Electricity usage anxiety

I’m blessed with being assigned to Lee Woo Sing college during my time at CUHK. It’s a newly built college, to accommodate for increased student numbers when Hong Kong moved to a 4 year undergrad curriculum in 2012. It also has a kick-ass canteen with discounts for LWS students, including 20% off at Cafe Tolo, which sells waffles for $32 (HKD).

From what I understand, basic lighting and electricity sockets are free to use in other colleges, and you pay for what you use for air-conditioning. Lee Woo Sing likes to promote itself as green, because we have an ‘innovative’ smart meter system.

Basically, we get charged per kWh for everything! But, we also get subsidised $100/month which should be more than enough for lighting, fans, the fridge and socket usage.

How do we monitor this? There’s a website.

The rankings and grades were meaningful, because starting this term, our pricing per kWh would be dependent on our grade. 0.5 the market price if in the A range, 0.75 if in the B range, 1.25 if in the D range and 1.8 if in the E range.

I’m okay with this in principle, except half the rooms don’t use any electricity on the weekend because local students go home, which is grossly unfair. So on a bad weekend, I was charged about $25 a day, whereas usually it’s under $10.

What ended up happening was I would monitor the website obsessively and turn off air-con whenever I got close to the E zone. Hence, electricity usage anxiety. All up, my roommate and I paid $150 in September, plus $150 in credit given by the college¹.

Fortunately, there has been some backlash and the college will revert to charging a flat rate per kWh, and retrospectively recalculate September’s electricity usage.

One thing I’ve gotten out of this is that air-conditioning uses a lot of electricity. A lot. It takes up over 80% of my room’s electricity usage. The fan in comparison uses almost nothing.