Monthly cost to run a tank

[lockrookie]

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

[Pan]

Originally Posted by lockrookie

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

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.

[whatcaneyedo]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

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.

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.

[asylumdown]

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.

[Coralgurl]

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....