We’re definitely being softened up for higher Hydro‑Quebec bills, and I suspect sooner rather than later no matter what Pierre Fitzgibbon says.
Updates from August, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A city manager in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough has been convicted of corruption, but the real lede has been buried here: the real estate developer with whom the manager had dealings was shot dead in Laval in April 2023.
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Kate
The Montreal marathon takes place in late September, and fraudsters are busy selling fake bibs on social media.
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Kate
Incidents of road rage are on the rise, and traffic gets worse when school starts. It’s not a practice that should be offered sympathy and understanding. Make it simple: an incident of road rage and there goes your driver’s licence for a year.
dhomas
Is it just me, or does that article sound like it’s almost condoning, or at the very least justifying, road rage? “There were road rage incidents, but did you see the traffic?!?”
Joey
Classic TV journalism – the city says that the obvious solution is unfeasible in the short term. Is there an explanation? Follow-up? Nope… so the impression is that the ‘common sense’ drivers are justified in their increasingly intense road rage because some bureaucrat won’t authorize a fix. They may be right! But we’ll never know…
Mark Côté
Took my daughter to her new school this week and nearly went into pedestrian rage… drivers waiting for a light stopped right on a crosswalk outside a school. Infuriating.
jeather
This one happened near me and I’m curious what happened. The traffic is certainly extra terrible because of construction, but I haven’t noticed an issue with jaywalking.
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Kate
CBC looks into the increasingly fraught issue of housing the homeless, although in many neighbourhoods, finding places at a formal distance from schools and daycares will be a challenge.
A regular reader sent me this link about the Place du Village, a square which was intended to unify the area but has become an open market for drugs. The reader points out the account of how inmates released from prison, functionally homeless, are dropped off there without even minimal assistance.
bob
It’s almost like homelessness is an effect of some things, not the cause…
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Kate
A man in his fifties was killed in St‑Michel Wednesday evening, presumably in a fight. Police make this homicide #23 of the year.
There’s already been an arrest.
Counting back, I notice that a suspicious death five days ago hasn’t been given a homicide number, but I’ve seen nothing else about that incident.
Joey 16:00 on 2024-08-29 Permalink
HQ has also integrated its offshoot, Hilo, into its main business – Hilo offers ‘smart’ home electricity management. Ultimately this will mean more dynamic pricing and incentives to reduce electricity consumption during peak hours.
dhomas 17:11 on 2024-08-29 Permalink
Using domotics (smart home technology), I actually managed to get a 165$ credit using dynamic pricing last winter. I also managed to reduce my yearly energy bill by over 700$ overall. I did this using my own hardware, and not Hilo’s, though. And this despite using more energy for an electric vehicle. I guess I was more wasteful in the past.
That said, the line about the price of gas is disingenuous:
“When oil prices go up by 50 per cent, it’s life, and we have to deal with it. If it’s electricity, it’s bad and it’s the end of the world.” There’s a difference here. Oil is not produced in Quebec; electricity is. We control the price of electricity, no one else. For comparison, I’ve been to Iran, where lots of oil is (obviously) produced. Gas is less than 10 cents per litre there. For the citizens of Iran, gas is cheap.
Also, making energy more expensive goes against the whole raison d’être of Hydro-Quebec. It was created specifically to keep electricity affordable FOR Quebec residents. For fuck’s sake, the “pacte social” of 1962 is still referenced on HQ’s own website:
https://nouvelles.hydroquebec.com/fr/communiques-de-presse/1268/hydro-quebec-et-la-responsabilite-sociale/
Excerpt:
“Le 30 août 1962, le principe de la nationalisation de l’électricité a été adopté et avec lui, l’idée d’un ” pacte social ” entre Hydro-Québec et la population qui fait allusion aux tarifs raisonnables.”
The CAQ will 100% try to break this pact. Just like their predecessor, the ADQ, floated via Mario Dumont way back in 2008. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20081203093901/http://elections.radio-canada.ca/elections/quebec2008/2008/11/08/001-privatisation_hydro-quebec.shtml
HQ also already makes a profit of over 3 billion dollars per year, as-is.
Shameful that they want to exploit their own citizens. I hope we boot them out during the next elections in 2026. Electricity prices are frozen until 2026 already, so the timing would be perfect.
Tim S. 17:28 on 2024-08-29 Permalink
I’m curious about how you did it, dhomas. In general I really hate dynamic pricing, as it penalizes people who have to do things at a specific time because they work 9-5 or send kids to school, but it would be cool if there was a way to do things that was more fair.
dhomas 17:49 on 2024-08-29 Permalink
Disclaimer: I work in IT, specifically in Automation (though not home automation), so I’m a bit of a geek in this respect.
Heating is the main contributor to my energy costs. I got smart thermostats for every room in my house. I set a bunch of rules for the thermostats. When we sleep, automatically, the thermostats get set low in the rest of the house while the ones in each of our three bedrooms get set to a comfortable setting. Same thing for when we are home. We also have some presence detection, so when no one is home, thermostats get set low (lights also turn off, and the doors lock, etc.).
Peak events are mornings from 6h to 9h and afternoons from 16h to 20h. The most common peak events are the mornings, so I will use this as an example. I “preheat” the house from 3h30 to 6h, basically blasting the heat. Then I turn it off completely from 6h to 9h. The residual heat lasts us until 9h. Since we get notice usually over 12 hours in advance, I try to give the kids their baths the night prior and do the same for myself. I also schedule the dishwasher (basic timer, no smarts in it) to avoid the peak hours. I was toying with the idea of putting a smart switch on the water heater altogether, but I read up on Legionnaire’s disease being caused by insuficiently heated water heaters, so I decided against it.
Other things I did to reduce my energy costs: replaced all light bulbs with LEDs. I’m also a notorious recycler, so I would keep old computers powered on to perform some tasks for me. I consolidated many of those old, power-hungry PCs into less machines, sometimes even into very low-powered machines like Raspberry Pis. Being a bit of an opportunistic buyer, I usually add to my home automation network in bits and pieces, when there is a sale (for example, I got my smart thermostats for about 36$ apiece on sale at Amazon, which is cheaper than regular thermostat pricing).
Anywho, if you have any questions, let me know. I can talk about this for hours. Maybe I should start a blog. 😀
Kate 18:20 on 2024-08-29 Permalink
Thanks for all this data, dhomas. I’ve been on HQ’s Winter Credit Option plan for ages, but I have no thermostat so have to tinker with it as I go along. Heaters are either on or off. HQ sends alerts, and on really cold days, I stay under the covers from 6 till 9 am, and if necessary, from 4 to 8 pm, and of course I don’t run my washing machine or cook anything between those hours when it’s required.
But I made a princely total of $16.08 doing this last winter (it wasn’t a very cold one – I’ve done better when we get some real deep freeze).
Also, while dhomas says below that he lives in a “pretty old home, built in 1969”, I live in a triplex that’s just over 100 years old. It can be a challenge in wintertime.
dhomas 18:54 on 2024-08-29 Permalink
Yes, I got really aggressive with my automations. I also live in a pretty large house with a wife, 3 kids, and a mother-in-law who lives with us part-time. It’s an old house, so it’s also not super well insulated. There was definitely waste before I got serious about saving energy. But basically, when you’re spending a lot, there is more opportunity to cut/save. I saved about 23% annually, but I was spending a ton in previous years.
walkerp 19:50 on 2024-08-29 Permalink
That’s good stuff, dhomas. Thanks.
So with your smart thermostats are they just one thermostat connected to a single baseboard heater or do you have some kind of more centralized system?
Tim S. 21:12 on 2024-08-29 Permalink
Thanks dhomas, there are some useful ideas in there.
dhomas 02:44 on 2024-08-30 Permalink
@walkerp I have a pretty old home, built in 1969. My smart thermostats are each connected to a single heater. They are controlled like baseboard heaters, but are actually radiant ceiling heating panels (this was important for my automations, since the thermostats are mounted on the wall at eye height, so once the heat from the ceiling would hit them, they would turn off the heat. But that’s likely not the case for others). The centralisation is done by my home automation system. My devices, other than thermostats which are all the same, are a bit of a hodgepodge of whatever was on sale. So, to link them all together, I use HomeAssistant which runs on a Raspberry Pi. This is what does all the coordination and automation. Since I try to avoid any cloud connected devices, all the automations run locally, even if the internet is down. As a note, my devices run on two home automation standards called Z-Wave and Zigbee (if you’ve ever seen the Ikea or Philipps Hue devices, these also run on the Zigbee standard).
@Tim S: glad I could provide some insight. And I agree, it was difficult to get everything set up so as to not impact my family. With 3 kids, it was a bit difficult, but I managed to make it seamless. They don’t even know the peak events are occurring. My wife and mother-in-law were a little harder to work around. “What do you mean I shouldn’t take a shower in the morning?!”. 😀
JaneyB 08:38 on 2024-08-30 Permalink
@dhomas – yes, you should start a blog! This is really interesting and would help people trying to reduce their usage.
I think the CAQ is trying to create surplus hydro to sell to the US. Quebec would get a premium for that hydro, after all. Legault has gone on record saying that he wants HQ to power the whole Northeast US. It sounds green (compared to the current coal usage) but it’s not good for our local bills. The generational pact is an issue and I assume the PQ will soon start using changing rates as a political weapon. HQ is something we have to keep our eyes on; Legault is politically very canny and a sharp businessman.
dhomas 09:48 on 2024-08-30 Permalink
@JaneyB
A lot of what I’ve done was adapted from forums on HomeAssistant’s website and from the HomeAutomation subreddit.
That said, if I did start a blog, I would probably angle it towards how I affect these automations in the context of the particularities in Quebec: climate, Hydro-Quebec’s billing, etc. Maybe in French, too, since everything I’ve read is in English.
Al 09:58 on 2024-08-30 Permalink
I would definitely be interested in a blog like that, I am interested how you automate the application of the rules during the winter event periods
walkerp 10:04 on 2024-08-30 Permalink
Much appreciated, dhomas. I will file this info for later when I have mustered up the courage to tackle the project. 🙂
Joey 10:47 on 2024-08-30 Permalink
Hilo does most of what dhomas described straight out of the box – the pitch to consumers was that they would get new smart thermostats – installed by a Hilo-contracted electrician – at a very steep discount; in exchange they had to participate in ~30 Hilo “challenges” throughout winter. A challenge consists of a four-hour period during peak hours (6-10 am or 5-9 pm, IIRC) whereby the baseboard heaters are turned way down, effectively off, following a period where they are jacked up; the idea is to pre-heat the house during a cold snap to reduce demand during the peak hours. Hilo would use energy consumption data to determine how much electricity was ‘saved’ during the challenge period and pay a corresponding reward. By the end of the winter, you could expect a couple of hundred bucks in rewards (all paid out in early spring), though some folks with very large houses would receive larger absolute amounts. Challenges usually occur when temperatures were below -10, I guess, and it’s not uncommon to have two in a day.
Hilo users were eager to share their tips for gaming the system on social media, whereby a not insignificant portion really jack up the heat, do laundry, or charge electric cars in the baseline periods (e.g., middle of the night) to inflate the reference consumption and therefore get bigger rewards.
A small group of DIYers, like dhomas, figured out how to automate the entire process themselves, via things like Home Assistant, though you could achieve most of that work via the Hilo app, which allows you to remotely adjust the thermostats (and any other smart devices, like light-switches, connected to the same hub) and schedule different scenes as you wish. (The Hilo app and devices integrate easily into Google Home and Amazon Alexa, so you can control them with your voice, but not Apple’s Home offering.)
Last week Hilo revised its standard contract, reducing the user’s obligation to participate in three years’ worth of challenges to one and increasing there number of ‘opt-outs’ to which users were entitled (failure to participate sufficiently in challenges – or too many ‘failed’ challenges whereby you don’t decrease consumption adequately – could lead to users having to repay the subsidy received for the cost of the smart thermometers). My sense is that Hydro-Quebec sees the value in this kind of thing and will more fully integrate it into their offering rather than consign it to a third-party ‘startup’… Interesting to see HQ put so much effort not just into reducing consumption but into managing consumption more evenly. I guess the marginal cost of importing electricity during peak periods is really high.
@walkerp typically one smart thermostat per baseboard heater, but that would depend on the existing configuration, so if you have one thermostat that controls all your baseboard heaters, you’d only need to replace it with one smart thermostat. Hilo also came up with a water heater switch that had it stop heating during peak periods (DIY folks would just flip their breaker) and I think incorporated an EV charger last year. I think there were rumours of a heat pump mechanism coming at some point. We only got ours because we moved into a new place that had smart themostats by a rival company that went out of business… because HQ chose Hilo. Unfortunately, unlike the Hilo thermostats, the old ones couldn’t even be controlled manually so we had to buy new ones anyway. I think we got five smart thermostats and two smart light switches (with dimmers) for about $150…
dhomas 12:28 on 2024-08-30 Permalink
As Joey has mentioned, I’ve made this unnecessarily complicated on myself. Hilo does all this automatically. The Hilo thermostats are also pretty cheap with a contract (about 40$ each).
The reason I didn’t go with Hilo is twofold: 1) I already had a Home Automation system that I wanted to plug into; 2) I don’t like being in anyone else’s ecosystem. As Joey mentioned, if the company goes belly up, you could be stuck with obsolete equipment. Even if they don’t cease to exist, they could simply no longer want to support what they consider “old” hardware leaving you in the lurch. Google bricked my fully functional network router last year, for example (this kind of thing should be illegal, but that’s another topic). Hydro-Quebec won’t ever disappear, but they could have discontinued the program and left customers in a bad spot (like Google did with my routers). It looks like the program is successful and continuing now, but I didn’t know that when I was considering my smart thermostats. It was sort of a beta at the time (~2020).
My thermostats are Z-Wave (I believe the Hilo ones are Zigbee), and made by the same local company, Stelpro. They cost me roughly the same thing as the Hilo ones. I am part of the same challenges as the Hilo customers and get the same benefits (credits at the end of winter). The additional cost is my time, but this is a bit of a hobby of mine.
If anyone is interested in these types of smart energy technologies, I would probably recommend the Hilo program. It’s a good starting point for anyone not yet into home automation and it seems to be well established now.
Joey 14:40 on 2024-08-30 Permalink
@dhomas +1 I think if I were starting over I would take more of a DIY approach. To be honest, I’m surprised Hilo allowed users as much control as they did; all they really care about is your overall consumption during peak periods, regardless of whether you’re using electricity to heat your house, wash dishes, charge a car, whatever. But they really position and market Hilo as being a heating-control system, focusing almost exclusively on baseboard heaters. In our case, we found that turning the heat pump off and postponing laundry/dishwashing + shortening bath time had a bigger effect. As always, ymmv.