This is a very productive exercise because you can then see how you are tracking.

CLICK HERE and you will see a graphic picture of how one South Hobart household has tracked its declining power usage over time.

This is a neat way to turn something that’s invisible (your power consumption) into something really tangible. By doing this we can challenge ourselves to keep improving our performance step by step as we make adjustments to our home and our lifestyle choices.

Note that your power usage will go up and down wildly as you go through the seasons – our Winter usage is normally much higher than our Summer usage. It makes it easier to see your performance if you iron out all these peaks and troughs. You can do this by making a ‘running total’.

There are two ways to go about this yourself.

1. If you keep your quarterly power bills, do it this way:

• Take any power bill and simply add up the total ‘units’ of electricity used on that bill.
• This is the total amount of electricity you used in that quarter.
• If you add up any 4 sequential bills you will have your total power usage for the year to date.
• If you do this every quarter you will have a running total and can put it on a graph like the one shown.

2. Alternatively, you can download your power usage from the Aurora website:

• CLICK HERE to register yourself with Aurora
• Once registered you can go back to the site and enter your log-in details
• This allows you to download all your power usage, usually for the past 8 years
• You can also get the results graphed for you and can download that.
• This graph will show all the Winter highs and Summer lows and you can then get a clear picture of how your household is tracking.
• If you wish to do running totals, simply add up your usages for each 12 month period and construct your own graph.