As February settles over our region, it’s important to remind members about the SmartHub self-service portal and its powerful usage tracking features. Here’s why: The typical home in our region generates its highest electric bills during winter. It’s not unusual, in fact, for the year’s costliest bill to arrive in March, covering February usage. Certainly, summer usage in South Texas is heavy; but you might be surprised to know it costs more to heat a home than to cool it.
Studies indicate the more insight residents have into household electric use, the more likely they are to find ways to conserve. SmartHub can be the difference between feeling you’ve no control over how high your winter bill may stretch beyond normal and feeling confident you’ve taken steps to keep usage as low as possible usage as low as possible.
Self Management is Key
SmartHub’s intuitive “My Usage” gateway helps homeowners connect the dots between their usage patterns, times of day and year, and outside temperature. My Usage generates detailed charts that present consumption data in kilowatt-hours or cost. This allows residents to both assess the numbers behind their bills and visually evaluate usage. Here’s a quick breakdown of the My Usage tools.
The Tools: Usage Explorer, Usage Comparison, Average Usage
Usage Explorer lets you track monthly, daily and even hourly usage compared to outside temperatures. For example, what were the high and low outside temperatures on January 27? Do you see a connection between that day’s coldest temperatures and your highest energy consumption? You can compare that information to other January days too, looking for patterns based on day of the week, time of
day and/or temperatures.
Usage Comparison can compare any two bills in your usage history. Maybe your January 2022 bill was much costlier than your December 2021 bill. This tool lets you evaluate the differing usage trends between the two bills. Depending on what those differences are, you might be able to spot ways to modify your routine and conserve more.
Average Usage lets you view your home’s average energy consumption for a selected time period. For instance, suppose you want to evaluate how your usage patterns change on weekends. Or maybe you’d like to see how much electricity you typically consume on weekday evenings. Average Usage can summarize such data and more. summarize such data and more.
A Full-Featured Communications Tool
The SmartHub self-service portal offers a great deal of additional functionality too. You can use it to keep your contact information up-to-date (something we encourage all GVEC members to do), pay bills, report outages and view GVEC’s outage map. You can set email or text notifications through the portal too, including bill alerts and important Cooperative notices. You can even set specific kWh usage alerts to inform you when energy usage passes a specific threshold. This can be particularly useful if you know a cold day’s coming.
SmartHub is just one of the ways GVEC puts into practice our commitment of helping members use electricity more efficiently. For regular efficiency tips and other Cooperative efficiency tools and initiatives, keep reading The GVEC Review, and visit our blog at gvec.org.
I am always interested in your comments and feedback. Contact me by phone at 830.857.1152, by email at dschauer@gvec.org or by mail at P.O. Box 118, Gonzales, Texas 78629.
