{"id":1190,"date":"2013-07-23T20:34:33","date_gmt":"2013-07-24T01:34:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1190"},"modified":"2013-12-01T10:23:29","modified_gmt":"2013-12-01T15:23:29","slug":"rounding-youre-doing-it-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1190","title":{"rendered":"Rounding: You’re Doing It Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

In our most recent hydro bill, we received one of those little propaganda pamphlets explaining why our electricity bill has to go up again. In it is this little statement:<\/p>\n

\n“For most Canadian households, electricity makes up about 1% of the household budget. In fact, one penny per dollar powers many things that we simply take for granted: lights; appliances; air conditioning[…]”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then right be side that is a little city-to-city comparison, pegging a typical 1000 kWh Toronto Hydro bill at about $135.72 (ours usually comes in ~$100\/mo; elsewhere they say a typical Toronto Hydro customer usage is 800 kWh\/mo, which would scale to $108.58). Now combine those two pieces of information and you have Toronto Hydro saying that a household budget is $13,572\/mo or $162,864\/year (or using the slightly lower monthly usage, $130,291\/year). That’s quite a bit above the actual household pre-tax income, let alone the spending budget.<\/p>\n

They provide the source as Stats Canada, so of course<\/em> I had to go fact check on them. In the table<\/a> the total Canadian household expenditures for 2011 is given as $956B, with electricity at $17.4B. The percentage of the household budget that electricity represents is then 1.8%, which should be rounded up to 2%, not down to 1%. Even then it seems too low, putting the annual household spending budget above $70k, over $90k with that 1000 kWh bill — at about the level of pre-tax household income, rather than the spending budget. I’m pretty sure electricity likely makes up even more of the household budget than that. <\/p>\n

Looking at the Stats Can data, we have a parent category for electricity called Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels<\/em>. Now I couldn’t find detailed notes explaining this category, but here’s my best inference: the total should be right, but the subcategories might not be fully broken down. Within that Housing, water, electricity, gas and other fuels<\/em> category are Paid rental fees for housing <\/em>and Imputed rental fees for housing<\/em>. We know from all the studies of the Canadian housing bubble that the ownership rate is about 70%, and that it should be the more expensive slice of the market that falls under the ownership umbrella, thus imputed rent should be a fair bit more than 70% of the total of rent paid and imputed rent. At $48B and $142B it is, but just by a bit: rent makes up about 25% of that total. My suspicion is that there are some people with all-inclusive rents whose electricity is lumped under that subcategory rather than electricity proper, under-reporting the amount Canadians spend on electricity. <\/p>\n

Anyway, at the very least the Toronto Hydro pamphlet should have rounded to 2% (small numbers either way, but you know, double <\/em>what they said).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In our most recent hydro bill, we received one of those little propaganda pamphlets explaining why our electricity bill has to go up again. In it is this little statement: “For most Canadian households, electricity makes up about 1% of the household budget. In fact, one penny per dollar powers many things that we simply […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1190"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}