The condo we live in uses a common boiler to heat hot water and because of the cost the administrator wants to have everybody install their own water heaters. He wants to insist that they all be electric, but we know it would run our electric bill up quite a lot: using gas for cooking and water heating in the past our gas bill was well below 100 pesos per month. The warmer weather is now starting to push our ac use, and electric consumption up: it's hit 12 KWH/day, at this point, with ac on all night, and for five or so hours during the day. This would still produce a very modest electric bill, here.
I also had the problem of high electric bills. (Well not in Cancun, but this "problem" is not location based) What helped me a lot is buying 3 electric usage monitors. You simply plug them between your wall plug and the device you want to monitor. Then you can record and monitor the electric usage of that device. Home energy monitor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia It helped a lot, since i found out that my fridge and my dishwasher were eating way to much power. Buying new ones, was of course an investment, but it will pay off with the new lower power consumption. It also gave me a sense how much each device consumes. (Even in Standby). Running your Computer 24/7 is also a big factor. I did this also till i measured the consumption with the electric usage monitor. My computer (nothing fancy) used around 220 Wats of power average. Thats around 5kwh a day. meaning 150kwh each months.... I also wonder how far "Green Energy" is spread through Mexico. Here in Germany we have a lot of homes with Solar Panels on their roof. This should work much better in Mexico, because you have way more hours of sun than we got here. (Would be only interesting if you own a place). There are a lot of aplliances that can run from solar power, as pool heaters/pumps even to the whole electric installation like ACs / fridges / lights etc
The CFE bills came to my bldg last week. Bottom Floor $ 39 Middle Floor $ 501 Top Floor $1,985 Is something wrong with this picture? I am the "man in the middle" as MJ sang, and I was out of town for a week and left my a/c on, set at 21C, by stupidity.
What happened to those people above you, T.J.? They must have left their ac on all month! Well, we're now beginning to see the difference that having central air can make, in the negative way. With the higher humidity days we've been having, we're running the central air even more hours than we were just recently, and are now running a higher daily average consumption than we ever have in Cancun- where we've always had minisplits, until now- with 23 KWH/day consumption, and it's not even the depths of summer, yet. When we moved in, we thought of making some modifications to the cooling system here, installing one or more minisplits to create some options about how to cool the place: we decided not to, and see what the experience was with the central system.... Not so good, so far....
V, A few options could be to have the current central AC checked for efficiency. Air filters,drainage plugs,coolant levels,thermostat-shut off and turn on. Another option would be to replace the central unit with a newer more efficent unit. We have some older units that are probably in the SEER level of 8 versus newer units that can be at level 13 or above.I am thinking of adding a few mini-splts and replacing the central unit which we have had fully maintained. Just some thoughts.
SEER levels We've had the units serviced, recently, but they were installed ten years ago: who knows what generation of a/c they represent.... Thanks for introducing the "SEER" information: that's something I'll have to look up, as I haven't heard the term before!
Solar I was wondering if anyone had done anything with solar panels down here? I was just have a browse online and there are systems in the States that are tied to the grid and any power you don't use gets fed back in - you get rebates etc. Does CFE have any program like this? Seems like they are not very efficient (solar panels I mean not CFE but you might run a pump of some sorts or something? Any other ideas of things to do at home to not rely on utility companies? A homemade 20 meg braodband for 100 pesos a month perhaps?
I, too, believe CFE has a program to give your credit for electricity you may produce which gets fed back into their grid: there may even be info on this on their website. When I´ve heard about it, it´s been in the context of wind energy generation, but I doubt that would be treated differently.
Just got the bill - 476 pesos - not to bad. Am I right in thinking that if the usage stays under 850kw a month we remain on the same tariff "1C 2 Hilos"? Do you reckon changing a wall unit A/C to a minisplit is worth it considering we are only using about 600 k/w a month running the AC all night, does it make that much difference?
