Why do I blog? I thought it was because I wanted to share information for the good of all, but I've just discovered that it "saves ME money"

Why do I blog? I thought it was because I wanted to share information for the good of all, but I've just discovered that it "saves ME money" - not "makes me money", not "saves others money" - it saves ME money.

The "makes me money" part is simple - Google Adsense places their "content-appropriate" ads on my blog and they pay me a small percentage of their advertising income based on the number of clicks that my readers find interesting.

So, how does it "save me money" you might ask?

Well, in my previous blogs about saving electricity I have tried to explain why it's necessary to install a time switch on your solar geyser and explained that without a time switch installed, electricity (not energy from the sun) will heat up the cold water faster than the sun can...... well, while keeping statistics on units/day usage, I discovered that my consumption wasn't giving the savings that I had expected!

In fact, since installing my solar panels last year, my electricity usage had not really gone down at all! In fact, at times, usage went up!

Here are some of the reasons that I have come up with:

1) when the new geyser was installed, the installer (in all his wisdom and 30 years of experience) installed the geyser with the thermostat set to 60 degrees Celsius (my old geyser was set to 50) - I reduced the thermostat setting to 35 degrees Celsius and reduced usage (from about 42 units/day to 34 units/day = 19% saving).

2) time switch was not working - there was a problem with the wiring and even though the time switch was "switching", the geyser was never disconnected from power. Watch this space for stats on how much I actually save with the time switch which is now working correctly.

So, bottom line, due to my keeping detailed statistics to report on this blog, I noticed that the energy usage was not going down and this caused me to investigate further and find the problems with the thermostat setting and the time switch wiring! So, thanks to you, and this blog, I have saved myself (and hopefully you) lots of money!

PS: it took me a while to figure out that our old geyser had "burst" - there was no "big bang", nor was there any water pouring from the ceilings, but there was (hot) water fast-dripping from the overflow pipe. Well, that dripping caused our electricity usage to go up drastically (114%)! So replacing the geyser reduced my daily units from 92 to 41 units/day)

Update on 16June2010:

Watch out or, at least, be aware: #WTF Geyser's element has just blown <3 years after installation... 5 year geyser warranty, but only 3 months on the element! #FFS #RipOff

http://www.xstream.co.za/warranty.htm