With all the recent hype about Eskom requesting to increase electricity prices at around 45% a year for the next 3 years (supposedly to prevent a once-off increase of 146%!!!) emails, petitions and outrage have been heating up the airwaves.

Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to see that I’d been cc’d on the following email from a good friend who works for City Power in Johannesburg. He was answering the concerns of another mutual friend. The writer’s a dedicated, highly intelligent and thoughtful soul. I say he’s wasted working for the municipality. Evan (my husband) says we should be way thankful that he does.

With minimal editing (for length) & highlighting (my emphasis), I’d like to share it with you as it cuts through the rants and just makes good common sense, offering logical reasonings, ideas and solutions. And a whole lot of stuff we should all be DOING already …

Although this was written for the private house in mind - the principles can just as easily be applied to guest houses, lodges, hotels and so on.

Dear XXX,

Glad to see you’ve decided to take some action instead of the usual South African whinging - we still have the cheapest power in the world and have not realised its true value, nor the environmental benefits of reducing consumption in addition to controlling the electricity bill.

Don’t get me wrong - we are also not happy with Eskom’s suggested increases, but urgent action is required to reduce consumption through investments in energy efficiency, otherwise I predict that by this time next year, we may start to see load shedding, getting progressively worse over the following 3 years. The key is for everybody to invest in energy efficiency measures - not generators - that’s the wrong investment.

I thought most of us, with a fondness for the bush, would realize that to generate one kWh of electricity requires the combustion of almost a kilogram of coal and the evaporation of 1,2 litres of precious fresh water. When you realize that Eskom last year alone burnt more than 200 million tons of coal, which released about 260 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, to generate electricity for our country you would have to be really thick to think that this is not having an effect on the atmosphere and the environment. After all, it only took Mother Nature about a billion years to trap all the prehistoric carbon dioxide into the ground as oil and coal and convert the atmosphere into the oxygen rich one so essential to life as we know it. In another short, 200 years we will have burnt it all and put a lot of the prehistoric CO2 back into the atmosphere. Ironically, we have all seen the strip-mining activities next to the Witbank highway on our way down to the lowveld game reserves - this does not look pretty - have we not made the connection between this and power generation?

The concepts in the power4home scheme you refer to are right, but the prices are exaggerated. Sure, you may pick up a photovoltaic panel for $100 in the States, but unfortunately not in SA just yet. Before you invest in these, rather go for a solar water heater system. We probably have the best sunshine in the world for this, but seem to ignore it completely. The energy yield and offset of your power bill will be much higher than with photovoltaics, even if you build them yourself, which is not as easy as they claim. Solar Water Heater prices are coming down too - a 300 litre system will set you back around R15k at the moment, but will pay for itself in less than 5 years if there are four hot water users in the house - and it’s yours - forever, and free as long as the sun shines.

Starting from zero cost to most expensive, do the following to minimise your electrical energy consumption:

Do this at No Cost:

Change the household’s energy-saving culture - if a room is empty, no lights should be on. If an appliance or computer or computer game or TV set is not currently being used, it must be switched off. This costs nothing, but you may have to keep up the pressure to sustain this ‘energy conscious’ behavior. What puzzles me is that we as South Africans seem to have lost this culture somewhere in the 70s and 80s. We had to make every cent count before then.

If you have a domestic worker, educate him/her about appliance usage. She can play a significant role in energy efficiency, which we often overlook. They are willing to learn too. Irons left on, half loaded washing machines, habitual use of only the hot water tap regardless of the water requirement, over-cooking food and using hot water to thaw frozen food are but a few of the bad energy habits of an uninformed domestic worker. Whatever energy they save can be used more productively by industry to grow the economy.

Get to know which appliances chomp power. The biggest is the geyser, followed by space heating or under-floor heating in winter (air conditioning in summer), followed by swimming pool pumps, then cooking, followed by fridges and deep freezes and lastly lighting. The most obvious is to reduce the time spent using these appliances.

Deliberately make less hot water by turning down your geyser thermostat. 55 to 60 degrees is sufficient. Plumbers (who don’t want call-backs) and housewives (who can never have enough hot water, especially if there are newborns in the house) always want them set to 70 degrees which is unnecessary and runs the risk of scalding unsuspecting people and small children especially. Also the less hot water is used, the less you will need to make - this is so obvious and yet people don’t realize it. Only pour out as much hot water as you need - again this is a culture thing, quite difficult to get people to change their habits without confronting them. You’ve got to be cruel to the humans to be kind to the environment.

In a similar vein, a leaking hot water tap - even just a drip - consumes a lot of energy and wastes water too. These are simple to fix.

Monitor use of space heaters in winter Most heaters - typically the oil-finned type - chew energy. They are left on when nobody is home, and the thermostats are usually set to maximum by default - again kids and skinny women are the culprits. Heaters should be used only to make a house comfortable - to keep warm, simply dress properly. (If it’s your lucky night - well, that’s a different story …)

Use a plug-in timer (R100) to automatically control when the heater is ‘allowed to be on’. This solves the problem of remembering to switch off when rushing to work in the morning.

Look for duplicate appliances and disconnect them. The least thought-about are fridges and deep freezes - many houses have two (of each). Usually the old one is relegated to the garage to keep a six pack of beers cool. What a waste. Old fridges consume way more than modern ones - often 3x more power. Get rid of them - preferably scrap them and don’t sell to the pawn shop - this just passes the problem on to a less affluent person and doesn’t reduce the total load which is what we do need to do.

Only use second geysers for guest rooms when guests are actually staying there. Switch them off otherwise. The trick is to plan things properly. It is a complete fallacy that this action will shorten the life of the element or use more energy to re-heat the water. I’m not convinced that switching off your operational geyser is really worth the hassle if there are more than three people in the household.

Reduce the running time of swimming pool heaters to the minimum required to keep the water clean. Apparently 3 to 5 hours a day should do.

The next lot of interventions will cost you money up front, but will actually pay for themselves in relatively short times:

Insulate at least the first 3 metres of hot water pipes leaving the geyser. If possible, insulate all the hot water pipes. If you go to the right supplier (Air-o-Thene in Langlaagte, Johannesburg) this will cost about R9 a metre for the ‘zip-lock’ pipe insulation which is easy to install. Don’t look for it at the usual hardware megastores, they’ve lost the plot, asking R35 per metre - #**s.

A geyser blanket, if properly installed, will pay for itself (R350) in a year or two, although the saving depends where the geyser is installed. Just think of a hot ceiling in summer, where the heat in the roof void is probably hotter than the water in the geyser - the blanket will stop the heat going into the geyser as well. It solves the problem for us as electricity suppliers in winter though, so we support it.

Replace all old incandescent (hot to touch) light bulbs with energy-saver Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs). Go through your house and count the number of light fittings you have. It is not uncommon to have more than 30 in an average middle class house. Costs about R500 to replace them all, one of the quickest payback interventions. Tip - write the date on the base with a koki pen when you install them - this way you may be able to return the odd faulty or early failure lamps at no cost. Caution though - for some stupid reason, it is difficult to find the warm-white variety for use inside the house, which have the more cosy look and feel of the old light bulbs. There seems to be a glut of Cool-white (very stark and to some extent unpleasant to the eye, but suitable for security lighting) lamps in our market - perhaps buyers are ignorant of middle income preferences. Also, buy the right base - count how many bayonet fittings vs edison screw type you have before you buy.

The popular downlighters are a problem though. For now, these are best left alone as the CFL or Light Emitting Diode energy efficient replacements are just too costly at the moment.

For outside security lights, get the day/night switched type (R200). You can also get an electrician to install a photocell (R700 - a bit of a rip-off)

Replace your conventional shower head with an aerating, low-flow shower head

(R300 for a good quality one). This feels the same as a regular shower head but uses much less hot water. Good energy and water savings. Avoid the drip type (smaller holes without aerating system) - this will make you unpopular in the household.

Install a gas cooking hob (not oven - electric ovens are still more energy-efficient) which is better than electric. A 2-plate hob will cost about R1400, but you will need a registered gas fitter to install - about another R1500 minimum. An added attraction of this appliance is that you will still be able to cook in the event of future load-shedding.

Install the think pink ceiling insulation (R6000 for the average house). Benefits in winter and summer.

Finally - again - install a solar water heating system (R15 000).

Hope this helps - please pass on to anyone you know.

Paul

Will do, Paul, will do!