Riot – April and May 2013 – Months 54-55

OVER FOUR YEARS OF RIOT!

I’m a little late reporting but I did calculate the Riot a couple of days back for the months of April and May 2013 for the three of us and three house guests for 2 weeks, making it on average 4 people. My summary of our first three years is here. Edson fixed the calculator: all go tither to crunch those numbers!

Gasoline.  Calculated per person.

12.1 gallons pp.

29.4% of the US National Average

Electricity. This is reckoned per household, not per person. We cook on an electric stove. According to our solar meter, we produced 9015  kWh since the system was turned on in August 2011, that’s  1210 kWh over the last two months, a lot more in sunny April than in cloudy May (you can follow our solar harvest live here). It could have been more: two of the micro-inverters on our system conked off and it is taking Enphase a long time to replace them (they’ll be replaced entirely on their account, and they’ll refund us for the lost production, but those dollar amounts don’t help with the Riot!). We used up all but a 35 kWh of this. I don’t know why. Yes, there were more of us, the grow lights and heat mat are still on, and we’ve been using power tools, but it seems too steep.  I’ll be keeping an eye on this.  So, 1210 our solar + 85  NSTAR Green – 35 kWh credited overproduction)/ 2 (months) makes:

630 kWh monthly average

34.8% of the US National Average

Heating Oil and Warm Water. This too is calculated for the entire household, not per person. This is for supplemental space heating and supplemental water heating (supplemental to the solar hot water that was installed in February). Since we turned off the latter at the beginning April, so since the boiler only had to come on to heat the water, the following number is an important indicator of how well that solar hot water thing is going. That’s still a lot, but calculate into that the fact that more water was consumed than usual (cf. next), it figures. We’ll need more data.

7.5 gallons of oil / month

12.2% of the US National Average

Water. This is calculated per person. This is more than our usual. I’m blaming my sister-in-law!

897 gallons pp.

29.9% of the US National Average

Trash. After recycling and composting this usually comes down to mainly food wrappers:

6 lbs. pp per month

4.4 % of the US National Average