This is half-pie.

And still, here I am ripping my stuff.

Sometimes, bands put out bonus DVDs with a few videos on them – like Coldplay’s X&Y Australian Tour Edition from a few years ago. There are several audio tracks on here that I don’t otherwise have – and so the question becomes how to rip these so I can listen to them in the usual manner¹.

I’d done this several years ago, but had noticed that the result seemed slightly slowed down, something that probably related to the different sampling frequency of the source material. The DVD audio seemed to be sampled at 48,000Hz, but regular CD audio is at 44,100Hz (I think), and so if any part of the lengthy chain of transcoders is assuming it’s dealing with CD audio then there’s a problem.

I think I’ve sorted it now. I’m sure there’s a better way, but here’s what I did on my Mac:

• Mac The Ripper – this can be used to separate (demux) the video and audio. At the end of this process you should have a large .pcm file containing all the audio tracks as well as a video file you can discard.
• Audacity – import the PCM file as “raw data”, making sure you set the sampling frequency to 48,000Hz in the appropriate import dialog.

At this point you’ll have to select each song separately out of the one long audio file and “Export Selected…” in Audacity. It’s a bit of an interesting exercise if you haven’t done it before (I’m sure Audacity has better ways of doing this too, though I haven’t delved that far as yet). You can export as MP3 / WAV etc etc – I did two exports, one to Apple’s lossless WAV equivalent AIFF for archival purposes, and another to 320kbps MP3.

I’m glad I only have to do this once.

Later: So much for knowing what I was doing. The next one I tried, the DVD version of the Super Furry Animals Rings Around The World turned out to have a variety of audio encodings resistant to the above. I’ve ripped it once before, several years ago, but to a less than adequate quality. Unfortunately I can’t remember how I did it. Back to the drawing board!

¹ The question as to whether or not it’s actually worth the bother I’ll leave aside for now.

As mentioned, I’ve been ripping all my CDs to some sort of quality level that means I won’t have to do it again for a while (sadly, I don’t quite have enough disk space for FLAC, but that’s another story).

One slightly annoying issue is that some CDs have hidden tracks that can be almost impossible to rip. I’m talking here about those tracks that are hidden before the start of track one on the CDs hosting them. In order to hear one you need to scrub backwards past the beginning of track one using your old CD player, and eventually you’ll find it. They’re in what’s known as the “pre-gap“, a space that supposedly should be 2 seconds long, but in which it was discovered whole tracks could be placed.

Most software based music players will not detect these tracks, so you can’t find them with iTunes and the like. Therefore it’s quite possible you may even own CDs with these tracks and not know it – here’s a list.

Mine (that I know of) is the Super Furry Animals album “Guerrilla“; the hidden track is called “The Citizen’s Band”, a little ode to CB radio whose melody borrows heavily from an earlier song. So not the Eldorado of hidden tracks, but then not getting it would be an affront to my completist sensibility around SFA, my long-term favourite band.

Cutting to the chase: it turns out that it is possible to get these tracks. Special software is required:

• Windows: Exact Audio Copy – instructions here
• MacOSX: XLD – instructions here
• Linux (& MacOSX MacPorts): CDParanoia – commandline fun for all!

One additional problem: not all hardware can actually extract these tracks correctly. My two Macs, though both with different optical drives, eventually extracted what seemed to be full sized files, spewing lots of disk errors as they did so, but the files actually turned out to be silent. This is apparently quite common, and you may have to try lots of machines before finding one that works.

I found one eventually, though not at home… and now I have the track ripped and safe in its new place of repose. Clearly, my life is complete. For now.

If you are at all interested in the use of various typefaces on webpages, you will have noticed that most web pages seem to use a very abbreviated set of faces. This is because typically to see the web page the way the designer intended, site visitors must have the same set of fonts on their machines as the designer has specified to be used on the website. In practice this means that the designers can only count on a very few number of fonts being available to all their users – so they specify these in order to obtain a consistent experience across their userbase. This means fonts like Arial, Times, Georgia, and Verdana.

Typekit seeks to overturn this rather dull state of affairs by allowing designers to license new fonts that are then downloaded into their users’ browsers at the time the website is viewed. It’s a great idea, and implemented quite nicely through the addition of two javascripts to each website page, and some configuration on the Typekit website.

I had run across Typekit a few months back, and signed up to try it out. The invitation came through last week (as it did for many people) so I gave it a go over the weekend.

I was up and running within a matter of minutes, having selected a couple of new fonts I liked, and then further adjusted my stylesheet to make their sizes a little bigger. Job done, I thought.

Not so fast, unfortunately. It turns out there are still a few problems with this approach.

• Uneven browser support: while most “modern” browsers are supported (i.e., major browsers newer than IE6) some important newer browsers like Google Chrome are not supported. Luckily you can specify a fallback font set to use for these browsers, which I did.
• Costs money: yeah yeah, I shouldn’t complain about this. In any case, there is a free version that allows you to use two fonts on a single website: and that’s what I was using.
• No support for non-latin characters: a problem as I try to spell Māori words correctly.
• Many fonts look like crap in Windows.

This last one was the killer. I really was quite shocked to see the difference. (The images below will open in a new window.)

I’m not sure exactly what the problem is here: whether it’s Windows font rendering; or the fonts themselves for not being adequately drawn for the screen; or mine for choosing unsuitable fonts for my website.

Either way, I can’t use them like this. Other people with a better eye for font selection, and more time to test out what looks best might have a better experience.

So to my non-professional eye, Typekit is not ready yet. Full marks for effort, but I’ll come back to it in a year or so and see how it looks then.

About six months ago I asked the question: Will Powershop save me money? Based on my projections at the time I concluded that the savings weren’t really enough to me jump personally, though I was, and remained, interested in the concept.

Eventually curiosity got the better of me, and I joined up anyway. I was satisfied that I’d save at least some money, and so long as I handled the details Rebecca was happy for me to go for it.

I was pretty impressed with Powershop‘s signup process¹. Once I was into the website proper—after two and a half weeks looking at the screen you see here while everyone waited for my old power company to sort themselves out—there was a lot to take in. It didn’t take too long though before I’d explored all the areas and was ready to make a purchase. Which I did. And it turned out there were some significant savings to be had.

There seems to me to be two parts to saving money with Powershop:

1. via cheaper unit prices; and
2. through becoming more aware of your power use habits, and using that awareness to use less power.

I’m pretty sure that I’ve saved money on both counts in the last month.

The first is relatively easy to calculate. I have come up with a consolidated unit price as charged by my previous supplier of 21.81 cents per unit² – a bit like a break-even price. Any time I purchase power from Powershop that is cheaper than this, I am saving money; and conversely of course, every time I purchase power from Powershop that is more expensive than this, I am losing compared to my previous supplier.

Six months ago when I first looked at Powershop, I had thought to be losing money at this time of year; and in fact the price of winter power that Powershop was offering back then was 22.49 cents per unit. This is to be expected: demand rises in the wintertime; and this causes a rise in the wholesale prices. Come summertime however, we would expect the Powershop prices to have dropped back significantly below my break-even price.

What actually happened though was more interesting. With the southern lakes full, and the month of August being mild weather-wise, supply of power was plentiful and demand was weakish. You can see this for yourself by looking at the Electricity Commission’s Wholesale Market reports. The graph I’ve lifted (below) from the 23 August report shows that wholesale power prices this time last year were up to 20 times higher than they are now³, and that on many days, demand this time last year was higher.

So Powershop has been able to pass on some of these savings to its customers through cheaper unit prices. I’ve calculated that over the month and a half of power I’ve purchased so far on Powershop, I’ve saved $37.52; a saving which does not include the $50 joining promo I managed to find⁴. This is unexpected, and pleasing⁵ – I had expected to be saving only around $70 over the entire year!

The second source of savings, those relating to behavioural changes that cause us to consume less, is less easy to measure. While the obvious measure of our behavioural changes would be the size of any decrease in the number of units consumed each day, compared to previous years, this figure is also affected by externalities like the weather, and water temperatures going into the hot water cylinder. But what the hell, let’s do some calculations now.

During August it turned out that we used considerably less power than we do usually. Our long-term (last six years) daily average consumption for July and August is 37.1 units per day (with it being closer to 40 in the last two years). For most of August this year, we’ve been around 30-32 units per day. I know this because Powershop provides a handy graph of our daily usage, based on the meter readings I have become mildly obsessed with entering every couple of days or so.

While much of this could be due to the warmer weather, switching to Powershop has made us more aware of our usage. We’ve been turning off lights, and heated towel rails, for example, and we recently decided (unrelated to the switch) that our girls were old enough now not to need their bedrooms heated at night⁶ all the time.

We’ll be better placed to measure the effect of any behavioural changes at the end of our first year with Powershop—we probably need to see some ups and downs of weather to help average out those externalities—but I’m convinced that Powershop has altered our behaviour for the better. And that also, is pleasing⁷.

So, to summarise then: we’ve switched. Our savings, even after a month, are very real. We’ve modified our behaviour to use less power, though the effect of this is, as yet, indeterminate. But overall, I’m very happy with my Powershop experience.

¹ The website couldn’t be easier – all you need is a power bill, and optionally your bank account number (they have online Direct Debit setup, if you wish to pay that way, something I had thought could not be done). Once you are in and committed, they give a clear indication of when they think you will change over; and they communicate with you frequently and appropriately during that period. There’s also a telephone help desk staffed by real people who don’t seem to make you wait; and in any case you can email them if you’d rather. I think that other companies with online presences need to take a close look at Powershop, and be taking notes. It’s one of the best signup processes I’ve ever experienced.

² Your figure will be different – here’s how I calculated mine. To compare what I would have paid with my previous supplier (Meridian) with what I’m paying now with Powershop, I need to convert their prices, a mix of fixed daily and unit prices, into something comparable to Powershop’s unit-only prices. On my last Meridian bill, the unit price was 20.66 cents (including the Electricity Commission Levy); while the daily charge was 96.74 cents. Looking at the two calendar years 2007-8 we used 19,741 units in total. Using this information, and assuming that we’ll always receive the 10% “prompt payment discount” that our previous supplier offered (bloody rort!), I get an estimated consolidated unit price for our household of 21.81 cents per unit.

³ Sometimes I think that smoothing out this excessive price volatility is really the only added value service regular power companies perform. And they charge an awfully large premium for this service.

⁴ If you hunt around you should be able to find one of these – I was going to link to the TradeMe promo but it expires tonight.

⁵ One thing to remember though: if next winter is dry, then all this year’s savings could go out the window. Don’t spend them too soon!

⁶ For which I had purchased two of those brilliant Honeywell home thermostats, which we had set to 15°C year around.

⁷ I think this alone is worth switching for, and also that anyone who thinks of themselves as green should sign up to Powershop to gain access to their monitoring tools.

I have two very pleased little girls this evening.

 

But then kids are always interested in the things that obsess their parents (or in this case, just one of their parents)¹.

The Green Snapper cards for children became available today, and by coincidence the girls and I were able to catch a rush hour bus home this evening to try them out. Although it would have been possible for them to travel on my card, it’s not something that’s a good idea during the rush hour given the impatience of other commuters (it’s too easy for other people to push past and tag on with your collective fare), and the varying levels of bus driver knowledge on how to allow it.

So I thought that a green card each would have them able tag on for themselves, and give them a chance to take a little more responsibility for themselves.

The cards worked pretty much as you’d expect. Both girls needed a little coaching to tag on and off, but no more than many adults did this time last year. And travelling in the bus is still something of an exciting novelty for them (though something we want to do more of). But I still have a couple of issues with the new cards.

1. The first, and least significant, is the crappy lanyard Snapper provide for them. While I’m grateful to have obtained some free ones for the girls, they don’t seem robust enough for my liking. This must surely be a job for the crafty people entering the Smarten your Snapper competition, right?
2. Secondly, management of multiple cards is becoming more important. While you can register more than one card under a single login on the Snapper website, to add money to those cards or get an accurate balance via the website, you have to a) have the cards physically on you and b) have a computer running Windows. The first is not always going to be possible if the girls are looking after their cards themselves, and the second is unlikely given my home computer is a Mac. I want more ways to be able to fund card balances without having to go into a shop to do it – like being able to Bill Pay into a balance that can be distributed between cards via the website.
3. Thirdly, once kids learn they can use their cards at shops to buy an ice cream and a packet of chips then some, at least, are going to find themselves short of enough balance to travel. I would love to be able to fund two balances on each card (and this goes for the red adult cards too) – one that works only public transport, and one that works at the corner dairy and other retailers. The cards should be able to do this: their little chip is capable of more than they’re currently being used for – I hope. (The question would be can the supporting retail hardware, business processes, and processing back-end handle it?)

So, another chapter in the ongoing Snapper story. It might not be the chapter we were looking for (fully integrated travel across Wellington, for example, will need more contributing authors than just Snapper alone); and could have been a little better written maybe… but my girls seem to like it.

¹ Last year: Snapper, an introduction and Snapper: What about privacy? and Snapper: What about privacy, again?. I seem to be much more relaxed about the technology now than I was back then; though I still only use the cards for transportation purposes…

This arrived in the mail today, all the way from the UK.

It’s a Crabble.

It doesn’t look like much¹. It certainly didn’t cost very much. But it’s something I’ve been wanting for a long time. I was, at one point, even thinking of using Ponoko to make something like it for myself – not the same as this, and considerably bulkier.

OK, so what does it do?

Given how monotonously dull I have become on the subject of the iPhone, you’d be right if you made a wild leap of deduction in that direction.

Yes! You guessed it!

It’s an iPhone stand: simply fold it along the centre scoring and sit the iPhone on it.

But that’s not all. It’s cunningly shaped to work both in portrait and landscape, and is small enough to fit in your wallet (it’s in mine right now). And it has a couple of clear rubbery bands on each “claw”, which hold the stand steady on the surface it’s sitting on (think airplane tray table).

OK, I’d better cut this off before I start sounding like Suzanne Paul. (There are no steak knives for free with this product.) But you can use it to make video viewing just that much easier:

I love stuff like this: so clever, and so simple at the same time. And even better, it’s the product of another of those genius solo designer types I’m so fond of.

Need I say: only six US dollars delivered?

¹ I used Rebecca’s phone to take these photos. How I miss not having a decent camera with macro in my phone! Hopefully they’ll improve the camera significantly by the time I come around to buying another iPhone…

I’ve been a faithful user of Shaun Inman‘s Mint, a ravishingly beautiful and terrifically useful self-hosted stats application for websites, for nearly four years now. Even though I do have Google Analytics installed as well¹, Mint is what I refer to most often: it’s always up-to-date and it quickly and concisely shows me what I want to know.

Mint showed a really interesting combination of design, UI skills and über-coding ability all rolled up together, and I’d wondered what Mr Inman would do next.

That next thing is Fever°, an RSS feed reader. Fever° is unusual in that it’s an application that you need to host on your own webserver, much as you might self-host a WordPress blog. It also costs money.

I’ve bought it, and been using it for almost a week, and I can say that it is money well spent.

As you’d expect, it’s lovely to look at, and works perfectly well as a feed reader. It has lots of keyboard shortcuts, and plays nicely with Fluid.app. A particularly nice aspect of Fever° is the iPhone version of the site: it’s perfectly optimised to the screen, and when saved as a webclip² behaves almost identically to a native application – even down to being chromeless and having a startup screen.

But the most interesting thing about Fever° is the splitting of feeds into two broad (though not necessarily exclusive) categories: “Sparks”, and “Kindling” (you’ll get used to these names fairly quickly). Kindling are all your must-read feeds, the things you follow religiously.

Sparks are all those interesting feeds you’ve subscribed to but may be just too high-volume to read all of. What Fever° does is scan these, together with the Kindling feeds, to detect the most “important” or most linked items; assigning and ranking these with a rating based on human body temperatures and placing these your “hot” list for priority reading.

I’ve started using this… but I’ve come to the conclusion that I need a lot more feeds in the Sparks category. I’m open to suggestions.

One worry with self-hosted applications is installation. If you host your own website on your own domain, you are probably mostly there already. The first step, once you’ve created a database on your webserver for Fever° to use, is to download and run the Fever° compatibility suite. You have to do this, and your webserver pass the test, before you can purchase Fever°³. But if you get this far, you are actually 90% done on the installation – because once you enter the activation code into the compatibility suite, the rest of Fever° installs itself.

This has to be one of the most painless web application installation processes I have ever experienced. I hope other developers are taking notes.

The next step is to load it up with feeds. It was easy to import my feedlist from Google Reader. The next additions were the various shared items lists from friends in Reader; and after that I thought about some suitable additions to Sparks. High-volume and interesting link blogs seem like a good idea, so I added in Slashdot, Digg, Metafilter, among others. Done!

So… why use Fever° when Google Reader already does this? And why spend US$30 when there’s cheaper ways of doing it? Here’s three reasons:

• I already use and love Inman’s Mint. I therefore had a pretty good idea of what Inman, a genius, idiosyncratic, solo designer-developer, had the ability to come up with. I like supporting genius, idiosyncratic, solo designer-developers (Loren Brichter is another).
• I like self-hosted applications, up to a point, but I also like not depending too much on any one provider for anything. (To put it another way: I don’t want Google to be a single point of failure in my life.) So a plurality of web applications is A Good Thing in my book.
• Fever° is cool, and I fully expect it to be further developed in interesting ways. For example, sharing links between friends is one big strength of apps like Twitter, Friendfeed and Reader. Something similar for Fever° would be brilliant.

Which brings me to Fever°‘s annoyances. It’s only a version 1.0 application, but even so I’m finding very little to carp about – in fact the following just seems like whining:

• On the iPhone, external pages resulting from tapping on outward links appear in a little frame above the page that allows you to easily go back into your Fever° session. The problem is that when you do, it’s displayed very very small and you have to force a screen redraw by changing the orientation of the iPhone to horizontal and back again.
• In a web browser, if there’s a refresh of the feed you are reading, you lose the article you are on. Of course, you can press “u” to see all unread items, so all is not lost.

But those are just minor things. Fever°⁴ is a ravishingly beautiful and terrifically useful self-hosted RSS Reader. You should really have a good look, even if you don’t buy it: a brush with the product of genius is always inspiring.

¹ People who write blogs are nothing if not obsessed about the number and nature of their readers; and Google Analytics provides a more common basis for comparison. How big is yours (audience, I mean).

² By tapping the “+” you can save a Fever° icon to your home screen – just as you can for many other websites, though with varying levels of eye-candy.

³ Presumably learning from his experiences with Mint, this compatibility suite part of the install makes absolutely sure that no-one who has paid money for Fever can fail to install it because of some non-standard server configuration (and it would seem that Mr Inman has seen it all with his experiences supporting Mint).

⁴ I’ve overdone it on the ° ° °. They do get tiresome, don’t they.

It’s been pretty hard to miss the fact that Telecom NZ have a new mobile network, XT. It’s all 3G, the latest and currently fastest of the mobile “generations”, and represents quite a step up from the old CDMA network that they put in at the beginning of this decade¹.

Telecom’s major rival, Vodafone New Zealand, also has a 3G network that uses pretty much similar technology. The difference lies mainly in the frequency bands used to carry the cellular signals. XT is mostly on the 850MHz band with the centre of some large cities on the 2100MHz band. Vodafone however uses 2100MHz in most of the major towns and cities with another band, 900MHz, as fill for the rest of the country.

From what I understand, 2100MHz is less able to penetrate buildings, and the cell coverage areas are smaller. On the other hand, both the 850MHz and 900MHz bands can deliver fast internet connections to sad geeks taking a dump in toilets that happen to be located in the middle of massed steel-reinforced concrete high-rise faraday cages buildings². The contra to this wonder of technology is that the capacity of the two lower frequency bands is much poorer (which accounts for why Telecom is supplementing its network with 2100MHz sites in some cities).

Which brings me to my phone. It’s a second generation iPhone, as my three regular readers will by now have tired of me talking about, and it’s currently loaded with a Vodafone SIM card. The 2nd gen iPhone can receive both the 2100 and 850MHz bands, the latter of course being unusable on Vodafone. When out of range of the 3G 2100MHz band it will drop back to an older, slower, 2G technology. Unfortunately this can happen quite a lot: on the bus to work; down the other end of my building; over the hill in the Wairarapa etc etc. Cue much whining.

So of course, I had to try a XT SIM card to see if I should switch over. Data speeds were faster. Of course they were: as the reporter from the NBR put it, “the cellular equivalent of being able to zoom up a new motorway before the ribbon’s cut” (or in this case, just after the ribbon-cutting ceremony).

And 3G coverage was better. Of course it was: the iPhone isn’t capable of receiving Vodafone’s 900MHz band that would match the coverage of XT’s 850MHz band.

After some reflection, I decided that that speed and coverage issues, while important, were not the whole story when it came to making a decision to switch cellular providers. There’s price; and there’s the rest of my communications business; and there’s some indefinable other stuff that’s the sum of my attitudes to and experience with both companies.

With price, XT has an advantage. Slightly. About $4 per month if I try and make something that matches what I have now from Vodafone; and to get that level of pricing I have to have my home phone on Telecom. If I want to avoid that, I need to get the next mobile plan up; and this would make the XT plan $14 per month more than my current plan.

This brings me to an interesting marketing device that both telcos employ: a mixture of loyalty bonuses and cross-product marketing. Both Vodafone and Telecom sell home phone, mobile, and broadband internet services; and typically if you get one service, you get a discount on the next one. So I save $10 per month on my broadband by having my toll-calls with Vodafone; and if I add in local calling and line rental I can get even faster, cheaper internet. Horizontally too: calls between mobiles on the same network can be had cheaper; Rebecca pays $6 per month for unlimited calls from her Vodafone mobile to mine; and I don’t have to pay the $6 at all for the reverse as I’ve been given that as a loyalty bonus when I re-signed up last year.

I’d lose all this if I shifted to XT. And to get the most benefit from changing over I’d have to switch over the whole home communications stack, and then buy a new mobile phone for Rebecca too (her SonyEricsson k770i won’t run on 850MHz).

Can’t see it happening.

So we’re left with the last criterion: the indefinable one. And I have to admit, I just like Vodafone more. Telecom aren’t quite the lumbering idiots of yore, but I’m still not really a fan. I’ve had more experience with Vodafone; some good times with their people when I worked for a corporate client of theirs; and smoother runs with their technology roaming overseas. I like that they have a real person on the other end of their corporate Twitter account who actually can fix things (and has for me, on one occasion); and I like that after the kerfuffle about the pricing on the original iPhone plans they sharpened their pencils in response.

So yeah, I’m staying with Vodafone. And who knows, in the next few days at WWDC Apple might announce a third generation iPhone that does 900MHz, rendering all I’ve written above, obsolete³.

¹ In what may have been the blunder of the decade by Telecom Mobile, given the lack of handsets available and general dead-endness of the technology.

² I can neither confirm nor deny the veracity of this cartoon.

³ Of course I won’t be able to turn my phone over until at least the middle of next year – my CFO (Rebecca) probably, and quite rationally, wouldn’t agree. I try telling her I could get a more expensive hobby, like cars, but it just doesn’t work.

Do people actually fall for these?

Here’s an email I got the other day, sent from a PC in Chile, but supposedly for a company called “WA-Surveys”. Supposedly WA-surveys is a company based in Washington State, but oddly, the domain is registered to a Hong Kong company.

Anyway, the email started like this:

Thank you for your interest in the Mystery Shopper position.
Our company conducts surveys and evaluates other companies in order to help them achieve their performance goals. We offer an integrated suite of business solutions that enables corporations to achieve tangible results in the marketplace.

Nice. Someone’s been reading up on their corporate bullshit manual.

It goes on to offer a “contract” for mystery shopping:

You will be paid a commission of $100 for every duty you carry out, and bonus on your transportation allowance. Your task will be to evaluate and comment on customer service in a wide variety of restaurants, retail stores, casinos, shopping malls, banks and hotels in your area.

Sounds like fun, eh? There are a few qualifications though:

Qualities of a good Mystery Shopper:
 * Is 21 years of age or older
 * Loves to go shopping
 * Is fair and objective
 * Is ON TIME
 * Is very observant and able to focus on details
 * Is fairly intelligent

Well, that rules out a lot of potential employees. But wait! there’s more:

 * Has patience
 * Is detail oriented
 * Is practical
 * Types well
 * Is trustworthy
 * Explains well in writing
 * Is discreet
 * Loves to learn

Could be quite a learning experience, yes.

 * Handles deadlines
 * Has full internet access (at home or at work)

Mystery Shopping is fun and exciting but also must be approached very seriously and is definitely not for everyone.

Hard to know how they’ll get anyone for that job. It goes on, but I think you’ve got the picture by now.

So… there’s at least two ways this thing could play out.

1. They send me a cheque, ask me to cash it and use the money to “mystery shop” Western Union. Cheque bounces, but not before I’ve sent the cash away.
2. Worse (arguably), they deposit some money in my bank account, and then ask me to use that to “mystery shop” Western Union. The money is actually stolen from some other New Zealander’s bank account.

In either of these cases there’s a good chance I’ll either lose some money, or I’ll be party to someone else losing money. It’s just a new twist on those old job scam emails.

So you’ve probably seen the Powershop advertisements on TV. You may even have wondered what it was all about (indeed, some of the people I’ve spoken to thought that Powershop was a new online shopping-mall like the late and unlamented Ferrit – so it might seem the adverts aren’t communicating the Powershop proposition as well as they could).

Powershop – a wholly-owned subsidary of Meridian Energy – is trying to turn the old model of electricity retailing around. Just as the breakfast foods aisle in the in the supermarket contains lots of different cereals with different origins, attributes and prices, so Powershop offers a range of power packages from different generators, each with different characteristics. For example, some might be entirely wind-sourced; while others are carbon-offset. Some might be a fixed price for winter power to buy now but to consume later; while others might be cheap summer power available now. You set Powershop to be your power supplier, and then pay by credit card for the packages you want.

It’s a little complicated, and it’s probably not for everyone. But it sounds interesting, particularly as the prices quoted are, at the moment, much cheaper than anything you’ll get from a traditional supplier.

However, I think a little caution is advised. But before we get there, let’s work out what my current usage might be.

First of all I pulled together all our power bills for the last six years. The important data are really bills based on readings – the rest are just confusing crap. You’d think my current provider, Meridian Energy, would have a handy download of this data from their fancy new My Meridian website… but no, they just allow you to download your total bill dollar amounts, which are useless in this context. Anyway, after much sifting and sorting, I graphed the results:

And in doing all this I’ve noticed some things that are interesting, at least to me:

• our winter consumption is up to double our summer consumption (no surprise there, but the amount of difference is an eye-opener);
• the power companies are terrible at estimating our usage – and as a result our monthly bill can swing from $80 – $300 as the bi-monthly readings force a catchup payment;
• sometimes the meter-reader enters a wrong reading – as in January 2008 when the visiting meter-reader seems to have mis-read us by -1000 units, causing at first a credit, then a colossal bill a couple months later after the next reading (exacerbated by the intervening estimate-based bill then attempting to reflect our supposed lower usage) – and I’ve had to correct my data for this;
• there have been a number of substantial cost increases in power in the last few years: for example, the power we used in 2007 and 2008 cost us $3,770; yet the same power at the prices prevailing today would be $4,560! (this actually did surprise me – I had no idea prices had increased so much – I wonder if it’s the line charge);
• our electricity usage varies year to year quite substantially, but on average appears to be on the increase.

All of this tells me that our household has plenty of room for improvement. And now we have enough data to make some cost comparisons with Powershop.

Right now, Powershop has a Wellington-area standard price of 18.18 cents per unit for a household metered like mine. One’s first instinct might be to multiply this price – it’s all-inclusive of line charge and GST – by the last two years’ unit consumption to get a figure ($3,590) to compare to that $4,560 above. And thus decide that Powershop is going to save us 21% on our power bills.

Not so fast. Because we are making an implicit assumption here that the Powershop prices are going to stay steady all year. Clearly they are not, as Powershop is already selling winter power now that costs more (22.49 cents per unit) than the standard price, implying that when we get into winter the standard price will be MORE than the winter powerpacks for sale now, in late summer.

And there’s the problem. We don’t yet know exactly what those winter prices are going to be.

What we could do is make a couple assumptions:

1. we’ll buy all our winter power now, locking in that price; and
2. without seeing the terms and conditions for this power pack, and for ease of calculation, let’s say “winter” means May through to August and that in all other months we’ll be able to purchase power at today’s “summer” price.

Applying these to the last two years, this would have cost $3,960, a 13% saving or $250 per year, over today’s Meridian retail prices in Wellington. But this doesn’t include factors like the cost of purchasing power up front (after all, you could have put that same money on deposit – ha! – at the bank, right?). And of course we are also making a pretty generous assumption about that summer price rate. If I was in marketing I might say “up to $250 savings”.

Even so, up to $250 per year is better than nothing. So why then, aren’t I jumping at it?

Well for one, I’m not sure if I can be bothered with the hassle of remembering to make intelligent decisions about my power purchasing right through the year. I might be able to make a more reasoned decision about this if there was a fully usable demo on the site.

And then there’s some extra risk inherent in switching to Powershop: you become more exposed to the wholesale market. What if it’s a dry year, or the Cook Strait cable breaks? The wholesale price will rise sharply, and Powershop’s prices will rise too – and possibly quite a bit faster than other power companies.

(Incidentally, there’s a great site showing in near-realtime the wholesale electricity prices here. I love it. Info-pr0n!)

I’ve worked out that if the average Powershop unit price I pay over the year rises above 23 cents per unit then I’ll start losing in comparison to staying where I am. I’ve been talking to some people who say that if this happens to them, they’ll just switch back to their present supplier. And to that I say again: not so fast. If there’s a power crisis, and the power retailers have to buy wholesale power to sell at a massive loss to their retail customer base, then they may refuse to take any new customers on board – something that I believe has happened before in dry years. You could end up stuck on the higher prices for longer.

The contra applies too. In a good year (and this year is likely to be one of those, with the hydro lakes full) it should be easy to save some money.

I’ve asked Powershop about this price volatility, and they said:

In answer to your question yes the customer is more vulnerable to the fluctuations in the wholesale market, but Powershop endeavours to smooth this volatility throughout the year. Our business modellers are very confident that over a year we will be able to deliver savings to the large majority of Kiwis.

It is our intention that what you gain on the swings (cheap prices in summer) you will not totally lose on the roundabouts (slightly more expensive in the winter). This is looking especially good this year with the great dam levels and generation capacity.

So yes, there’s risk, but Powershop say you should still save money. Fair enough.

One other thing that might sway me would be if their website allows me to easily monitor power usage. (We really need Google’s Powermeter, in other words.) There’s a hint of this in their demo video, but just a hint. I don’t know how that works or how easy it is to use.

In summary then, Powershop will save me money – up to $250 per year – but it’s not clear to me if this $250 is enough to offset the hassle of shifting; the small increase in price risk; and the unknown usability qualities of their website, both for purchasing power and monitoring our usage.

So, after all that, I’m not 100% decided on switching. You may, of course, come to a different conclusion – and I hope you do. I really like the idea of Powershop, and I hope it succeeds. I don’t think our power companies have really done us proud thus far, as today’s Sunday Star-Times would seem to confirm, and maybe – call me naïve – Powershop can be the lead for something better.

Update March 2, 2009: Commenter Jeff Weir asks if I’ve factored in the amount of the 10% prompt payment discount which may be obtained from many existing retailers if you pay on time. I thought I had, but in reviewing my calculations I see that I haven’t.

Stupid mistake! We’ve missed just one of these in four years of supply from the company, so for us it’s a discount we must include.

This makes the amount I would have paid for the last two years of electricity at today’s Meridian prices $4,107.23.

This explains why the price of power had, according to my earlier calculations, risen so much in the last two years. It hadn’t.

It also brings my calculations into line with the calculator on the Powershop website, which the other day did predict that the savings I could get would be around 3%.

And, as you’d expect, all this has the effect of making the Powershop savings much less spectacular (3.5%, or about $70 or so per year when calculated using the assumptions outlined above) compared to earlier, with of course no lessening of any of the other factors that were giving me pause.

Update August 31, 2009: Since writing the above, I’ve joined Powershop anyway. We have saved significant amounts, even after just a month or so; and a summary of these is here, at Powershop: the first month.