Congratulations to the Green Building Council South Africa on their My Green Home initiative!
You can keep track of this excellent energy saving programme here http://mygreenhome.org.za/ Their site is loaded with tips on making Your Home Green, whether that’s saving electricity (our favourite!) or reducing the amount of waste you send to landfill or water that you use. It’s a great, home-grown initiative that Homebug is doing everything we can to support.
Solar water heaters are a great, useful and money-saving device. But if you’re a household looking for Solar Water Heater you might get a bit lost with all the promises of “save up to 30% on your electricity bill”, “save over 50% on your heating”.
I was recently walking around Builders Warehouse and spotted a flyer for Solar Water Geysers. It all sounded very good until I read one of the figures at the back – 11.4MJ of energy per day. As an engineer and someone interested in saving money on my electricity bill, I converted that number –> 11.4MJ is 3.2 KiloWatt Hours – that’s 3.2 from my electricity meter; so if you pay R1.3 per unit of electricity that’s just over R4/day. So this geyser, working perfectly and if I use all hot water it makes can only save around R4/day…
Lots of people say your geyser accounts for around 50% of your energy use, so if you spend R1,500/month on electricity, then you spend R750 on your geyser – which is about R25 per day. So you’d need more than 6 of these solar panels to cover my usual geyser usage, if they worked perfectly!
Every month I pour R350 down the drain; and I’m sure you do to. That’s how much I spend on heating water for showers, washing dishes. Geysers and Hot water are a great place to focus any energy-saving measures as for most homes it’s the single biggest spender. This post helps you work out how much your spending; that’s always the first step to making intelligent energy savings.
Following on from our article in March on the Eskom price increases and how you can at least delay your price rise, we thought it might make sense to give you a bit more warning about the municipality price rises in July.
The headlines are – pretty much everyone is getting an 6-8% price rise.
If Eskom gets the 16% price rise it wants you’ll pay R20,000 more over the next 5 years. Why?
“the power of compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.”
Albert Einstein
Consumers are reeling from Eskom’s request for a reconsideration of the 8% cap on annual average tariff increases going forward. The monopoly is in a dilemma partly of its own making, and the government refuses to bail it out. Leading economist Mike Schussler told Mail & Guardian to expect a steeper tariff increase. “That’s the way the cookie is going to crumble.”
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