Generating your own power – Wind

So, Wellington is a windy place, right? And if we’re flat out interested in energy efficiency we can go a step further than merely buying low-watt bulbs, or turning off lights when you leave the room, or putting on socks instead of turning the heater up, by generating your own power.

This old idea absolutely fascinates me.

What I figure is this. My household used around 6400 kWh of electricity last year, and that amount was elevated on account of washing nappies and running a shallow bath for the wee man every day (it was also an extremely cold winter). This means that we run and average of about 18kWh through the meter every day. Fortunately we’ve been in an apartment all year, with decent insulation, hardly any windows, and no real drafts. All the same, if I could have found a way to knock down the power bill I would have. After all, the ~$1600 we spent is nothing to sniff at, right?

Not being anywhere near running water (although we could have cheated and run a small hydro scheme in the bathroom, with all that free potable water the city provides), our options are pretty limited. Ignoring the fact that we’re in the apartment (the move to the suburbs impends), we can either run a wind turbine, hang some solar panels out for all those sunny days – I’m not joking there, Wellington has more sunshine hours per year than Auckland – or perhaps set up a bicycle with a generator (you can get up to 300w per hour, not bad really).

So I started thinking seriously about wind, and to my surprise it actually seems financially viable. The first thing I did was consider the resource. Why opt for wind?

Well, Wellington is a windy place. Using the handy table generator over at NIWA I was able to download a table containing daily windspeed and wind direction at the Kelburn station for the years 2000 – 2008. The figures I obtained were very similar to those presented at Wind Finder, with average windspeed siting around 16 or 17 metres per second year round. With the NIWA figures I drew up the following graph.

Windspeeds Wellington, 2000-2008

What this fancy box and whisker graph tells us is how strong the majority of Wellington’s winds are. As you can see, the boxes (which mark 50% of all wind) consistently sit above 10m/s or 36km/hr. Now with most models of wind turbine requiring a minimum of 2.5m/s to activate you’re going to think you’ll have no trouble with an idle fan.

In fact, the more I investigated it the trouble with Wellington isn’t so much the absence of wind, but the abundance of it. Many turbines are rated to hurricane+ speeds 60m/s, and the windiest it gets here is a little about 40m/s (about 140km/hr). But that amount of very high wind actually places a fair amount of stress on a turbine, something we’ll return to.

So. How much power can all this lovely wind generate for us?

The short answer is that it depends on the model. As I said, our power consumption was around 6400kWh last year, well below the ‘typical’ consumption of 8000kWh. This means we’d need a turbine that could make a decent dent in that usage, and drop it low enough to make the savings offset the cost of whatever turbine we need.

It was then I started phoning power companies, and what I discovered was very interesting. There seems to have been a slight shift here in New Zealand and the companies have started allowing what are called ‘import-export’ meters. What this does is allow you to import power from your local supplier. But, if you have a generator, you are also allowed to export power back out to the grid! Awesome. In principle this means that if you have a turbine going, and nothing switched on in the house, you can actually watch the metre turning backwards. Then when the metre reader turns up, hey presto! They might actually owe you money!!

Naturally… it isn’t that simple.

The first people I emailed were Contact Energy, who eventually informed me that they’ll buy my power for 17c a kWh. And they’ll also sell me power for whatever the cost of my plan is. If this is 17c then great. If not, then I lose a little.

The next people I spoke to were Meridian, and they informed me that they don’t bring in cost. They have a 1 for 1 approach, where my kWh is taken off the meter directly. And that I found pretty interesting. Essentially, If I have a 26c per kWh plan (which is what we’ve been using), then I’m ’saving’ 26c every time my turbine generates a kWh.

At this point the calculations started. What’s great about wind is that it can potentially generate power 24 hours a day. You can be lying in bed at 3am and know that all the fresh air out there is making you money. Even better, it averages that production out across the entire year. You can run the meter backwards during our windy summers, and forwards during the power-hungry winters. The trick of course is getting the right sized turbine for your place.

So, how big to go? Turbines, like anything, come in different sizes and quality. Wellington being Wellington I figured we’d need something pretty heavy duty, otherwise maintenance would become an issue. And if we have to maintain we lose our offset costs to a repairman. Worse still, we might have to replace it.

One turbine I saw was a 1.25kWh job. Designed for the Shetlands, and looked like it was built by Soviets.

So let’s say we get around about 80% efficiency per day (perhaps it isn’t windy enough all day, or it only runs slowly). This will turn out around 25kWh, and a whopping 9075kWh annually!!

This is though, from looking at our wind graph above Wellington has wind in excess of 5m/s over 95% of the time, so we can pretty much guarantee ourselves the 80%. The sensible thing then was to work out the appropriate sized turbine. What I did was compare 4 different sizes: the big 3.5kWh boys you’d use if you lived out on a lifestyle block (but still had connection to the grid), the 1.25kWh job, and a more modest 1kWh and 800Wh models.

Potential kWh generation from wind turbines - Wellington

As you can see, the amount of power generated can be pretty big. The totals for each model are:

• 3.5kWh – 25410kW
• 1.25kWh – 9075kW
• 1kWh – 7060kW
• 800Wh – 5808kW

Which leaves me wondering – assuming my calculations are correct (and I stand to be corrected), then a modest 800kWh turbine could be just the thing. The price should come in under $10k, and the savings at the current price of electricity (taking into account the almost 6% annual rise in power we’ve been experiencing), I should be able to recoup around $1400 of my power bill per year.

That’s a pretty snappy repayment. Perhaps 6 or 7 years, and far better than solar power.

And at that, I have to admit why I wouldn’t do it.

For starters, getting council approval for anything even the tiniest bit unusual in Wellington is, by all accounts, a freaking nightmare. Most turbines need to sit on a 10 or 15m high pole, and that’s something every NIMBY in the world will complain about. But assuming you actually get the thing up in the air, and enjoying all that sweet, sweet free energy?

Noise. Turbines are really seriously noisy. Really noisy. They recommend that you don’t have them within a 100m of your dwelling to be on the safe side. Now, when you closest neighbour is likely to be about 3m away from your property line, you’re sunk. Enough complaining and the council could actually try to take your $10k turbine away, permanently.

Then there’s the noise for you. That 3am enjoyment could actually be, “WTF! This turbine is putting out 50 decibels, almost 24hours a day!” FYI, that’s the volume of a noisy office conversation, outside your bedroom, in the middle of the night.

Worse, in high speeds they can put out something like 85decibels – a fire alarm, or siren.

So maybe on the farm. Otherwise? Idea kaput.

25410

Energy Efficiency – Why bother?

In the big news in the Tibby household stakes is our impending move to suburbia. We’re very excited, and mostly because of the requirement to make a lot of plans.

Now some would call this nesting. And they would likely be right. But! In our defence a large part of the planning concerns ways to, firstly, save money compared to living in a city apartment (our first choice…), and secondly to add value to our property (like all good New Zealand home owners).

Other than servicing the mortgage and feeding/clothing ourselves, the big cost to any household is energy – including petrol for the automobile, another post altogether. It’s important then to make sure that your place is as energy-efficient as possible. It’s a mantra the green movement has been speaking for years, and I’m well-sold on it. Not only does it assure us that we’re not being wasteful, it also ensures that we save a little money. After all, $10 a week saved on the power bill, if transferred to the right account, amounts to about $30k off the cost of a mortgage.

So in looking at this issue I started considering alternative power sources as a means to drop costs. The outcome is another post entirely, but in doing so I uncovered one big long-term reason for looking at energy efficiency – the ongoing rising cost of purchasing electricity.

Snooping around the net I discovered this handy page on the Ministry of Economic Development (MED) site. What you have there is a quarterly survey of power costs for a household using 8000 kilowatt hour’s (kWh) of power a year, around about the average for a New Zealand home. And there was some pretty interesting stuff provided in this excel spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet provides costs of electricity purchasing across the entire country since August 1999, and that’s a reasonably good time series. With a little very simple manipulation this turned up some very interesting information about power prices across the country, and how much they have changed over the decade. The first graph, below, gives us raw costs in cents per kWh averaged nationally (and yes, they include the 10% prompt payment discount).

Power Prices, National average

What’s more than clear from this graph is that prices have been increasing steadily since 2001. What this made me wonder is, how much will they increase in future? The thing about alternative energy is that once the initial outlay has been made you’re (hopefully) no longer subject to increasing in pricing – again the subject of another post.

If you consider the minimum tariff line the average household will be paying about $1800 per annum for electricity alone, a fair amount. This is especially the case if you earn close to the average weekly income of $830 (which is around $43k per annum, before tax, meaning the income in the hand is actually only $34k). In effect, the average house earning the average weekly income spends around 5% of it’s total budget on electricity. Higher earners usually have bigger houses, so they’ll also likely spend around that percentage (or more).

Now consider what prices are actually doing. As you can see in the above graph, prices trend up, as is normal. What I did then was find out the how much these prices have increased, and how much they are likely to increase in future. And I was mildly surprised.

The graph below shows both the percentage in quarterly increase in prices relative to an August 1999 benchmark. As you can see, the quarterly price difference (i.e. the amount prices change every three months) kind of bubbles along, but the cumulative cost places current prices 80% higher than in 1999 (the blue line, measured on the left axis). And that’s a fair bit. The green line (measured on right axis), shows that kWh are today costing around 23c each (whereas they cost around 12c in 1999).

Price Increases, Wellington Region only

The next thing to do was to attempt to project prices out to 2019, to see what we could be paying here in Wellington by then. To do so, I averaged the total quarterly price increases since 1999, and applied them to cost of kWh’s. When applied to the graph above I got the graph below. Of course, this assumes a constant rate of price increases close to my average – but considering the time series of data I had to work with thus far, it’s likely not far from the truth.

Future Retail Cost of Electricity, Wellington only.

As you can see, assuming a constant increase of 1.47% per quarter (the current average quarterly increase), electricity prices should rise to around 44c per kWh. This is almost 90% higher than now, and if we go back to our Joe Average family consuming 8000 kWh per annum, their bill will increase to around $3.5k!

Why I found this all interesting is that if you’re making energy efficiency savings in your house now, the ongoing saving in real terms actually increases every year. This means that as the price of energy increases – which it must - then you’re actually saving more over time, because that kWh you don’t use today hopefully won’t be used in 10 years when it will cost you almost double.

Furthermore if you’re installing some kind of energy generating device or system (the real reason I set out on this analysis), then the offset of your initial cost is actually higher as the years pass, because you’re generating the same amount of kWh you were when you installed, but saving more on money not spent. If you get my meaning.

Now the only question is how to generate that electricity… The subject of another post.

Holiday Hibernation

Dear frugal readers, I’m taking some time away from the Internet until the New Year. Do feel free to send any suggestions for posts or topics, or even write a post of your own. And have an inexpensive break, and a very merry celebration of the festival(s) of your choice.

Hate Me Tender

So we have found a house we really like (or are mildly interested in, when we talk to the seller’s agent). It is for sale by tender.

Tendering is a particularly noxious process in which you hope you aren’t being a fool, and the vendor hopes you are. If it weren’t for the fact that the place is just down the road from where we are now, with neighbours we know and like, I’d be inclined not to participate. But there you go.

We know the rateable value (it was done in September this year) and we have a report from QV on recent sales in the area (which unfortunately has an unhelpfully wide range). The house is in one of those pockets of Wellington with a very varied geography so it’s hard to make meaningful comparisons with nearby properties.

Any tips on tender strategy, dear readers? High to be sure, low to be cheeky? I lie awake at night thinking about it.

New Four Square!

Well, there were two guys handing out pamplets for a free coffee from the new Tory Street Four Square, so we grabbed one, and popped down there this morning.

In short, I think we’ll shop there more often.

Checking out the prices, the place was pretty competitive. Certainly the range is more limited, but there are weekends where we don’t buy that much dry food from New World anyhow. Plus, on account of buying our fruit and vege from the farmer’s markets we’re often not actually getting much from the supermarket.

What they didn’t seem to have was a large number of loss-leading products, but… no worries. We can always pop just down the street to New World to buy stuff like that.

Most importantly, what they did have was a friendly guy who ran the place. The owner spotted our one-year-old and popped over for a chat. Now, this is what makes community to me. A shop-keeper who’s more that happy to chat to you like you’re a person, and who you can see is putting his own sweat into making his own coin. When I compare that to some minimum-wage teenage clerk who isn’t paid to care about who I am, then I’m shopping with the local guy every time.

After all, New World won’t miss my money. There are plenty of unconscious shoppers who will habitually stop in there anyway. But for personal interaction, and actually supporting my local area, I’d much rather give my money to a real person with a real vested interest in my coming back.

So, Four Square (corner of Tory and Cable), you’ve got my business whenever I need to stop by.

This card makes no sense to me at all

Recently Kiwibank sent me a leaflet along with my credit card bill, suggesting that I obtain one of their new “Go Fly” cards. The Go Fly card is one of those reward point jobs — in this case, you get a certain number of Air New Zealand Air Points for every umpty dollars you spend on the card. Just how many depends on what particular flavour you have. There is a special twist in that you can pool your air points with other people if you want, so the family can club together to get little So-And-So a ticket to visit Granny if they want.

This is an interesting proposition for me, because I spend a lot of money on plane tickets. I fly my daughter over from Australia at least four times a year, we travel to visit Kathy’s family several times a year, and there’s the odd trip for funerals and weddings and other important events.

So I was frankly a bit disappointed. Have a look.

If you pay $56 a year for a plain card, you get one airpoints dollar per $120. So to get enough air points for, say, a return trip from Wellington to Auckland ($260), you would have to spend $31,200 on the card.

And you paid the fee, so  you’re really only getting a $200 win.

And if you spend $31,200 in one year, that means you’re putting $2,600 a month on your credit card. Now I think that between us, Kathy and I are on a pretty good wicket, but we would struggle to do that over two months, even though I try to put everything possible on the card.

And if you were to not pay the card off in full, the interest rate is a stonking 18%, which isn’t nothing with your huge monthly balance that you’ve apparently racked up.

(I do this because our main account gets credit interest, so it makes sense to keep its average balance as high as possible and pay the card off every month to avoid interest charges. There are no transaction fees for credit cards, so it’s win all round).

I compare this with the Mastercard Zero, which is the card I currently have, and I just cannot understand who this Go Fly card could possibly make sense for. Anyone with any sort of normal household would be much better off with a Zero card (no fees) and saving the $56 fee and sticking $20 in a tin every month — and then if you change your mind, you could spend your savings on something else instead of a plane ticket.

It’s especially peculiar because Kiwibank must know how we normally use the credit cards. Were they expecting I would suddenly become a debt junkie for a free plane ticket up the island?

Dear readers, are there any credit cards with unusual features that are actually worth having? By which I mean, the benefit outweights extra fees or higher interest rates?

Secrets of the supermarket ninjas

In a previous post I claimed that we were “supermarket ninjas” and Mellopuffy asked how we managed on so little each week.

I’ve been thinking about this, and I think comes down to these things:

1. Kathy is a vegetarian, and I only eat meat dinners maybe half the week. When I look at our grocery bill, the priciest regular items are wine and meat. If we both ate meat in typical New Zealand portions every night, our grocery bill would be a lot larger.

2. We buy very little in the way of processed food. No biscuits, no cakes, no muesli bars, no pre-made sauce, no packet mixes or tinned soups. I make our bread from scratch, and usually our yoghurt. If I want baking to take somewhere, or for an occasion, I bake. I have a good repertoire of dinner dishes that don’t take much when I’m tired, so I don’t need sauce in a jar.

I think the bread in itself is good for about $10 in savings a week. We would normally go through three loaves and that would be over $12 at supermarket, whereas the ingredients for a home made loaf total less than a dollar.

Because of points 1 & 2, we incidentally have a pretty healthy diet, which is a happy bonus effect.

Of course cooking everything and avoiding treats is a lot easier when you don’t have children, and I know that plenty of grownups would balk at not having any snack food in the house. Well, tough. That’s how it’s done. My Mum always said if you weren’t hungry enough to eat an apple or make a cheese sandwich, then you weren’t hungry.

Cooking is like any other skill — if you do it every day, you can achieve a tolerable level of efficiency, whereas if you only do it when you have plenty of time, you will probably stay an inefficient bungler and packets really will always be easier.

Example super cheap, fast meal for low-energy  evenings:

Pasta with broccoli sauce. Chop broccoli into tiny pieces, mince a couple of cloves of garlic, saute in olive oil with pepper until broccoli is cooked (put a lid on the pan for the last couple of minutes and the broccoli will steam). Toss through rigatoni or similar with grated cheese on top and maybe some more oil. Should take 20 minutes or less, and is very tasty.

I find Italian cookbooks particularly inspirational because lots of country food from that region is cheap, fast, and based around seasonal vegetables, and tasty with a little sharp cheese, oil and pepper. An interesting thing I’ve found is that nice cheese and good oil seem like luxuries, but they’re actually condiments that you use in small amounts to make much bigger quantities of cheap stuff nicer. So I tend not to be so hard-arsed about olive oil and cheese.

3. I buy our fruit and veg at the market on a Sunday, and that’s about 30% cheaper than the cheapest supermarket I know of. It is another trip in my week, but on the other hand I enjoy the market as a social experience. I often spend some of the savings on a roti or a dim sum or something too…

4. We shop at the cheapest supermarket in the area. Last weekend I spent a New World gift voucher, and I noticed how much more expensive New World prices are compared to the Kilbirnie Pak’N'Save, confirming for me the claim that they are the cheapest supermarket in Wellington. I’m pretty sure I’d have to spend a significant amount in transport to go anywhere cheaper.

5. We are sensible buyers: we stockpile when staples are on special, diligently compare unit prices, and always use a shopping list.

6. We buy in bulk when we can. For example, I buy my bread flour in 5kg sacks. If I had suitable storage, I’d probably buy 10kg ones. Likewise I buy olive oil in 4l tins, onions in 5kg bags, and meat by the half carcass when the freezer has space. Moore Wilson wholesale is not as cheap as it used to be, I reckon, but still turns up some good prices on catering sized stuff. Basically, if it doesn’t go off before we can finish it, and we have room to store it, I’ll invest in any large portion.

In summary, I’d say it’s cooking our own semi-vegetarian diet that really makes the big difference. It’s the nice food from simple ingredients that backs my claim “we eat well.” But there are some other things that help too, allowing me to blow some money on wine and chocolate out of the surplus.

Best investment ever. The footstool

I originally bought this stool with a 70s ‘lazy-boy’ design, waaaay back when I came home from Melbourne. Since then I’ve constantly lambasted anyone who’ll listen with the tale of the one that got away, a matching armchair and stool. Now, this is mostly because it is extremely comfy, and only cost $15, an absolute steal.

Since that time, i’m come to regret it more. This is because this stool has become the most oft-used piece of furniture in the apartment. In addition to serving as a footstool, it has been:

• a seat for parents watching a wee man in the bath
• a seat for parents feeding a wee man at his high chair
• a spare chair at the dinner table when people come over

And, most importantly:

• A zimmer frame for a wee man learning to walk about the house.

So why is this on Frugal Me you ask?

Because today I saw a walking-toy for boddlers (babies who aren’t quite toddlers), for a whooping $120!! And I asked myself, why in the hell spend that money when you have the superfootstool hanging about the place?

Again – the best damn investment I ever made.

Making your own cottage cheese

Following hard on the heels of Stephen’s now-famous yoghurt-making antics, I thought I’d try out making cottage cheese, and see if the savings were enough to get me into the paper as well. I didn’t think that one would work twice, and thought I’d make do with the kind of crazy google hits were going to get off the frequent use of the word cottage.

If there is anything that makes me think of the 1970s it is cottage cheese. That and bean sprouts. But because around here we mostly stick to seasonal vegetables, getting greens for sandwiches is tricky, so sprouts it is. Likewise, with cheese being at times unreasonably expensive, cottage cheese is a good fat-and-protein addition to liven up lunches.

So how to make it? Easy. Put a litre of milk into a pot and apply heat, when it’s tipping 80-odd degrees, put one 1/4 cup of white vinegar into the mix and stir gently. The milk will curdle, and you strain the hot mixture through a muslin. And…. voila. Cottage cheese, or paneer, depending on your background.

I keep the whey and continually try to find uses for it, but let the curds cool in the fridge, mash it with a fork, and moisten it with some of that home-made yoghurt (you can’t use the whey, doesn’t work well). This makes it, to coin a phrase, just like the bought one.

And the savings. Well, I bought a litre of milk for this costing $2.09, and made 250g of cheese. 250g at the supermarket cost $2.35 the last time I checked. We’ll call that one “not a substantial saving”.

However, there are some key differences. My cottage cheese is incredibly simple to make, and is not time consuming. It is also without unnecessary packaging, and hasn’t been transported half-way across the country or world to my fridge (ignoring the packaging/transport of the milk, which I buy in bulk). Also, I know exactly what’s in it, something the me who has worked in food manufacturing knows is very, very important.

All in all you’d need decent access to a ready supply of cheap or free milk to make this one work well. But, there is satisfaction in making your own food, and in knowing that it has a low carbon-cost. Plus, you get to try celery sticks stuffed with raisins, and topped with cottage cheese! 1978 par excellence.

Budgeting on an annual basis — what an eye opener

Part of buying a house is getting a mortgage; part of getting a mortgage is figuring out what repayments you can afford; figuring out what repayments you can afford requires budgeting; and to make a budget, you need to figure out what you spend already.

I use a program called Gnucash to track our spending. I export statements from internet banking, and Gnucash sucks the data in and categorises it.

Now I often run reports on a monthly basis in Gnucash, but there’s an obvious thing I should have been doing but only just thought about now.

Obviously, there are a lot of expenses that only happen once a year, like paying our insurance premium. And there are other expenses that are irregular, even though they’re certain, like holiday spending, or going to the doctor. So the right way to work them out for a monthly budget — we both get paid monthly, so that’s the best way to work it out for us — is to total expenses over a whole year, and then divide by 12. Or maybe even over two years, and divide by 24.

And what a sickening revelation that was. It turns out that there are things that I think of as “one-off” that really are recurring expenses, just not frequent or regular ones. For example, we spend quite a bit flying around the place visiting friends and relatives. I drink a lot. I buy $40 of books every month, on average. And so on.

The only comfort is that our grocery bill tells me that I am a supermarket ninja. We eat well on only $125 per week, and that includes a fair amount of wine and a teenage girl 12 weeks of the year. But apparently I have a long way to go in other departments.

I do sort of have a system for irregular stuff. I have an account called “bills” and put a fixed amount in it every month, and pay all the bills out of it, so if some months we spend less, there’s a buffer building up for the months when we spend more. But maybe it’s time to actually do a real business-style budget, with a forecast for the coming year, and a monthly update to track actual spending against the forecast.

As always, your suggestions on budgeting for irregular, infrequent things are welcome.