The old adage ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ is an important principle and is essential for managing scarce resources. As well as being useful in industry, it is also important in a domestic setting. No, I am not talking about managing water but rather electricity.
Regular readers of this blog will remember that I previously reported that my household energy consumption was 30 kWh/day in 2009 and has fallen to 16 kWh/day by mid-201. However, there were gaps in the data due to the advent of paperless billing. The bills that you can access via their web site only go back 18 months.
I contacted Electric Ireland via the help desk to see if I could get details of my energy consumption going back further in time. They did respond quickly and issued me details of the invoice amounts going back further. Of course that data is useless if you are trying to work out the energy use reduction. I sent them back another email requesting the data in kWh units. I was totally ignored, not even a reply saying the data was not available.
Electric Ireland needs to do much more to help consumers reduce their electricity consumption. Making the energy use data easily available (in both money and energy units) would help people. Displaying it as a graph would be even better.