iConserve User Guide___________________________________________________
10
How do I know the tariff rate of my electricity and how many tariff rates do I have?
It is the price per kWh of electricity, as shown on your electric bill. You may have just one
tariff/tier rate or you may have two. Some electric companies charges more during specific
hours of the day. Our unit supports this. Some electric companies charge by meeting a specific
kWh during the month. For example after 500 kWh the tariff rate goes from $0.046 to
$0.090(see figure below). Our unit does not support this specific tariff rating system yet.
However we recommend taking the tariff rate you’re more likely to be charged at over the other
to provide the best estimated historical costs. It won’t be exact but it will be near enough to
ensure you’re still able to accurately manage your costs per hour, day, week, or month. In this
figure we would use tariff/tier 2 as our rate for tariff 1/tier 1 in our iConserve’s configuration and
tariff 2/tier 2 would be left blank or not enabled at all.
My Cost reading doesn’t match my monthly electric bills actual cost?
The iConserve provides an estimated cost based data you provide it. Some power companies
have various charges that cannot be figured out by the iConserve because they are additional
fees such as Electrical Commodity Adjustments, Demand Side Management Cost, Purch Cap
Cost Adjustments, Service Facility Costs, and much more unfortunately. Many of these fees are
based on your total monthly kilowatt hours used (kWh). So to help get a better accurate total
monthly expense we suggest adding up all major expenses that are based on your kWh usage.
For example see the figure below:
We first selected the most used Tier rate, which is “Summer Tier 2” at $0.09 per kWh. Then we
added the following to it “Elec Commodity Adj” (just the one charging against the bulk of the
kWh usage) $0.032370, “Demand Side Mgmt Cost” (again just the one charging against the
larger part of kWh used) $0.000800, and “Purch Cap Cost Adj” $0.012130.
Our total came to: $0.1353
