Thanks to ticking a little box somewhere in a signup process that signified me as the kind of eco-conscious person who does not want to see our planet burn-up and die due to excessive use of envelopes, each week my power company sends me an e-statement detailing exactly how much further into electrical debt I and the currently Mrs Grimley have plunged. A neat little feature of this is a little graph which tracks our power consumption and lets us know by how much our usage has varied from the previous seven days; usually it’s no more than a couple of percent each way, so you can imagine my shock to find that this week we had outdone ourselves to the tune of 1057%.

After climbing off the floor and double checking I hadn’t been sent a report on the historical rate of inflation in Zimbabwe, I sat down and did a few calculations. Admittedly we were out of the country for a couple of days, but even with that taken into account things weren’t adding up until I remembered the heat pump.

Get in. Drive. Tama-nui-te-rā demands it.

Thanks to the Antarctic blast that swept the country and brought single figure temperatures to the inside of Grimley Towers, our usual strategy of simply adding more layers was abandoned in favour of the mechanical wonder that has sat patiently unused on our wall since we moved in last December. This was a good move in the sense that it allowed me to walk around in my stubbies and get full enjoyment from chilled beer, but in hindsight it would have been far better on the bank balance to find heat from other sources. Like shivering.

But it got me thinking that if it is so easy to unintentionally eat up beer money just by keeping warm, then it may not be a bad idea to investigate other aspects of our life that might be haemorrhaging dineros. Read the rest of this entry »