Monthly cost to run a tank
 

I just finished running the power meter on all the various power bars hooked up to my tank. Here's the results:

My 8 radions are collectively drawing 8.9 kWh of power per day

The power bar that runs my return pump, skimmer, and various other powerheads draws 6.14 kWh per day

The power bar that runs my heaters, reactor pump, and a couple more powerheads is drawing 4.77 kWh per day.

In total, my tank is drawing 19.81 kWh per day, or 594.3 kWh in a 30 day month. Our last month's power bill switched rates half way through, so taking the halfway point between the two rates ($0.085/kWh), my tank is costing roughly $50/month in electricity to run.

I have to say I'm surprised by this, I thought it would be lower. I'm going to have to look in to ways to get the total draw down. I might have to consider removing two of the radions.

That's nothing my tanks cost me $250 in electricity per month. Hummmmm no wonder I'm in debt! My monthly power bill is $350, my friend who has a house similar size to mine pays $90 a month. Someone tell me why am I in this hobby again? *sigh*

I am going to Print this out and put it on our fridge, so the next time I get yelled at for how much my tank costs I can point out how good of a deal we're getting!

Although tight for stock space inside, I'll keep my 6 gal nano. :)

I wish my power bill was this small. My tank are the least of my power issues when you consider there is 4 adults & a baby living in one house with 2 full kitchens, a heated indoor pool and my shop which run alot of 220v.

All though I am going all LED & dc pumps on the new build, most power consumption will be the chillers.

Ya but its pretty sad considering its a regular sized house in the city with just 2 people living in it.

Not sure if I should laugh or cry :lol: :cry:

I just looked at my Epcor bill for this month and it says $140 for electricity even though only $90 is for the electricity, the rest is BS fees. I wonder what the bill was like before the tanks.

Ask them to send you copies for your personal records....they have to.

Yes but they can charge you a fee to dig up records too

I just switched from Epcor to Enmax for that reason, was paying over $100 just in fees. Our saving from just switching providers is quite substantial.

The way around that is to tell them you have someone doing an energy audit, I got pdf's sent to email. Paper copies would have cost me. Same with the Gas company.

That was a couple years ago though, perhaps things have changed.

incidentally enmax has its share of bs fees as well. So to does direct energy for that matter.

I crunched the numbers on my 240gal system with 3 MH (double ended drawing about 312w each) and came up with roughly $75/month. BC Hydro gives us the first 1332kWh at $.068/kWh and then our rate jumps to $.1019kWh so I had to do some proportioning and came up with about $.082/kWh as being our average rate.

I think they will ALL start charging BS fees sooner or later. If one can do it and get away with it, the others will join soon enough. Just like the airlines charging us luggage fees, I think Westjet hasn't done so yet but I think they will as well in the future.

My tank costs about $30 a month in utilities.. much much more in supplies and other things I buy for it...

Yikes! I keep an annual budget spreadsheet and have 4 years saved. Checked my annual costs for enmax today and for 2011 and 2012 and my bill increased $2300 for the year or just shy of $200 a month since setting up my 180 gl. Nothing else has changed in my house. My monthly bills are just shy of $400 a month right now. Most of my equipment was bought new with the exception of the return pump.

Chatting tonight about downsizing to one tank and combining the 2 I have.

That's pretty high for a 180 :surprise:

I'm not entirely sure what my tank costs but we average around $200 total a month now and that's with fees. My tank is about 270 gallons with multiple pumps and such but I've always spent a little more up front for efficient equipment. I also have three additional fridges in the bar and a home office that gets used most days so realistically the tank should be less than $100 per month. One of these days I'll get around to measuring it but still working on cutting energy costs on it as it is.

Maybe, but I'm pretty sure my previous experiences with Enmax suggest otherwise and Epcor has always been pretty bad. When we first moved out here it was the only option and perhaps why the fees where so high, when we found out we could switch we jumped on it right away.

keep in mind when compairing to old bills that power prices have skyrocketed in the last year or so

Yah when you work it out over a period of year it really starts to add up, but 200/month for a 180 - do you know what the draw of your return pump is supposed to be? One of the things that shocked me when I started using the meter on my tank equipment was how much more power certain things were drawing that was advertised. My Deltec SC2560 skimmer is drawing more than double what it's spec sheet said it was supposed to.

I manage commercial properties and have budgeted 10% increases for the past 2 years for electricity and have been pretty bang on. Commercial rates are different than residential but the market is the same, I would expect to see some increase but not double at home. I watch my water billing as well and it's less than $50 a month.

Not complaining, was just surprised. Not sure where I could cut back..

I don't actually, will look into it. I will actually check all my equipment and run the same analysis others have done. Where do you find these handy meters?

This is the one I got: http://www.amazon.com/P3-Internation...s=energy+meter

It was super cheap on amazon prime delivered while we were in the states, but amazon has tons of other ones too. This one tells you your total KwH draw over a period of time, but it doesn't record max/min wattage draws, which I would have wanted. I actually had to physically check over the course of the day to see what wattage my lights were pulling at any given moment as they ramped up and down through their cycle. I also don't know if the power draw for my heaters was "normal", as it didn't tell me how many times they came on over the course of the day, or how long they stayed on, just their average kwh usage over a 24h period. On a cloudy, cold day, my house stays cooler, and on a sunny day the room the tank is in warms up a lot, so I'd likely need to leave the heaters plugged in to that meter for a couple of weeks to get a really good sense of it.

Well, I thought I was on to something....I checked my spreadsheet again today and looked at my numbers from 2009 and 2010 and because 2011 was significantly lower thought maybe I had missed adding in some of the invoices. So I call Enmax, and between them and me, our numbers are out by a minimal amount. She did explain the rates in 2012 were higher than previous years (ok yes, this was noted by Mike-Fish). If I ignore 2012 and look at '09 & '10, the increase is not that significant ($50-75/month). Phew.... still going to pick up a meter and figure it out.

Sorry for the drama, but relieved that this isn't sucking the life out of me and changing it up won't make that much of a difference....