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A comment on For a Bit of Colored Ribbon.

Re:For a Bit of Colored Ribbon by ChuckMcM on Monday November 26, 2012 @10:30AM (#4832325)
I noticed this to, and noticed that they lie. Well perhaps not lie but they cherry pick the other homes, and they can be 35 - 40 miles away in a 'similar' area. The only funny part was when I got my PV solar system, which I turned on "to test" prior to them getting through all the paper work. (we were one of, or perhaps the first, people in our general area to get a 'large' PV system (a bit over 5kW)) Our house came in at like 1/10th the numbers of the 'efficient' house but all the wording was written to tell us how we could improve to get closer to the "efficient" house (which in our case would have meant leaving on a few lightbulbs 24/7 :-)

Anyway I realized then that what ever program generated those reports, the programmer had been told that there wouldn't be any 'good' houses so that text never got into the code. I stopped paying any attention to their propaganda at that point.

As that was 9 years ago I'm sure they are much better now than they were but still.

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Re:For a Bit of Colored Ribbon by davetron5000 on Monday November 26, 2012 @10:31AM (#4832331)
The report Jeff mentions could not have been made nine years ago as the company that generated Jeff's report (a company hired by PG&E) didn't exist nine years ago.
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Re:For a Bit of Colored Ribbon by ChuckMcM on Monday November 26, 2012 @12:20PM (#4832849)
As far back as 1998 I've got letters from PG&E that put my power bill in 'context' with the 'baseline' and 'typical' home in my neighborhood. The format has always been the same

Part 1, here are the base lines

Part 2, here is where your power usage puts you

Part 3, here are all the things you can do to reduce your energy usage including, if active, any rebates for various programs.

The funny part was that Part 3 was always created on the assumption that part 2 was significantly higher than part 1. It made me wonder if they were fudging the numbers in part 1 to make that always true.

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