Breeze Electric — Home Electricity Costs | breezerelectric.com
An ordered procedure: take two meter readings, subtract, multiply by the tariff — with a worked example at an illustrative 0.15 currency units per kWh.
The electricity meter records cumulative kilowatt-hours. It does not reset between bills; it counts up. That single fact determines the whole procedure: to find what you used in a period, you need two readings and a subtraction.
Step one: read the meter and note the date. Write down the number exactly as displayed, including any leading digits that are not part of the kWh total. Step two: after a known interval — a month, a fortnight, any period you choose — read it again and note that date too. Step three: subtract the first reading from the second. The difference is your consumption in kilowatt-hours for that period.
Step four: multiply the difference by the tariff, which is the price of one kilowatt-hour. The product is the cost for the period. Three operations — read, subtract, multiply — and there is nothing else on the bill's arithmetic.
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Worked example, at the illustrative tariff of 0.15 currency units per kWh this site uses throughout. Suppose the first reading is 12 480 kWh and the second, taken 30 days later, is 12 613 kWh. The difference is 133 kWh. Multiply by 0.15: 133 × 0.15 = 19.95. That is the cost for the period at this tariff. Substitute your own tariff and your own readings and the same arithmetic gives your own figure.
Why read it yourself at all? Because estimates built on wrong readings compound: an overestimate one month becomes an underestimate the next, and the correction lands as a surprise. A monthly reading you take yourself keeps the baseline honest, and that baseline is what every later change is measured against — the steps for changing it are on Find and Cut the Base Load.
The calculation is the same one that turns any appliance into a line item: watts × hours ÷ 1000 = kWh, then kWh × tariff = cost. A 2000-watt kettle boiling 10 minutes a day is 0.33 kWh per session, about 10 kWh a month, about 1.5 at this tariff.
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