GreenQuest Blog all about GreenQuest – your personal Web-based energy dashboard

By Barry Kroeker

Watch the video on YouTube.

This article is about how you can use GreenQuest to predict your energy bill—weeks or months before it even arrives. Here’s how.

The easiest way to get a preliminary estimate is to compare your use and cost with the bill history you’ve entered in GreenQuest. Just log in to your GreenQuest account and click the Advanced tab. Then click Energy Recap. Your utility bill history will be displayed year-by-year as a line graph.

Right now I’m looking at my Electric bill history. I could get the same kind of data for Water or Fuel (if I was tracking those commodities) just by clicking on the link for the commodity.

Since I’m writing this in June, my interest will be in the June billing period, which looks promising for predictions since all three historical data points are closely grouped. Notice I’ve got the Usage displayed. You can also click the Cost and/or Unit Cost tabs to refine your prediction, but I’ll get to those in a minute.

I can “mouse-over” the data points on the graph and GreenQuest will display the actual usage VALUES associated with each graph point. Or I can click My Bills, and “look up” the historical usage in the bill list. My history for June has been:

June 2007: 1491 kWh

June 2008: 1401 kWh

June 2009: 1624 kWh

If I average the three values, I get 1505 kWh. So, based on my billing history, I can expect to USE about 1505 kWh of electricity this month. But how much will I SPEND? To figure that out, I need to check my CURRENT Unit Cost by clicking the Unit Cost tab. My 2010 data tells me I’ll be paying about 9 cents per kWh, so if I multiply my usage by my cost, the total bill would be $135.48. But let me see if I can refine my prediction a little more by looking at the weather forecast.

If I click the Usage vs. Weather link from the Advanced tab, I can get the current weather forecast from AccuWeather®. Why do I care about that? GreenQuest can tell me if my utility costs are affected by weather (heating/air conditioning). And if there is a correlation to weather, GreenQuest will tell me exactly how much each degree of warmer or cooler weather will affect my bill.

To see my summer weather analysis, I have to click the Summer tab under Usage vs. Weather.

Good news—there is no weather correlation. That means … that my wife is saving us money every summer. You see, we actually have an air conditioner. And living in Pennsylvania, I’d LIKE to use it. But she is from New England, and she HATES the air conditioner, especially at night. So the house is rarely as cool or as dry as I’d prefer it to be from May to September. Now on really hot days, she will occasionally relent and let me turn on the A/C—but as the data proves, she doesn’t back down very often!

Of course, there are always a few more “variables” in the mix, such as how long the billing period was/is from year to year (sometimes the utility company will read the meter at different times, so you may be paying for 32 days instead of 30, like you might expect for a June bill).

And in my case, there’s a new variable—we got a small above-ground swimming pool last month, and we’ve been running the filter several hours each day. We also got a supplementary air conditioner for the bedroom—but I have not had much of an opportunity to enjoy it this month either! The wattage on the new air conditioner is 1340, so if I manage to keep it on for 40 hours this month, that would increase the total electric load by about 54 kWh, or $4.82. So I’ll refine my crystal ball prediction for June’s electric bill to $140.30. I’ll let you know how I did with my prediction in the next newsletter.

Now, go see how accurately you can predict your next utility bill!