 5am-6am is lower than the other overnight hours?

Going back through daily records, I think I can see where our PVR kicked in while we were out-of-town on the May long weekend, and I can see roughly how much it cost us to stay up late and watch the Canucks game in overtime the other night.

So go try it, log in, check out your graph, and let me know if you learn anything new about your electricity usage.

** See also: ** Ottawa Services Guide