There are fancy devices out there—not available in South Africa—to bring all of this information into your home. One day I would like to own one. But I do this all with my ordinary municipal meter and a simple, but effective Excel spreadsheet. I have now created a downloadable blank version to make tracking your electricity consumption incredibly easy, even if you know nothing about Microsoft Excel. All you do is fill in the date and your current meter reading. (The final digit on the meter is normally a decimal, which I ignore or round off.) The spreadsheet will calculate the average daily consumption since you last took your reading. To try it out, click here:

ElectricityMeterReadingsBlank

Your computer should ask whether you wish to open it directly in Excel or save it. Either option works, but if you choose to open it directly and later save it—using Save As—be very careful to save it in the folder where you keep spreadsheets. It will not automatically opt for the My Documents folder.

I hope it helps you save electricity, or at least gives you some ammunition when fighting the municipality over outlandish readings.

Note: ElectricityMeterReadingsBlank.xls was scanned with a fully updated version of Norton AntiVirus 2009 immediately before it was uploaded to GreenerHouse. No viruses or other security risks were found. Still, GreenerHouse can take no responsibility for any consequences arising from its use.

Swimming season’s here; start shoveling coal

I didn’t mean to wait until spring had fully sprung before restarting my pool pump, but I forgot to turn it on in August. Even though September is well under way, the water is still not green after leaving the pool pump off for 110 days. Compared to running the 0.75 kilowatt pump for 3 hours a day—as I previously did in the winters—I have saved myself nearly 250 kilowatt hours and spared the atmosphere a similar number of kilograms of carbon dioxide. Financially, I saved about R140 off my municipal bill. Compared to the conventional wisdom of running the pump 12 hours a day, I saved about R550 and kept a few bags of coal out of the pool. My only expense was R20 worth of algaecide.

I don’t like the idea of using algaecide, or any other pool chemical, for that matter. I know far too little about what happens to these chemicals when I backwash the pool. But the likelihood that the algaecide is still very toxic after more than 3 months in the pool seems rather slim.

So can I declare the experiment a success? Not quite. I should have anticipated that the pool pump was not happy to start after being left idle for so long. I had to physically get it turning with my hands—while the electricity was off—before it would move on its own. In the process I may have strained the capacitor. A new capacitor costs less than a hundred rand, but I hardly want to put my pump through such agony at the end of each winter. Next winter, I will set the timer to run the pump for a half hour each day. (Not during Eskom’s peak morning and evening hours.) I’m sure that a couple of hours exercise once a week would also keep the pump lively, if I trusted myself to remember.

Will this work on your pool? I certainly wouldn’t try it without a pool cover. And my pool cover is particularly suited to protecting the water from sunlight. After years of frustration with the limited durability of ordinary bubble pool covers, I bought a heavy duty bubble cover of the kind used on indoor public pools. It doesn’t let through light, so it adds no heat to the pool. That doesn’t matter to me since I have solar panels to warm the pool. And after more than 4 years, it’s still strong.

I would be very interested to hear from others about their experiments with near-zero pumping.