Do You Use A C-PAP OR Other Powered Medical Equipment? Read This!

[Dicey]

I live in the Bay Area and am a PG&E customer. Since we bought our new house, we've been struggling with high PG&E bills. We've installed ~120 LED bulbs, converted the dryer from electric to gas, bought a new Energy Star refrigerator, use a manual defrost freezer, etc. Hell, we've only turned the A/C on twice for a couple of hours each so far this summer. There is still way too much Tier 3 & 4 consumption, which was driving us crazy. BTW, the house is only 7 years old and is more energy efficient than average. We have mature redwood trees all around us, which provide lovely filtered shade, but eliminate solar as an option.

If you don't have tiered pricing in your area, it basically means the more you use, the more you pay. The energy company sets the tiers by area, not by individual user. The system is designed so that it's virtually impossible for any household, much less one with four adults, to get through a month without hitting higher tiers.

Today, I called PG&E to discuss our bill. The second call yielded a guy who was a wealth of information. He asked if we used any medical equipment in the home. I said no. Then he rattled off an alphabet soup of medical equipment acronyms. When he got to C-PAP, I yelled "Stop!". Amazingly, if you use a C-PAP breathing machine for sleep apnea, you qualify for a much higher utility usage baseline. How much higher? More than double our current limit. The PG&E guy then showed me where to find the form on their website. I printed it and he helped me fill it out. It didn't specifically mention C-PAPs, but he assured me it qualified. He said it was not a program they promoted and that there were a lot of things not on the list that still qualified, even hospital beds. The form must be completed by your doctor and mailed to PG&E. It takes a month or two to process and must be renewed every other year in most cases.

We had never even considered the C-PAP when we were searching for vampires with stakes and strings of garlic. This new baseline will legitimately save us a ton of money each month. We'll still have to be careful to make sure we don't go above tier 2, but this will make a huge difference in our bill.

So, here is a little-known, unpromoted hack that could save you some big green soldiers if you qualify. If you're not a PG&E customer, call your own utility company and ask probing questions. We will also get a $50 rebate for letting them install a meter that limits our A/C use during peak consumption periods. Since we hardly use it anyway, it's unlikely to have any noticeable effect. There are also great time-of-use and seasonal programs detailed on the utility company's website. Yes, our circumstances are not that common, but they're not exactly unique, either. If this particular shoe fits, wear it!

[Primm]

Did the company who set you up with your CPAP machine not tell you this? That was pretty remiss of them, in my opinion. I used to work in home healthcare, and among the "how to use your machine" paperwork and troubleshooting tips we set people up with, we always helped them fill in the paperwork to claim any electricity rebates to which they were entitled.

I'm not sure if it still works (planes these days are more sophisticated than they were when I worked in the area 12 years ago) but if you're flying a long haul international flight and you have a CPAP machine with you that you need for OSA, tell the airline and there's a good chance you'll get bumped to first class, because that (used to be?) is the only part of the plane with the compatible power outlets.

:)

[Dicey]

Did the company who set you up with your CPAP machine not tell you this? That was pretty remiss of them, in my opinion. I used to work in home healthcare, and among the "how to use your machine" paperwork and troubleshooting tips we set people up with, we always helped them fill in the paperwork to claim any electricity rebates to which they were entitled.

CPAP came with the husband, so I 'm not sure. He's sleeping next to me while menopause is keeping me awake so I can't ask him just now. I suspect he was not informed, for a number of reasons. The prime one is that healthcare is shockingly fragmented in the US. The Australian healthcare system is leaps and bounds ahead of ours, so It's no wonder you did this as a matter of course...

I'm not sure if it still works (planes these days are more sophisticated than they were when I worked in the area 12 years ago) but if you're flying a long haul international flight and you have a CPAP machine with you that you need for OSA, tell the airline and there's a good chance you'll get bumped to first class, because that (used to be?) is the only part of the plane with the compatible power outlets.

Good to know. I used to be pretty proficient at getting upgraded to first class, but it's become much harder in the past decade. Since I've retired, I/we don't fly that much any more. I'll stow it in the future file for reference, thanks!

[Less]

Posting to follow the thread since I work designing med devices.  Really interesting to learn how the different regions handle things. 

[DarinC]

What do your tiers/use look like? FWIW, my household has five adults, three 40-50" TVs, a bunch of smaller electronic devices (laptops), and a plug-in hybrid, and we rarely get into tier 4 with SCE, although tier 3 is common when my grandma turns on the AC for a few hours maybe ~2-5 days a week.

Given your situation I'd get a killawatt and see how much everything with a plug in your house is drawing, because tier 4 with what you're describing seems very high.

[Dicey]

What do your tiers/use look like? FWIW, my household has five adults, three 40-50" TVs, a bunch of smaller electronic devices (laptops), and a plug-in hybrid, and we rarely get into tier 4 with SCE, although tier 3 is common when my grandma turns on the AC for a few hours maybe ~2-5 days a week.

Given your situation I'd get a killawatt and see how much everything with a plug in your house is drawing, because tier 4 with what you're describing seems very high.

Tier 1 - 303kw/.15 per hr.
Tier 2 -  90kw/.17 per hr.
Tier 3 - 210kw/.26 per hr.
Tier 4 - Whatever you use over 603kw billed at .32 per hour

This explanation is lifted directly from PG&E's website:

"Tier 1: Each monthly billing period begins at the lowest rate. While you want to stretch as far as possible, average customers use all of Tier 1 in about 15-20 days.
Tier 2: With about one third the allotment of Tier 1, Tier 2 costs slightly more (+2¢). If your Tier 1 lasts 15-20 days, Tier 2 could last another 5-6 days.
Tier 3: The rate increases dramatically (+9¢) in this tier. Customers who enter Tier 3 are consuming significant amounts of electricity.
Tier 4: Finally; if you enter tier 4, you are using more than twice your Tier 1 total, and the rate increases by an additional 6¢."

Darin, we have turned the A/C on only twice this year so far, so no, we aren't using anything excessively, except perhaps, my laptop, which I use to post here :-).

DH and I each had reasonable bills in our previous homes. They were tract homes, the same as everything around them.  The size of this new house (2648sf) is well above the average size in the area. PG&E has assigned a rather low baseline to our home based on the area and it's not negotiable. This new house is bigger than anything we've ever owned, but it's also new-ish, with lots of energy efficient features, so we are surprised that our bills consistently hit Tier 4.

Also, the hack here is not really about how to use less, but how to get your baseline increased. DH's CPAP is a legitimate way of increasing the baseline, which we knew nothing about. (I asked him, Primm, no info. Probably because PG&E doesn't promote this program.) I'm sharing this in the hopes that it helps someone else out.

Here's the kicker: Approved medical equipment adds 500kw to the Tier 1 & 2 allottment!

[DarinC]

There's gotta be something that's using a lot of electricity. A larger house in and of itself doesn't translate to higher electricity use, especially if you are using AC twice a year, so something, or some group of things, must be using up a lot of juice.

Obviously this isn't meant to detract from the point of your post. The increased baseline for medical device usage is great. Along the same lines there's also a program called CARE, which PG&E also has, that allows for reduced rates if the household income is below certain levels. SCE has a a summer discount plan (SDP) where you get a monthly bill credit in exchange for letting SCE remotely turn off your AC when demand is high, but I'm not sure if PG&E has something similar. Anyhow, my mom's on both CARE and the SDP, and her bills are ~$30-$35/month even though her electricity usage is ~500-800kWh/month.

[Dicey]

You're right about those other programs, Darin, but they are heavily promoted and thus well known. There are a lot pf people using CPAPs, so I thought I'd spread the word. Luckily, we don't qualify for the CARE program ;-).

BTW, How do our PG&E Tiers compare to your SCE Tiers?

[DarinC]

PG&E is maybe ~1c/kWh more expensive depending on the tiers and has ~50kWh more in each of the tiers, but that might be a zip code/weather difference as much as it's a difference in service providers.

[Dicey]

Good news. We jumped through all the hoops and just got an approval letter from PG&E. Hope it will kick in before the next bill arrives. Will keep y'all posted.

[dragoncar]

That's cool and all, but I'd still try to find out what's causing your crazy energy drain.  It's absolutely not true that "it's virtually impossible for any household, much less one with four adults, to get through a month without hitting higher tiers."  We are two adults in a clownish bay area house and use about 250 kWh/mo.  And we barely have any LED bulbs, have older appliances, a number of vampire loads, etc. (don't run AC though).

There's gotta be something wasting the energy, and even though you now pay less, it's still beneficial for everyone to find the vampire and kill it.

[Dicey]

Well for starters dragoncar, we have twice as many people in our household. So let's just double your figure and come up with a nice round 500kWh/mo. Wow, look how easy it is to land squarely in tier three! That's not even considering differences in square footage.

And "crazy energy drain" could be the MIL with Alzheimer's. She watches TV a lot, leaves her lights on when she leaves the room, takes long-ish showers, lets the water run while she's brushing her teeth. Washes her underwear in the sink instead of letting me throw it in the HE washer. And you know what dragoncar? I am so damn grateful that she can still do these things for herself that I am not about to "find the vampire and kill it".

Or perhaps the "vampire" is DH's CPAP machine. Not going to kill that either. I have no idea how much energy it consumes, but since it keeps my husband alive, it's going to keep running every moment he's asleep.

The point is not really the energy consumption, it's the weirdly low baseline set by PG&E. If I lifted my house and plopped it down in a neighborhood where all the houses were about the same size, my baseline would be higher. Because my house sits in an area of mostly smaller houses, it gets assigned a smaller baseline. There is no avenue for appeal. What's fair about that? Since I stumbled upon this legitimate workaround, I thought I'd share it with the MMM community.

[teen persuasion]

Wow, nice of you to spread the word on this way to save on energy bills.  I never heard of such a thing, and DH has used a CPAP for years.

I don't think that the CPAP machine actually uses that much electricity, though.  We have a kill-a-watt and checked out everything we could think of a while back.  I don't remember any numbers, but I would have been looking for an option if it were high.  DH is actually no longer using the CPAP, he now has a mouth guard type of device, and he's sleeping much better than with the CPAP.  Our electric usage hasn't changed noticeably before or after.

I have to agree that something is using a lot of electricity.  We have a big, drafty, inefficient old farmhouse, and five kids.  Our electric usage is generally under 200 kWh per month.  Adding and subtracting people doesn't change the usage as much as you'd expect.  We've seen this in action when the college kids are home on breaks vs living on campus.  The biggest uses are the fridge, computers and TVs, and lights, for us.  Most of those are on regardless of how many people are home, but we did find a bit of an uptick in usage when they brought laptops home and kept them plugged in all the time, less than 10% extra.

Differences may depend on what you have on electric that others may not: stove, hot water, dryer, a well pump, pool, AC.  We have none of those.