You do all these things, but have you ever thought about how much you know about your energy consumption, costs, and emissions? When you really start to unpack household energy, it’s more complicated than you might realize.
Now, every household is different — the number of people or vehicles, types of utilities, behaviours, etc. But we find four things that consistently make it challenging to truly know and understand your household’s energy.
Your household energy is measured in different units, making it nearly impossible to compare apples to apples.
If you want to put all of the pieces together, you need a normalizing unit. That would be the joule, a true unit of energy. By converting all energy consumption data into joules, information can be added, compared, or analyzed to paint a full picture.
The problem is that energy providers don’t readily provide this information. And unless you live for the thrill of crunching numbers in Excel, it’s a tedious, time-consuming process to do on your own.
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A joule is a very small unit of energy. For context, it takes 12,000 joules to heat a cup of coffee to 50°C. To avoid dealing with so many zeros, you can also use the giga joule. One giga joule (GJ) = one billion joules. One gigajoule can heat 83,333 cups of coffee to 50 degrees – enough to get almost anyone to midweek! Pretty powerful, right?
When you pay for energy (at home or at the pump), there are numerous fees and taxes embedded in the payment: delivery costs, infrastructure taxes, carbon taxes, administrative fees, municipal levies, etc. And, of course, each energy form embeds different charges. These embedded costs make it very difficult to identify fluctuations in your energy consumption and costs.
If you want to understand how much energy you are actually consuming and paying for — not the taxes or fees — you have to break down each bill, line item by line item, and map the trends over time. You have time for that, right?
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We help you understand your household energy consumption, costs, and emissions, and learn where your money is going. Intrigued?
If you’re like most households, you probably purchase energy from a variety of sources: electric utilities, natural gas utilities, and several fuel retailers.
Pay one bill over here. Another over there. Yes, the bills get paid, but they’re rarely combined to see the big picture.
Because here’s the thing: There is no one company selling you all of your energy. This also means there is no one company providing a bird’s-eye-view of your energy consumption, costs, and emissions.
How can we manage what we don’t understand?
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Within a household, one person is typically responsible for managing electricity and natural gas purchases. But gasoline, diesel, propane, and EV electricity could be purchased by any number of teens or adults in the house. Multiple people. Multiple assets. Probably multiple credit cards. Tracking down energy purchase data might just be harder than getting everyone to sit down for dinner at the same time.
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With so many barriers to understanding household energy, how is anyone supposed to make informed decisions?
Well, we’re working on it. Jotson is in the early stages of app development. We will consolidate, calculate, and translate your energy data and give you an easy-to-understand, big-picture view of your household energy consumption, costs, and emissions.
We’re on the lookout for some early adopters. Are you interested?
