153
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
153 points (100.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35848 readers
1321 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It's sensible to calculate this sort of cost, regardless of being normal or not. However be careful when and how you share this info with your family - because depending on the context, you'll be basically saying "I put $0.16 over your hourly well-being". (In special, pissing kids with this is a bad idea. They might even leave the AC turned on needlessly, just to spite you.)
Thanks, this is the answer I was looking for. I'm trying to save money because we don't have a lot. My wife is on board with saving, but she hasn't done the math to see where most of our money is going.
I might need to back off a bit. I like to save, but this might be a bit much.
In your situation I'd probably compile a list of general expenses of the household per month (or week), then for the higher expenses project a few costs contributing with those expenses. It should be more convincing when you show "we're likely spending around $15 per week just on A/C" than "we're spending $0.50 per hour".
And context is key - don't bring this up just because she turned the A/C on, instead bring this up when talking about the overall finances of the household. And it might be useful to ask her for a few other corners that could/should be cut, as she'll likely notice different ones than you do, based on her subjective values.
Excellent point. Thanks.
I also like to obsesively monitor power use of various things in my house just because I like knowing stats. I used to work with inverter setups so I put power monitors on all of my circuits right at the panel just for the hell of it.
Asuming you have central air and not just a window AC or something then turning your AC on and off frequently is not the best way to save money. When you first turn the AC on it needs to work really hard and run continously to lower the temperature in your home and remove a whole bunch of humidity from the air. That process is very energy intensive. If you just leave the AC on then it only needs to actually run ocasionally to maintain a cool temp. Unless you are planning on shutting off your AC for days at a time then the actual cost savings are fairly minimal.
I used to have roomates who would constantly turn off the AC and open the windows whenever the AC "didn't need to be on". The AC would remain off for several hours until things started getting swelteringly hot in the middle of the day then they eventually closed everything back up and turned on the AC. Now that they (thankfully) moved out I just leave my AC running all the time. The power usage from the AC has actually dropped since I started doing that. I'm even way more agressive with the temp setting on the AC now than I was then. My house is rarely above 70F indoors and I'm still using slightly less electricity than when it was being shut off regularly.
I like this take as you take into account the human element, but might even take it a step further in that this kind of knowledge could actually be good for more people to know this cost. Especially if cost is an issue, could help families work together in easy ways for a common goal. Maybe it's not worth it to say anything during a heat wave to save a few bucks, but on a cooler week maybe open some windows to save some cash sans suffering.
Extreme example: as a dad I feel a cultural obligation to get upset when random lights are left on when no ones in the room (not really, but does beg the question of why) - when you actually do the math on led lights it ends up something insignificant, like a cent. Not an issue that really deserves any attention.
If I got this right, that isn't even an extreme example, it sounds for me like you're trying to drill your children into attentiveness - like, "pay attention to what you do, what you don't, and the impact of your actions".
And even in the case of working towards common goals, to cut corners, I think that the parents can and should tell the children what's going on. Children can be surprisingly reasonable once you're reasonable with them, and that avoids the whole "oh no, mum/dad will scold me if I leave the lights on".
For a more extreme example: afternoon in a rather sunless city, child with poor sight is studying with the lamps turned on, shithead turns off the lights and wastes 15min of the child's studying time by screeching on how the kid is wasting its money. This is the sort of thing that should be avoided at all costs IMO, as it's outright immoral - we humans should be have money for more comfortable lives, not cause the others' discomfort to hoard money.