> The wholesale power price was at the maximum allowable $9,000 a megawatt hour for five days from last Sunday. For a household, that translates to a $9 a kilowatt-hour electricity rate, compared with a typical cost of 12 cents.
What’s the price of a hotel for 30 days while you’re waiting for a plumber? The waitlist in Austin for an inspection is 2 weeks. Then they schedule repairs.
If you only pulled the main breaker and left, as you wrote at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26211345, then the water in the pipes in the house would still burst once the interior temperature drops below freezing, and likely still flood.
You would also have had to shut the water off to the house and drain your house's plumbing system, empty the toilet tanks and water heater, add nontoxic antifreeze to the traps, etc.
So as jdanders pointed out, pulling the main breaker means you won't have the large power bill, but the home repair bill of a house that wasn't prepared for internal freezing temperatures might be larger.
I would obviously turn off the main at the street and open all the facets. That should be enough to weather the freeze. If it breaks on the city side that's their problem.
Anyway, quite a few of these folks lived in apartments and it comes down to not doing the math.
Points that you omitted from your initial comment. Both jdanders and I were pointing out that your comment - as written - wouldn't actually save any money.
"quite a few of these folks lived in apartments"
What are you talking about?
While some of Griddy customers are in apartments, the news articles I read on the topic (this FT article is paywalled so I wasn't able to read it) only report problems from house owners, not apartment owners.
Unless several neighboring apartments switch to Griddy, such that all cut their breakers, I would expect the shared walls would provide some heat transfer - an advantage that house owners wouldn't have (some townhouses might).
Or, for that matter, knock on the door of an apartment neighbor on a fixed rate plan and ask to plug in a space heater for the duration. That's harder for a house owner to pull off.
If you’re paying the price inflated rate of a thousand dollars a night, then that’s $30k.
And that’s assuming you could find a hotel room at all. Many people I know called many different hotels and couldn’t find a hotel room at all, for any amount of money.
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What's crazy is that letting your house flood is not the clear loser!
You would also have had to shut the water off to the house and drain your house's plumbing system, empty the toilet tanks and water heater, add nontoxic antifreeze to the traps, etc.
So as jdanders pointed out, pulling the main breaker means you won't have the large power bill, but the home repair bill of a house that wasn't prepared for internal freezing temperatures might be larger.
Anyway, quite a few of these folks lived in apartments and it comes down to not doing the math.
"quite a few of these folks lived in apartments"
What are you talking about?
While some of Griddy customers are in apartments, the news articles I read on the topic (this FT article is paywalled so I wasn't able to read it) only report problems from house owners, not apartment owners.
Unless several neighboring apartments switch to Griddy, such that all cut their breakers, I would expect the shared walls would provide some heat transfer - an advantage that house owners wouldn't have (some townhouses might).
Or, for that matter, knock on the door of an apartment neighbor on a fixed rate plan and ask to plug in a space heater for the duration. That's harder for a house owner to pull off.
That’s assuming you had the right tools to close the main water valve.
That’s assuming that the main water valve isn’t already frozen solid.
Again, you’ve made a lot of assumptions here that were not necessarily valid during this past week.
That’s assuming you could afford the price adjusted rate of $1000 per night.
That’s assuming you could actually drive out of your neighborhood without getting killed on the road due to excessive icing.
You’ve made a lot of assumptions here that were proved to be invalid during this past week.