koen

Just before Covid hit us in 2019 I got a call from our electricity provider greenchoice.nl that was (in my memory) the first time they actually called me after being with them for years. The question was if I wanted to renew my contract with them.

I have built up a very healthy allergy against energy providers that call me, so I did not really like it at first, but since they where only calling me to renew the contract, I was actually happy that time. I did something quite smart (in hindsight) and renewed the contract for 5 years. My idea was, that I would not have to think about it for a long time.

That choice really payed off, after Covid energy prices went through the roof while our fixed rate stayed valid until 2025. So while the rest of our street had to pay significantly higher rates, we payed a reasonably low one.

In 2025 our contract expired. So I renewed, unfortunately the maximum duration for a new contract was 2 years. So our new contract is set to expire in October next year. And again I am quite happy about that, since it gives us just enough time to get solar panels and a home battery so that we can cut our energy bill in half by not having to use much energy from the grid in summer.

Two weeks ago I finally got a 'smart meter'. The reason I gave in to this is that our government has made it mandatory. If you don't get one, you will get fined. Probably until you give in and replace the old meter. Mind you, the meter we had was from 1964 and was still functioning fine. It was one of those with a rotating disk. To my surprise they also replaced the gas meter, also fine and dated 1990.

Apart from the throwing away perfectly functioning machinery built to last a lifetime with plastic boxes that will probably replaced in 5 to 10 years from now, I really like that I can now monitor my energy usage almost real time, by using the P1 port on the new smart meter.

So this week I had a look at the Greenchoice website to see what settings I could adjust there. To my positive surprise, the default measuring interval is once a month, which is acceptable. You can set it to once a day, but why would I. My Home Assistant gives me much more insight than a supplier website ever could.

Then, I looked at the monthly amount that Greenchoice deducts from our bank account and I was shocked! After sending the yearly overview I saw that we would be getting more then 300 euro back, but they changed the monthly amount from 310 to 398 euro! There was no reason what so ever to do that but they just did. I immediately changed it back to the lowest amount possible (309 euro this time) but I was still feeling quite crossed about it.

While writing this I took another look at our usage over the past years and it turns out that we have saved on average more than 1000kWh off our usage every year for the past 6 years going from almost 13.000 kWh in 2022 to a little over 5.000 kWh over the past year.

Looks like I will look at other energy providers next year, and I am very much looking forward to solar panels and home batteries and perhaps it's even feasible to stop using natural gas. But only time will tell.