Here in Northern California we have PG&E and they have a Tiered Billing system. I got Sense to help me find out why my bill is so high. I normally get to Tier2 sometimes Tier3. There tiering system goes from 1-7 with the Kwh getting more expensive as you climb the tiers.
I was hoping to see a feature that I can set a tiers bases on usage.
Andy
Thanks for the suggestion, Andy. We do plan on adding tiered/time of use rates at some point. The billing functionality we recently added is just the start!
Perfect I am hoping the sense will make sense of why my power bill so high.
Not being entirely cute, but perhaps the visibility of the various devices will allow you to stay under Tier 1 or 2 and easy enough then to average the overall cost per kwh. the purpose of the tier is to discourage high usage of course.
The one thing regardless that Sense doesn’t do is put on non-kwh based charges, often called facility, customer, or service charge. Those charges are to pay for fixed costs of administration and distribution, costs which are incurred by the utility regardless of kwh consumed. I’m sure your bill is more complicated than mine with lots of extraneous surcharges.
Personally, I’d rather Sense work on better device detection and allow self-identifying detection. They do ambitious goals.
I would love to have support for tiered billing, service charges, and bi-monthy billing (the billing period is 2 months long instead of the more common monthly peroid).
We have Rockymountain Power here in Utah and they have 3 tiers in the summer and 2 in the winter and out billing cycles vary. Some months are 30 days and others 29 or 31 which is going too make things complicated.
For those with an interest in tiered billing, I think you’ll find the latest Goals update (v20) to be quite useful: What's new in v20
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For those with an interest in tiered billing, I think you’ll find the latest Goals update (v20) to be quite useful: What’s new in v20 5
“you can’t manage what you can’t measure”… I am not sure how a Goal will help with accurate cost reporting and predictions time of tier threshold passing.
Please add comprehensive tiered billing support.
Everyone,
A friend at work says he only pays $0.07 Kwh. I told him to take his entire cost of his power bill and divide it by his total billed KWh to get the true KWh costs.
This is the number I put into Sense’s Electricity Costs in the app… Over the past several years this has proven to be very accurate method.
I only have two Tiers with my electric company, but have only been able to stay in Tier One a few times.
If you tend to usually stay within a Tier or two, try this out.
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Yup I am a PGE customer with Tiers and would love to be able to see a real cost estimate.
Would love to see tiered billing as well. Shouldn’t be too hard to implement. Here in Meridian, ID we have 3 tiers 0-800 kWh 800-2000 kWh and 2000+ kWh. There are different prices for Summer (June-Aug) and non-Summer months too though. So please take those kind of things into account as well.
Having programmed a PG&E rate calculator, tiers are one of the most painful components to calculate in PG&E land, though easier in Meridian, especially for predicting costs and per kWh cost. Why ? In PG&E land with an E-1 rate there are several pieces to customize:
AFAIK PG&E has hundreds of different billing cycles that depend on the day you started service, so each user’s billing cycle needs custom entry. And billing cycles carry over yearly boundaries so you can’t count on a repeating yearly cycle - data must be entered for every year…
Biggest challenge - since tiering is computed on a billing period period basis, there is no way intelligent way you can ascribe an accurate value for a kWh in the beginning of the month. It might be fun to associate the then-current pricing with new kWh usage as you move through the breakpoints during a billing cycle, but that all might lead to perverse behaviors - profligate use of electricity at the beginning of the billing period, panicky, abrupt conservation at the end of the billing cycle. The best route might be to base per kWh predictive pricing on averages from similar billing cycles.
In addition to Tiered Billing, it would be nice to add a calculator function for people who may have even more confusing billing. Dominion Power has so many insane rate additions some on a tier system others not that all add up to equal your actual rate. I spent nearly a days building a huge spreadsheet to decipher my bill and still could not get it to calculate exactly what my bill came out to be.
It would be great to be able to enter the monthly base charge and a tax rate, in addition to price tiers.
I am actually surprised this is not already available in the app.
My EMC has several tiers and a base charge. This seems like a must have feature but certainly understand how the broad differences between power companies can add to the complexity of implementing this.
You can see my rate card here.
I just installed sense a few days ago. I entered our electricity cost based on our utility plan PG&E E1 which allows us 165.6 kWh @ .21 before it bumps up to .28. Are there plans to allow sense to have tiered usage data?
I too just installed sense and was wondering the same thing when I entered my electricity cost.
Something like that has been requested for some time. It’s for time off use not necessarily tiered.
Give a like to this product wishlist item to show your support for the request.
Wow - with rates that high a PV system could pay for itself quite quickly. We’re around 10¢ to 11¢ per kwh in far upstate NY.
Fortunately our usage is relatively low and Solar doesn’t quite pencil out but with the recent wildfires and PG&E bankruptcy looming it is widely expected that the rates will increase significantly. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the rates double in the next 5 years…
