Home Water, Power, and Heating Usage and Performance

These graphs show the electrical power and water consumption of my home. They also show the performance of my solar hot water system as well as the temperatures inside and outside my home. They are updated every few minutes. Click on the "Explanation" links below for more information.

Solar Hot Water System Performance

Today's solar hot water temperature graph

Solar Hot Water Graph Explanation -- Historical Graphs - More Pool-oriented Graphs - Temperature/Zone Activity Data In Tabular Form

Water Consumption

Today's water consumption graph

Water Flow Graph Explanation - Historical Graphs - Water Consumption Data In Tabular Form

Electrical Power Consumption

Today's Current graph

Note that the home NAS, Linux server, and router take 2.5A 24x7. Power Graph Explanation - More Power Graphs - Historical Graphs - Raw Power Consumption Data

Heating System

Today's house temperature graph

Munchkin Flash Boiler - Historical Graphs - House Temperature Data In Tabular Form

Today's Master Bedroom temperature graph

Master Bedroom Graph Explanation - Historical Graphs - Master Bedroom Temperature Data In Tabular Form

Today's heating system temperature graph

Historical Graphs - House Temperature Data In Tabular Form

We saw Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and took on as a family challenge to cut our consumption of water, power, and gas in half. Most of our water consumption is for irrigating our garden, so we have been working on making the sprinkler system more efficient. We already had 1.6 lpf toilets and a water-efficient washing machine and dish washer. The following three graphs are made from data that I typed in from our utility bills, so these are relatively static, unlike the graphs above which are from live data updated every few minutes. Unfortunately, we could not find utility bills that covered all the years we lived in the house and Palo Alto Utilities intentionally does not keep more than a year of historical data; there are gaps in the data and thus gaps in the graphs.

Water consumption over years

To reduce our gas consumption, we installed a solar hot water system to heat our domestic hot water, the circulating hot water that warm our home's floors, and to heat the pool. This system started operation in May of 2008. Note the drop in gas consumption as a result. A prototype system heating just the domestic hot water and pool ran the previous summer. When we moved in to the house there was a gas-fired pool heater, but we had it removed; we have never heated the pool with anything other than solar power.

Gas consumption over years

We installed a more efficient pool pump and dimmable CFLs in 2007.

Power consumption over years For more information, contact robert-pool@bedichek.org