A few years ago Toronto Hydro replaced my household hydro meter with a digital one (aka Smart Meter). Since logging in initially a few years back, I receive periodic updates reminding me of the fact that I can review my consumption levels and the impact of Time-Of-Use (TOU) billing online. Out of sheer curiosity, I decided to peek at my usage and perhaps stir up some interest with other individuals that have this same ability and do not realize it. After all, their web site states clearly,
Generally speaking I believe most Torontonians should now be able to access their meter information through Toronto Hydro’s digital meter web site for residential customers. Below are three graphs of my usage for the same period in each of the last three years for comparison.
Fall 2007:
Fall 2008:
Fall 2009:
Interestingly and surprisingly, our household has cut down on hydro consumption. Hopefully this trend will continue as there seems to be more motivation to do so now that data is easily reviewed in the web interface. I hope Toronto Hydro continues to improve this interfaces as it has a few issues around data selection and presentation that can make it a bit difficult to get the data you are looking for. Specifically the issues I discovered are
- Some of the date range fields for the graphical output only function when you select data by billing periods, even thought there are secondary input fields (yes two tabs for date input) for specific start and end dates, and the supporting data for any range is viewable when you export in XLS format.
- The tools are somewhat limited in their ability to do comparisons. i.e. There is no way to compare a range of dates from one year to one without comparing screen captures in a similar manner to how I have above.
- Some of the functions return errors when you enter older dates (2007,2008 in my case), suggesting the data does not exist even though the data is viewable in other functions and exportable in XLS format.
Of course some of this could be issues relating to the site rendering in Firefox 3.5 (on Ubuntu), but I would expect this not to be the case, as IE-only compatibility is really considered a bug in by today’s standards IMHO. Likely they are aware of these issues, and simply waiting for a bit of user uptake to justify the investment in some updates and changes. Hopefully this post helps.
