Giovanni Bricconi

Let me introduce my new friend, the electricity counter:

The green block on the upper-left, here in France, is called Linky. Its display is just 2 text lines, quite synthetics, but I have found them useful. There is a lot of bla bla about the contract, but pushing and pushing the buttons it has finally shown something interesting.

It is capable of displaying the instantaneous power consumption and the maximum power provided within a period. It’s not clear how long the time period is, but it has been a piece of valuable information. Are you wondering why?

I just searched on the internet for electricity prices and I have found a table like this on the site https://electricite.net/edf/tarifs

The second column gives you the price that you have to pay yearly to have a certain amount of power available to you. If you exceed that level, the green box will cut the electricity… an unpleasant experience.

When I arrived here I have been provided a 12kVA subscription, bit I was quite convinced it was an excessive one; the green box has given me the confirmation. My maximum power consumption is far below 12kVA, and I have managed to save some money stepping to 9kVA. I need some more checks but I am pretty sure I don’t need more than 6kVA, so I can save about 70 euros per year. I am very happy to have spent some time looking at my green friend. For reference, in Italy nearly everybody has 3.5kVA, but they cook using gas…

The third column gives the price by kWh used, and here you get super easily lost in marketing traps. Every company provides its way to compute the rate, and some are very complicated. I have been suggested to chose a rate wich makes you pay different prices during the night and the weekend. I had to take some bills and do some calculations with open office, but I realized that:

1 I am not disciplined enough to use a lot of electricity during the night

2 I have to pay a special subscription to have time-based rates, and I spend more than what I save

It may seem complicated, but if you resist to the temptation of finding the more economical rate on the market, and you just analyze 2/3 mainstream offers, you will be able to check your subscription too in just a couple of hours.

I said above that my green friend also show the instantaneous power consumption. When I was playing with it was a weekend, and at home there was nothing special switched-on. No air conditioning, nothing cooking, no oven, no dishwasher…. an the box was telling me: you are using 2300W. What??? With nothing turned on!!

You can see in the picture that the electric cabinet is filled with switches, each of them excludes something: the problem is that it is not at all clear what it does exclude, and there are no indications on the switches.

I started playing with the switches until I have found one that tuned off about 1800W consumption. I did not have idea at all of what I had turned off, it has taken a day to discover it. This in the end what I have found after some experiments:

The water boiler has not been wired correctly: it should be on a specific circuit, working only during the night. In my house it was running randomly all the day, making my electricity consumption explode.

The cooking plate is consuming 200W just for being connected to the electricity, even if it is turned off! Just turning off its switch made me save the equivalent of 2 old very bright bulbs working all the day.

The air conditioning, like the cooking plate, consumes also if it is turned off… so during spring and autumn there is no need to keep it connected, and its switch can be turned off.

I was quite bored of experimenting and there is not so much I can do to save more electricity, so that is enough for me. I won’t do more experiments but the time spent was definitively worth it.