My Electricity Bill Arrived

A brown recycled paper envelope appeared in the mail last week. Yes the long awaited Electricity Bill arrived. Yeah!! The first bill since the installation of the Feed-In Meter for my Solar Panels. On opening the bill a number of questions were immediately answered.
1. Was the Bill accurate?  - Yes it seemed to be as we had taken various readings throughout the months - amount of electricity generated, used from the grid and exported to the grid.
2. Did we retain our Peak/Off-Peak Tariff? Yes indeed we did - with a charge of 26.381 c/ KwH Peak, and 9.818 c/KwH for Off-Peak.
3. Did we get the 0.66cents Feed-In Tariff promised by our suppler. No!! This created some consternation which was satisfied by reading the fine print on our suppliers web page. It seems that the 66 cents Feed-In Tariff  needed to be gained by signing a contract which, on reading, indicated we would lose our Peak/Off-Peak rates. As we had asked to keep these we don't get the 66 cents rate. The billed Feed-in rate is 23.5 c/KwH instead.
4. How does this affect the yearly electricity costs?? Out comes our Excel sheet and using the figures from 2009 winter usage and the meter readings for Jan - Mar 2010, we are ahead by almost $100 by keeping the off-peak.
5. Can we negotiate having the best of both worlds? 66c and Peak/Off-Peak. I will try, but am not sure the supplier will come to the party. I'll keep you posted on that.

So more calculations will come to develop an accurate cost & usage picture for the year.

Electricity Bill & Rebate

This month has been a good one financially. Not only have tax refunds come from the ATO (without the delay forecast by our tax agent) but also the rebate from the Federal Government from the Solar Homes and Communities Plan.
The only thing that hasn't come is my electricity bill, though the direct debits are occurring monthly. So I called my Electricity Provider and they have promised to send the bill within 10 days. It also looks like the Off-Peak Tariff is not happening - though without the bill I can't be sure.
Complicating the bill is the change is electricity costs in January which will make the bill a computational nightmare. Thanks goodness I have a computer and mathematically inclined offspring.
Today is a lovely fine autumn day so we are still generating 4KwH on these days.
Yesterday was an entirely different story with < 1 KwH only generated. However the water tanks are full, the garden growing as is the weedy lawn and the birds drinking the nectar from the flowering camellia's.