Indigo Power’s analyst, Nick Mason-Smith, embarked on an energy efficiency journey with a simple switch that transformed his household’s energy usage. Leveraging his analytical skills and the data readily available through the Indigo Power portal, he shares his insights on optimising energy consumption by sharing energy.
Discovering inefficiencies
“Our journey towards energy efficiency began when we discovered that more than half of our electricity consumption during spring, summer, and autumn was attributed to heating water.
During our canoeing trip on the Glenelg River in January 2022, you can see in the graph below that, despite our home being unoccupied, our hot water system consumed nearly 5 kWh daily. Analysing our electricity usage through the Indigo Power portal revealed that this usage predominantly occurred overnight, between 11pm and 7pm, under the Controlled Load schedule.
Though we don’t have solar, given Indigo Power’s solar customers export a lot of energy during the daytime, we wanted to make use of this energy by running our hot water during the day. Previously on a Controlled Load, our hot water ran overnight, meaning a minimal portion of our energy came from other Indigo Power customers in the Kiewa Valley Hub.
Upgrading to a heat pump
We upgraded to a Reclaim Heat Pump paired with an Earthworker Energy Manufacturing Cooperative tank, which includes a controller that allows us to schedule heating times. Heat pumps are around five times more efficient than traditional resistive heaters and perform best at higher ambient temperatures. Coupled with the fact that we have access to shared energy from other Indigo Power customers during the day, we knew that running it during the day made sense. The question remained: when would be the best time to run it?
The data from our Energy Sharing portal showed us that the Kiewa Valley Community Energy Hub consistently had shared energy available throughout the day. Our analysis indicated that running the heat pump between 10am and 3pm would align nearly all its usage with the shared energy available, even on sunny days in winter.
Reclaim heat pumps have different pre-programmed modes, including one that allows the user to set their times. We opted for Option 4 (10am-4pm), aligning with our usage patterns, as it is unlikely to run continuously for six hours. Adjusting the settings was straightforward, taking less than a minute following this tutorial: Reclaim Heat Pump Settings.
For those on an AusNet Residential Two Rate tariff, using Option 5 and setting the timer to 9am-3pm ensures drawing either from your solar system or using off-peak power (since mid-2021, peak times for residential tariffs in AusNet are 3pm-9pm local time Monday through Sunday, and off-peak is all other times – including the middle of the day, so there’s no need to wait for the weekend to do the laundry!).
Impressive results
Since installing the heat pump, we’ve observed a substantial reduction in energy consumption and a remarkable increase in shared energy usage—from 10% in January 2022 to 49% in January 2023. Hot water systems are typically the largest electricity consumers in residential homes. Shifting this load to daytime, when solar production is high, means that we use more shared energy and less energy overall.”
Take action
In anticipation of future price drops during peak solar production, Indigo Power has installed 25 timing switches to shift night-time Controlled Load hot water systems to daytime heating, funded by a Victorian Government grant.
Benambra residents can still benefit from three remaining free switch installations—register your interest here.
As an analyst, Nick specialises in energy systems and sustainability initiatives. He explains the complexities of integrating community-scale batteries, aiming to revolutionise energy distribution and resilience. Nick leads a federally-funded feasibility study on community-scale batteries in North East Victoria.