Toronto Hydro PowerLens Report

[wayner]

Anyone else in Toronto get these reports.

This reports says that I use 247% more electricity than similar sized homes in my neighbourhood. No kidding - how many of them have a Tesla that they charge at home. I get a one (our of five) star rating that is implying that I am an energy hog. But in reality I am actually cutting GHGs because I have an electric car.

Plus I have solar panels on my house that they don't seem to account for.

Kind of a stupid report for EV owners with solar panels ...

 

[darkenergy]

Anyone else in Toronto get these reports.

This reports says that I use 247% more electricity than similar sized homes in my neighbourhood. No kidding - how many of them have a Tesla that they charge at home. I get a one (our of five) star rating that is implying that I am an energy hog. But in reality I am actually cutting GHGs because I have an electric car.

Plus I have solar panels on my house that they don't seem to account for.

Kind of a stupid report for EV owners with solar panels ...

I have had a similar concern regarding the largely useless reporting. I can say however, that our report says that we use only 25% more than similarly sized homes in my area. So given that our primary driving has been EV for over four years, I'm pretty happy with that number.

I semi-regularly fill out their contact form and complain about the report for exactly that reason. If enough of us did it we should be able to get them to update the report.

The truly crazy thing for us is that we were part of a Toronto Hydro pilot study where they installed a secondary meter to monitor the EV power usage. So they have 100% of the data required to separate out the car charging from the house usage.

 

[Struja]

Anyone else in Toronto get these reports.

This reports says that I use 247% more electricity than similar sized homes in my neighbourhood. No kidding - how many of them have a Tesla that they charge at home. I get a one (our of five) star rating that is implying that I am an energy hog. But in reality I am actually cutting GHGs because I have an electric car.

Plus I have solar panels on my house that they don't seem to account for.

Kind of a stupid report for EV owners with solar panels ...

I am at 153% of the average home my size. Very strange.

We have a high efficiency HVAC system, brand new high effeciency windows, energy efficient lighting and a smart thermostat. I was qauite surprised to see we were using more energy than average.

 

[wayner]

I am at 153% of the average home my size. Very strange.

We have a high efficiency HVAC system, brand new high effeciency windows, energy efficient lighting and a smart thermostat. I was qauite surprised to see we were using more energy than average.

But how many kWh per month is your car using? That will put you way over the usage of a non-EV household.

My usage is very high anyhow as I have a very large house, I have a hot tub, pool, two ACs, and I have a couple of servers that I run 24x7.

 

[darkenergy]

But how many kWh per month is your car using? That will put you way over the usage of a non-EV household.

My usage is very high anyhow as I have a very large house, I have a hot tub, pool, two ACs, and I have a couple of servers that I run 24x7.

Based on that I'd estimate that 2/3 of your overage isn't car related. If you are curious you could install some electrical monitoring to track per circuit usage. Then it would be a simple matter to assign blame.

 

[darkenergy]

I am at 153% of the average home my size. Very strange.

We have a high efficiency HVAC system, brand new high effeciency windows, energy efficient lighting and a smart thermostat. I was qauite surprised to see we were using more energy than average.

We have a similar setup (hvac, windows etc). Depending on your life/driving habits you're probably not too crazy high

 

[mknox]

Yeah, my utility has offered something similar for some time now. Haven't looked in a while but I was almost always the highest consumer in my group of so-called similar homes.

 

[Struja]

But how many kWh per month is your car using? That will put you way over the usage of a non-EV household.

My usage is very high anyhow as I have a very large house, I have a hot tub, pool, two ACs, and I have a couple of servers that I run 24x7.

So, I am not sure how accurate the EV Tripping log metrics are but according to those numbers, I use about 17KWH per day of charge or about 510KWH per month.

 

[mknox]

I have an electric utility background and so get somewhat obsessed by this kind of stuff.

Between April 1, 2013 and March 28, 2018 I drove 157,386 km in my Model S. That works out to about 86 km per day. I put 43,386 kWh into my Model S over that time. That includes charging at home, charging away from home and Supercharger/CHAdeMO station use. Over that time, it averaged out to 23.8 kWh a day. I calculated that if I drove 20,0000 km a year (I actually do more than that), my car would use almost exactly the same amount of power that my electric water heater does (which I also separately meter).

 

[MorrisonHiker]

In Colorado, my utility has a similar report:

We used to be among the most efficient neighbors but now that we have 3 Teslas, our usage has gone up. We'll be installing solar next month which should hopefully cover most or all of our electricity usage.

 

[1Step2NoGas]

In Ottawa, our electricity utility emails me a very similar report and I was getting extraordinarily high "relative to your neighbours" numbers until I logged into my utility's portal and entered all of our appliances and EVSE+EV information. Once I did that, the next month's bill was back down to showing me as "normal" or sometimes even "better" than our neighbours.

My guess is that the utility has 0 visibility into what your electricity usage is for and they would prefer you tell them. I believe this serves 2 purposes for the utility.

1) It lets them forecast the electricity demand a little bit better
2) It gives the utility visibility into your home usage so that they can up-sell you various items in the future

I do, on occasion, get emails from the utility offering me various things, but they're infrequent so I don't mind really.

 

[MorrisonHiker]

In Ottawa, our electricity utility emails me a very similar report and I was getting extraordinarily high "relative to your neighbours" numbers until I logged into my utility's portal and entered all of our appliances and EVSE+EV information. Once I did that, the next month's bill was back down to showing me as "normal" or sometimes even "better" than our neighbours.

My guess is that the utility has 0 visibility into what your electricity usage is for and they would prefer you tell them. I believe this serves 2 purposes for the utility.

1) It lets them forecast the electricity demand a little bit better
2) It gives the utility visibility into your home usage so that they can up-sell you various items in the future

I do, on occasion, get emails from the utility offering me various things, but they're infrequent so I don't mind really.

I just found the settings for my house and they were way off. I wasn't able to enter detailed information but was able to correct the number of residents, size of the house, heating system, etc. so hopefully it will show a more accurate report in the future.

 

[wayner]

Toronto Hydro does have a questionairre where it asks about your appliances, etc but it doesn't ask if you have an EV.

 

[darkenergy]

This may be of value to those wanting to get an idea of power usage vs home energy usage in the

Toronto Hydro does have a questionairre where it asks about your appliances, etc but it doesn't ask if you have an EV.

Use their contact us form to provide that feedback. If enough of us do it I'm sure they would update the model. They should anyway, but sometimes it pays to be a squeaky wheel.

 

[1Step2NoGas]

Toronto Hydro does have a questionairre where it asks about your appliances, etc but it doesn't ask if you have an EV.

@wayner Hydro Ottawa's appliance profile page has an "Other" category (right at the bottom) with a selector that has "1" or "2+" as options for Electric Vehicle. Interestingly, it's just below an option called "Large Fish Tank". Also interestingly, both options have a "Not Sure" button for how many large fish tanks or electric vehicles you may have.